Jump to content

Graphic Request: Manticore


Recommended Posts

Looking for a rather distinct monster graphic for my port-in-progress.

 

To quote the help file of the original:

Quote:
Manticore: monstrous guardian, originally created by sorcery. The manticore has the body and claws of a great lion, feathered vulture-like wings, the face of a cruel, bearded man, but with tusks in the wide mouth, and a long, rather insectile tail behind. The many-jointed tail is tipped with a pinecone of barbed quills, which it can fling with the accuracy and effect of a company of crossbowmen; with this, a manticore will try to slay lesser opponents at a distance, or cripple stronger opponents before closing with claws and jaws. Too, as a crossbowman can empty a case of quarrels, so can a manticore exhaust the spines on its tail, though it will usually cease fire before such exhaustion and so hazard a few quills against emergency. While manticores are intelligent, their bestial, angry nature overrides most subtlety. They talk, and will mock their prey during combat.

 

Will take either small or large template.

Would really like to have the attack pose include the quoted tail flinging, for proper in-game effect.

Bonus points if the graphic is flying, and the death animation invoves the creature falling to the ground.

 

Thank you.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Castle of the Winds was on a CD with 1000 Games. CD also contained Exile 1 and Exile 2, that is where I first discovered Spiderweb games. Magic Arrow was my first spell, I initially used hit and run tactics, until I reached the second experience level and obtained the Heal Minor Wounds spell.

Screen captures could be turned into a temporary Manticore graphic, until you came up with something better. Ditto, as I recall, the SSI Gold Box Savage Frontier games had Manticores in them. (These two games, Gateway to the Savage Frontier and Treasures of the Savage Frontier, are abandonware nowadays.)

If there are any Manticore graphics in any BoE scenario they can be used at a pinch too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha
Castle of the Winds was on a CD with 1000 Games. CD also contained Exile 1 and Exile 2, that is where I first discovered Spiderweb games.
I, on the other hand, discovered Castle of the Winds when I bought Jazz Jackrabbit from Epic Classics a few years ago and the first part was included on the disk. (Or maybe it was the Jill of the Jungle disk; I forget.) Exile I discovered on MacCubed.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is another BoA adaptation of an old game. I don't know if it has random terrain or not.

Castle of the Winds had randomly designed dungeons, like Darkstone. Hints on how to try and implement this in a BoA scenario could be found in the files for Blades of Rogue.

Edit:

I don't know if the Castle of the Winds save game file has a complete map of the current level or not, it may only have a numerical level seeding code. If it has a complete map that could be converted to a BoA style town record by an appropriately designed spreadsheet. I will have to look into this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord, with an emphasis on the word "Mad". So if the original game was bizarre that might be appropriate, it was designed by a madman after all.

I will look at a Castle save game and see what I find.

Edit:

This may not be as easy as decrypting most games that I have seen. You have provision for angled walls and so on, I don't know how the game handles the notation.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am on Windows and that is Mac. If anyone has Resfool, or anything like it. can they look at Castle of the Winds? (Not too sure where you would find the freeware Mac version of CW.)

Here is the Windows version of the application:

http://www.exmsft.com/~ricks/castl11a.zip

If anyone has a Windows resource editor that can handle this game can they look at it?

We need to know if there are distinct terrain bitmaps and if so what they look like.

If all else fails I can try analyzing screenshots. It may have a simple structure like the Exile games with terrain bitmaps. Then again the dungeons may be drawn by the game using point to point lines.

Edit:

There might not be a Mac version.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Windows resources and Mac resources are completely different formats, just so you know.

 

...why on earth did you upload it to your webspace when you could have linked to the freely available download from the creator's own site?

 

Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha
Then again the dungeons may be drawn by the game using point to point lines.

...seems incredibly unlikely, though not impossible.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The nature of Mac resources have been discussed on these boards frequently enough...

As for downloads:

http://www.exmsft.com/~ricks/castl11a.zip

(The game seems to have no Mac version?)

There may be a one-to-one map. Again, the notation may simply say "n1 copies of terrain type N1, followed by n2 copies of type N2..."

As for the size of the CW dungeons, it seems that the individual squares are around 32 pixels in width, which makes for some large dungeons, much larger than BoA varieties? You might need to string together several BoA towns just to accomodate one CW town.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The manticore does look very good. The death sequence seems slightly odd, in particular the transition from the living pose to the first frame – suddenly it turns upside down?

Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha
(The game seems to have no Mac version?)
Hole in one!
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel
The manticore does look very good. The death sequence seems slightly odd, in particular the transition from the living pose to the first frame – suddenly it turns upside down?

You're right. I have no way to see how it may look in-game as I don't currently own BoA, but here's a slightly edited version with a new death animation. (The original intention is that it gets knocked out of the air, falling over backward.) Please let me know how it looks, and anything else that should be improved.

Thanks!
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Don't own BoA? Just download the relevant Mac or PC demo. You can play the first scenario: Valley of Dying Things. Add your graphic to the folder of this scenario and give it a name like "G527.bmp". Simply alter the scenario data script so that one monster has your custom graphic. Play the scenario for a while and see how graphic looks.

Death sequence graphics are no big problem because they are gone so quick.

Dungeon Craft may have manticore graphics, I will have to check the various relevant sites.

