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Actionsoft's latest game, Midnight Mansion 2: The Haunted Hills,  includes 28 mansions. The 8 Built-in mansions have 3 difficulties along with 4 extra custom mansions. We don't have that many other custom MM2 mansions yet. Design your own custom mansion! Info below.  You can find out more about the game here.

The original Midnight Mansion game contains over 150 mansions. The 8 included mansions which have 3 difficulty levels each, and about 115 approved custom mansions which you can download here and also several freely uploaded mansions. To know the difference between these three types of mansions, click here.

Are you a creative person and thinking of designing a mansion yourself? Or want to know about how to upload it? Click here and we'll show you! You'll find guidelines for betatesters here.

News:
Midnight Mansion 2: The Haunted Hills version 1.0.2b has been released. This fixes a bug in Jasperlone Mountains Hard. Simply re-download the game, bring over your custom mansions folder from the old version and play on. All your saves and high scores will not be changed.

Midnight Mansion HD (MM1) is now available at the Mac App Store and at the Actionsoft website. A Windows version is now available.

Here is a list of downloadable MM1 HD ready custom mansions, which also work in the Windows version of the game.

The MM2 custom mansion Hanging Gardens of Babylon by Freddy/SandyBean/Josephine/brell was updated on 19. Nov 2023 to add a fourth section. Available here


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Poll closed Poll
Question: Wish you a new Mansion Builder up to 10.7 ?
*** This poll has now closed ***


Absolutely nessecary!    
  8 (80.0%)
Perhaps ... But welcome    
  2 (20.0%)
Not really, but ok!    
  0 (0.0%)
No need of this crap!    
  0 (0.0%)




Total votes: 10
« Created by: gonzo on: 11.04.2012 at 04:21:12 »

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At last! Discotheque Of Doom ins running for me... (Read 83475 times)
aquaMat
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Re: At last! Discotheque Of Doom ins running for me...
Reply #10 - 29.04.2012 at 08:46:43
 
@ SandyBean:


Ohmygawd..... are those dogs cute !!!


@ SandyBean & Semi-Native:


I did also keep my "big" computer, my trusty old G5, running OS 10.4.11, as there are enough applications that run perfectly on it (it's actually in my studio) and several that won't run on Lion at all.

However.....  once I had that new MacBook and Lion for a while I quickly got used to the new speed, the new functionality etc. and found myself spending more and more time on the new machine....
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Re: At last! Discotheque Of Doom ins running for me...
Reply #11 - 29.04.2012 at 09:35:42
 
gonzo wrote on 11.04.2012 at 04:21:12:
Hi,

since MM HD released, the building of customized mansions is going to "nothing"! So I decide to make a poll to see what YOU say about this... see ABOVE!!!!


I had a fairly lengthy response started, but I'll hold off a bit on it. The main question you should answer is how much would you be willing to pay for a new version of the Mansion Builder that worked on lion? It may sound kind of crass, but the economics of creating a new Mansion Builder are difficult at best. I note that 5 people (so far) on the forum feel strongly about the Mansion Builder, and I wonder how much those 5 people would be willing to pay for a new builder if it came down to it. Keep in mind all the custom mansions done so far were done by about 30 folks or less. I felt strongly enough initially to start developing a version from scratch. Unfortunately, my day job, commute, and family leave me very little time to devote to something like this.

I can only imagine that some people read this, and thought to themselves, "Pay? But I got it with the game before..." That may be true, however this version of the game was cheaper than the one before, and those who had the original game also got a discount on this new version. If Vern hadn't done the work he'd done those who upgraded to Lion wouldn't be able to play it at all.

It's easy to forget that this is a big part of how Vern makes his living. With this version of the game, he's selling it for less than the original, and trying to make it available to as many people as possible to make further work on it a viable activity to support himself. I'm afraid that it isn't working out as well as he'd hoped.

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Re: At last! Discotheque Of Doom ins running for me...
Reply #12 - 29.04.2012 at 09:54:57
 
Hi SandyBean, great to hear from you, too. Beautiful pups and mom!
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Re: At last! Discotheque Of Doom ins running for me...
Reply #13 - 29.04.2012 at 10:00:28
 
Even though I've only built one mansion and contributed to Catacombs for one section, I'd be more than willing to pay for a new Level Builder. After all, it wouldn't be expensive, and I would hope most people would be willing to shell out a few bucks for it. I do realize a lot of work goes into these games, and this is the best game I've ever found, hands down.
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Re: At last! Discotheque Of Doom ins running for me...
Reply #14 - 29.04.2012 at 13:17:32
 
aquaMat wrote on 29.04.2012 at 01:58:23:
[quote author=4A424357422D0 link=1334071748/5#5 date=1334157906]
Would it really be only possible with a Lion Level Editor.
Or could that "Recycle-Workaround" - which I'm afraid I have not yet fully understood - help to make all custom graphics work?

