Boulder Dash Forum

Hi. Bit of a technical question here.

I'm planning a BD game in CLCK with an 'adventure' theme. I have a lot of ideas for the bulk of this game, but to finish it off I wanted a few more different wall textures. Is there a way of discarding some of the new CLCK elements, such as the Mrs Rockford, eater, etc, and to get just a few more wall textures, for example, a stone wall, wood (for making trees - the dirt will look like foliage with green colour), etc... by replacing the graphics of these items and making them behave like walls?

Any advice would be mucho appreciated, since I'm really excited about this idea and I think it would work well!

Elements which entirely act on its own like the eater can be disabled by removing the code pointer and the effect from the tables:

6a70 codepointer MSB
6af0 codepointer LSB
4280 effect table
One byte per element. Order like in the element list of the FAQ.
Set the codepointer to 0000 and the effect byte to the element number. Effects are partially copied from the cave setup at cave start, thus some of them must be setup there instead.

However, this is a bit more complicated for elements which are reacted with from other elements, for instance Mrs. Rockford: There, the diamond catching is somewhere in the falling diamond code, the conversion to the time penalty tombstone is done in the explosion routine, and the voodoo death from the firefly and butterfly routine.

Also you can change the graphic pointers:
3b80 Grafikpointer
That way, if you don't use Mrs. Rockford, you could change her graphic and assign it to the Glued Boulders for example. Also, if you don't use Mrs. Rockford, you can replace the Tombstone and Titanium Wall Birth stages as well.

Let's see what elements can be easlily disabled by just changing the code pointers:
Fireflies, Growing wall, Butterfly, Slime, Bomb Ticking stages, Bomb Explosion stages, Acid, Falling Wall, Falling Wall falling, Boulder glued, Diamond glued, Trapped Diamond (which is indestructible), and the Biter. (I think. I don't remember every bit of the code).

Boulder Birth can be used if you change the effect setup "too big amoeba" to "boulders", which is the way BD1, BD2 and PLCK do also.
Also the delayed states (if existend) can be disabled with their elements and can be assigned to different graphics.

And of course, as there is no Enemiedesigner for CLCK yet, you have to copy your graphics in by hand. The locations are listed in the FAQ.

If something don't work out for you, I can probably help.

Thanks! That sounds too complicated for me to do at the moment though, though I will try since you took the trouble to write it out. Maybe I'll need to wait for the Enemy Designer module... I'm taking it that any changes I manage to make now won't be visible in the editor, which is really what I need.

Also, in the meantime, I was also hoping for a way to change the appearance of the expanding wall, and possibly the falling wall. Maybe just a little mark on them so that you don't have the trial and error and painful deaths from getting trapped by accident associated with special walls 'laying in stealth'.

Sendy wrote:I'm taking it that any changes I manage to make now won't be visible in the editor, which is really what I need.

Actually, since the main engine is identical in the Construction Kit, you can just save those modified tables to files. Then you can just load them in the Construction Kit like a cave. When building the standalone game, you just load the same files along with the rest when using the game linker.

And changing the appearance of the Expanding Wall is simple, as there is a setting in the effect menu for it. Lord Diego was the first one having it appear as Titanium Wall.

I assume, you have a monitor (hexeditor). For instance, you can use an Action Replay modul or the built in monitor of most emulators for doing all this stuff.