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    • About Dungeon Craft

    Dungeon Craft is an effort to develop an RPG and editor that mimics SSI's Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (FRUA). This project began back in 1995 as an effort Richard Turner (CocoaSpud) to learn more about Windows/DirectX programming. He got the itch to start Dungeon Craft after picking up a book called "Windows 95 Game SDK Strategy Guide" by Clayton Walnum. In it the author described how to make the pseudo-3d viewpoint used by FRUA when the party is adventuring. Then he found a book called "Spells of Fury, Building Windows 95 Games Using DirectX 2" by Michael Norton which described a way of making a tile-based map similar to the FRUA combat screens. He put the two pieces together and had a good start towards cloning FRUA, and learning more about DirectX (formerly Game SDK) programming.

    A few improvements have been made over the original FRUA, 16/24/32-bit color, more levels allowed, editable items/monsters/spells/special abilities/classes/races, and the resulting design includes the game executable so that each design is playable without the editor. Other differences exist, but an attempt to duplicate FRUA/Gold Box behavior as much as possible has been maintained.

    Dungeon Craft is an adventure creator that is based on the AD&D gaming system. So while mimicing FRUA, it does offer the designer more lattitude and is closer to the first edition rules because of it. While FRUA is DOS based, DC is Win32 based and currently runs under Windows 9x/2000/XP/Vista/7 using DirectX 7+.

    Minimum requirements:
    DirectX 7 or higher
    Win95 (4.00.950B or higher)/98/2000/ME/XP./Vista
    Pentium CPU required, Pentium II 233 or higher recommended, but not required
    800x600 resolution recommended for the editor

    Dungeon Craft has been in development for over a decade and programming compilers and libraries have moved on. The best program to use to compile DC is the original program that was used in it's development: Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. You will also need to download Microsoft DirectX 9 SDK as this is the last SDK that will work with Visual C++ 6. But, thatnks to the continued efforts of Richard Turner, Visual Studio 2003 and 2008 can also compile the code.