Frame Tricks

[manikus]

In FRUA, there were several underwater small pics, a couple of wallsets, a couple of backdrops and a combat wall. It was supposed to be a feature of FRUA that one could make undersea levels and the such, but the code was never completed (we know this b/c we can see what they did do) but was up to around 3/4ths of the way done. Some undersea monster icons surfaced that are credited to the artists at SSI, but were not an official add-on.

[Uatu]

Pretty cool - too bad that the feature was never completed. Perhaps we can "complete" the feature in DC instead Not sure what is necessary code-wise, but we can try to finish a set of underwater graphics to begin with.

(I did see what looked like a nice example of an underwater view in FRUA when I searched.)

[manikus]

As far as I can tell, FRUA was going to do the following to implement undersea adventures: movement decreased by half, fire damage lowered or negated and something about ice and electrical damage (but I'm not sure what). Interestingly enough, there was nothing planned to do with breathing underwater.

Art is the first thing, though. We've got a nice start and just need to do some walls now.

[SilentThief]

yeah the underwater breathing thing was taken care of like "now you have the (whatever) of water breathing..."

FRUA had quite a few things that they never finished, like there was the "special abilities" that included "troll regenrate" and "dragon breath", but they had "vuln to holy water" and that did nothing to anyone. There wasn't even any holy water in FRUA (altho the goldbox games had them, at least POR did). The original release had NPCs that joined your party fail their morale constantly as well (in fact, if you didn't have a paladin to get a chance to control them, they were worthless).

Oh well, DC is supposed to be an upgrade from FRUA anyways

-SilentThief

[manikus]

Other than the vulnerability to holy water, what else doesn't work in FRUA? (The volnerability to holy water has been fixed, btw, as it was a bit that had the wrong value that some ingenious person figured out.) It may be that all the broken special abilities were fixed with the UAShell program; I can't remember playing without it.

[SilentThief]

I dunno as I never played FRUA with UA-Shell

-ST

[Uatu]

Hmm - well, if we were to fully implement underwater adventures, we would have to do something with:

Movement (half is very generous! Without swimming ability, I remember movement rates of 1 or 2...)
Breathing
Spell changes
Item changes (most missile weapons no longer work, some items will rust and be useless, etc.)
Visibility

This is all a lot of work, though, so in the meantime I think I will also do the cheese and set a "airy water" spell or something like that that affords normal movement underwater... although it wouldn't make much sense that the opponents can still swim around normally...

For spells, at least we could nullify fire-related spells, I suppose, and some others that wouldn't work underwater (call lightning?).

I remember in Gateway to the Savage Frontier (maybe) that before underwater combats it just forced magic-users to forget fire-related spells

[manikus]

I think this would be a cool addition to DC. What would be even nicer is a more generic list of items the designer could check to adjust movement, spell ability, etc. (I'm imagining an outer space battle...)

[SilentThief]

Originally Posted by Uatu Cool, SilentThief It does seem like a lot of work to add that to each picture that appears in the window, though.

actually its not hard, you just have to set up a pic (like below) that is a blank backdrop, that you copy over another backdrop to place the front of the skull (MS-Paint transparent second color style).

Originally Posted by Uatu Never saw the dolphin coming out of the frame in FRUA... Sounds cool, though.

There were like 2 pics in the entire original FRUA that had this out-of-the-frame style. One was just a dolphin that had the head sticking out of the side, and the other was an animated pic with a sea-elf changing into the same original dolphin pic.

I dunno if those pics were in any goldbox game, having only played thru 1 (SotSB) and very little of any of the others.

-SilentThief

[manikus]

It would be a lot of work, even though it's not hard work. I project that the Silver Blades project will have scores of small pics, more than a dozen backdrops, more than a dozen big pics and probably a couple of dozen sprites. And this is not the biggest thing I'm working on.