Introduction to Hand Editing Tele-Arena Data

Tele-Arena has two main avenues which you will need to follow depending on what exactly you want to change. The first is item/world/monster data, the other is functionality changes. I'll break them up and give you an idea of what you're going to need for each.

Map/Item/Monster modifications

95% of changes made to the world's maps, items, and creatures are made through changes to text files. You'll find in your TA distribution a number of "mcv" files.

  • tsgarn-c.mcv
  • tsgarn-d.mcv
  • tsgarn-m.mcv
  • tsgarn-t.mcv
  • tsgarndd.mcv
  • tsgarndt.mcv

These files contain the game databases. They cannot be edited directly (at least, not in any way that i've found yet). For each mcv, there should be a matching "msg" file. Tsgarn-d.mcv would have a tsgarn-d.msg, you get the point. The MSG's can be edited using a text editor. I've had pretty good luck using VIM. I'll get more into which files contain what data, and how to actually make changes later.

Game Functionality

The functionality of the game is not so easy to change. You need to get ahold of the source for the game. AND a MajorBBS or WorldGroup Development Kit, with borland, and pharlap. These are all very old programs, which are not all that easy to come by.

The source is not generally available at this time.  There's an old (broken) release of 5.6c which a few people (including myself) have tried to work with.  It's futile.  There's a large chunk of this source package which is precompiled.  This is done to preserve license data.  Unfortunately, that's not all that's in there.  The main loop is in there, as well as a handfull of core routines.  For instance, the routine which tells monsters how to select targets in combat.  It's in there, and it's broken.  You cant edit it.  I spent hours working around the bug in the code, and i ended up with an unstable game.  My recommendation is not to pursue this source, and instead try to get involved in the community, make feature requests to Elwynor (the current owner of TA) if you think there's need for change in the engine.

What's in the msg's?

Each MSG contains a few sections of game data, I'm going to try to break down what file contains what data for you, so you don't need to look through all of them each time youre looking to make a change.

tsgarn-c

This is the game's config. Things like what key the Op carries, how many credit's are consumed while in the game, things like that. You dont need to modifiy this directly, you can use the BBS's CNF utility for this.

tsgarn-d

This file contains item's, spells, monsters, barrier descriptions, trap descriptions, treasure descriptions, and teleportation descriptions.

tsgarn-m

This is all of the in-game messages. Plain text, ansi color compatible.

tsgarn-t

-t has all of the town data in it. Rooms, shopkeepers, and descriptions. You'll also find the user to user actions here, like sob, hug, kick, all of those things.

tsgarndd

dd contains all of the numeric world data. By numeric I mean the ID's of all of the rooms, lairs, darkness, Terrain, triggers, and barriers.

tsgarndt

dt is mostly descriptions to match dd. All of the room descriptions are held here. You'll also find the tavern rumors and descriptions for actions (like "pull lever" and the like).

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