 

As for a Castle of the Winds scenario, features like Identify spells don't exist in standard BoA. I devised a work around, see the Codex:

http://thelyceum.yuku.com/forums/16/t/The-Codex.html

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha
As for a Castle of the Winds scenario, features like Identify spells don't exist in standard BoA. I devised a work around, see the Codex:
http://thelyceum.yuku.com/forums/16/t/The-Codex.html
I'm sorry, I have no desire to scroll sideways forever just to see what you're trying to say.

(Assuming you meant this thread. It looks like wz arsenic's post is the culprit...)

Originally Posted By: Ephesos
Ishad, what on earth are you talking about? Nobody's saying they don't own BoA.
Actually, Mistborn did:
Originally Posted By: Mistb0rn
I have no way to see how it may look in-game as I don't currently own BoA,
Link to comment
Share on other sites

A shadow might help to show that the creature is up off of the ground, but I would recommend against motion lines. There's nothing wrong with adding them, but doing so wouldn't really fit the usual style, and they might end up looking funny when they got highlighted along with the rest of the graphic when the monster is attacking. Of course, it's Grimm who wants the graphic, so it's his opinion along with yours as the artist which matter.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Mistborn, it looks awesome. May need to check the bottom edges to ensure that it fits in the tile constraints.

I'll see if I can give you an in-game demo of what it looks like in action, but that probably won't happen for a day or three.

 

 

And yes, I'm attempting a port of Castle of the Winds.

Pertinent info can be found at Shadow Vale and The Blades Forge.

I am interested in any suggestions from fans of the original, in order to help the success of porting the core of this classic.

 

_________________________

The Silent Assassin likes to favor a male human archae... no wait, wrong rogue-style.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

While randomly generated levels would be very true to the original, I believe that it conflicts with the nature and motivation of this port: the point is in fleshing out the world of CotW, not simply copying it from one engine to another. If someone wants CotW, then they can go play it: it is, after all, freeware.

 

That said, you're right, a good deal of the original game's allure rests on the fact that it's impossible to play the same game twice. In order to emulate that factor while maintaining carefully-designed and -purposed dungeon design, I'm taking an approach that blends Ishad Nha's suggested choices.

Players will be exposed to "standard dungeons", as he put it; however, I am creating a number of such towns, specifically tailored to the purpose of each dungeon level when applicable (and given an essentially random purpose when not); so the player will be exposed to randomly selected dungeon levels, as opposed to randomly generated dungeon levels.

Right now, I'm working on the premise that three different versions of each of the 38-39 originally randomly generated dungeon levels results in something like 1.35*10^18 unique play-throughs. Obviously, that overly large number does not consider the obscene amount of overlap, but realistically, how many times will someone play a port?

It does create more work for me in that I have to design (and test. and beta test.) over a hundred essentially unique towns, but it maintains the random play element without having to plagiarize BoR.

 

_________________________

The Silent Assassin points out that anyone simply wanting a randomly generated hack-and-slash with relatively prettier graphics should give up BoA and go play Vulture's Eye.

He also points out stars, errors and typos in my posts, candles, and occasionally, accidentally, the glass eyes in mounted animal heads.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote:
. . . without having to plagiarize BoR.

I have to say that I would be totally happy to see the techniques used in BoR embedded in another scenario if they suited its purposes. (I can't claim to have invented some of the key ones anyway.) There's certainly a lot more that could be done in that direction, such as different versions of the random level generator tuned to use different terrain and creature sets. On the other hand, there were a lot of restrictions that the dynamic generation placed on what the levels could actually contain, so by manually creating all of the levels you gain a lot of freedom to make them more interesting and detailed. You'll be able to have exciting things like height differences, which were an example of something I thought about putting into BoR, but simply couldn't guarantee working correctly and so had to omit. (The secret doors were bad enough; they were ridiculously hard to get right.)
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I sent off an email to the author seeking source code or graphics to enable my decryption. In the meantime I will have another stab at it myself.

Edit:

A map square may be 32*32. Automap square size is highly variable from what I can see.

The towns may look bigger than what they really are, I am still working on this. Fortress level 4 may be 64*62 or something.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Most of the dungeon levels that I have encountered are easily Large, though it appears from my playthroughs that 64*64 is the limit. The Automap stretches to fit the dungeon's dimensions to the current window.

That said, I'm not really interested in copying maps straight out the the random dungeons, but instead the key elements from them: various room arrangements, types, and sizes, specific rooms scripted to specific levels, the occasional door at a dead end for humor and authenticity, etc. As Niemand has pointed out, things like secret passages and height add a new dimension to the gameplay element.

It's been a slow process, particularly in having to use the debug tool to regenerate each level several times to determine if certain rooms are random, or designed specifically for the level.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Castle of the Winds seems about as complex as Exile 1. Blades of Exile scenarios can be ported to BoA easily enough. This project should be simple enough apart from the diagonal corridors.

Diagonal movement along diagonal corridors should be tough to implement in BoA. The only solution I see is breaking them up into horizontal and vertical stretches.

If you want to keep the corridors diagonal you would need to port to BoE which has simpler wall graphics.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Diagonal corridors would need a wall to lie along the diagonal of the square not the side as is currently the case. I have never tried to do this, so I don't know if it will work.

The party would move like a Bishop in Chess. So you would need custom terrain types that look like walls.

He may too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha
Diagonal corridors would need a wall to lie along the diagonal of the square not the side as is currently the case. I have never tried to do this, so I don't know if it will work.
He may too.


Or, y'know, just make the corridor two spaces wide and stagger the walls.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...