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    • 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.

    The first thing to do, if you haven't done it already, is to unzip the archive containing the Dungeon Craft game you would like to play. You can pick any place on your computer, even a flash drive or other peripheral drive, if you would like. Dungeon Craft no longer requires that designs to be played are placed in the Dungeon Craft Editor hierarchy.

    Minimum System 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

    When playing Dungeon Craft will be in full-screen mode which means that you do not have the ability to use other windowed tasks via the Taskbar. If you absolutely must access another application without closing the design you're playing (after saving it first, of course); use the + key combination the number of times needed to access the other application. Once this is done, the screen will be as it was before opening the game you are playing. To resume play, simply click on the button on the Taskbar. Note: you will get an initial graphics error when re-opening the design after moving away from it in such a manner. This error may be ignored and play resumed as normal.