Introduction
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 by Richard Turner, a.k.a. CocoaSpud, to learn more about Windows/DirectX programming. He got the idea 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 figured if he put the two pieces together, he would have a good start towards cloning FRUA, and learn more about DirectX (formerly Game SDK) programming along the way.
A few improvements have been made over the original FRUA, 16/24/32-bit color, more levels allowed, editable items/monsters/spells, and the resulting design includes the game executable so that each design is playable without the editor. Other differences exist, but I have attempted to duplicate FRUA/Gold Box behavior as much as possible. Of course, suggested improvements have a good chance of making their way into the source code. Dungeon Craft is an Open Source project released under the Gnu Public License.
Minimum requirements
To use Dungeon Craft, you must have:
- DirectX 7 or higher
- Pentium CPU required, Pentium II 233 or higher recommended
- Windows 95 or later
- 640x480 screen resolution required, 800x600 or higher screen resolution recommended