BTW: The BBB issues are probably more related to that old BBB-bug that we know for a few years now - where some BBB's that once were perfectly okay are suddenly not working correctly anymore.
I had it in several non-HD mansions, and I never discovered any method to that madness !


Rezycle is a stand-alone tool which "unpacks" the resource fork from a file. You can drag a mansion onto the Rezycle icon, or open rezycle and drag-and-drop the mansion on the opened Rezycle window. This will create a directory called: Resources from "<the mansion name>" that contains all the extracted resources.

The BBB issues, at least the easiest to spot issues, revolve around the description that was part of the resource information. This must have made all kinds of sense in the early days, because it documented the resource, whether it was sign/BBB or whether it was an image (pict file). Unfortunately, when Recycle extracts the resources, it embeds the description into the filename if it was set. For example, in the 'PICT' subdirectory, *all* the pict files contain a description like:

00351 "GreenBricks + Disco".pict

This would have to be renamed to:

00351.pict

This would have to be done for all resources like this. I've typically only seen it in the 'TEXT' and 'PICT' subdirectories - mostly in the older mansions. So for custom graphics you would have to:

(Assuming Rezycle has already unpacked the mansion)

1. Check and correct embedded descriptions within 'PICT' subdirectory

2. Use some tool that can convert all .pict files to .png files

3. Remove all .pict files.

5. Scale all .png files up 2 times their current size. When in doubt, compare size with resources under Game Data/Sprites.

6. Ensure transparency is maintained.

Keep in mind, the image quality will suffer when you scale it up. In the game, the resulting images will probably look somewhat pixelated. Basically, this is like taking a digital picture with a 3-4 Megapixel Camera and blowing it up to 8x10 or larger image. Scaling images up might be step one, but probably a better path to go would be to use the old custom images as a guide, and apply the same color changes to copies of the new game images. 

Before you change any image you should compare it to the new game graphics. Some graphics - such as those for Jack and possibly some monsters have changed enough so that simply scaling it up won't work. It will load OK, because the size (doubled) will be correct, but the animation will be off because the figures present in the image have changed. Changes to Jack are best redone using the current "Jack" image as a starting point.

Tools I found useful:
- Photoshop (or Gimp and Xee)
   
  Unfortunately if you use Gimp, it doesn't know how to deal with .pict files, so you'll have to convert them to PNG with another tool. I played with a few. You might try Xee - it was fairly straight forward (and free). Photoshop *can* convert the .pict files. There are no shortage of graphics tools, though not all of them have been ported to Lion.



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rose
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Re: At last! Discotheque Of Doom ins running for me...
Reply #15 - 29.04.2012 at 13:38:53
 
You can convert pict files in Preview to png!!! Though I don't think you can batch convert.
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Re: At last! Discotheque Of Doom ins running for me...
Reply #16 - 29.04.2012 at 14:16:41
 
aquaMat wrote on 29.04.2012 at 01:31:13:
.....and nobody had ever asked me to check my mansions for HD-compatibility, which I found a bit strange, considering how many custom-mansions I had designed.


I'm sorry we didn't contact you and the other designers. It sounds bad, but it was something we had intended, and even talked about it but didn't follow through with for whatever reason. The new game was getting ready to come out, and we wanted players to be able to be able to play as many of the custom mansions as possible.

The majority of the mansions required no changes other than to be "unpacked" using rezycle. We figured that we (the Admins) could do these since no "real" changes to the mansions were needed (and no builder was necessary). It was felt that a few people who knew how could take care of this quickly, and it did go quickly for the most part. Perhaps, too quickly...

Some mansions (the older ones), had descriptions embedded in the resources which (as I mentioned in another post), caused  problems in the game. These problems were easy to fix, and also didn't require a Builder, and didn't result in any noticeable change within the game so we also fixed these.

We were extremely reluctant to make any changes within any mansion that required the editor, even though most of the admins had (still have as far as I know) access to an older Mac and the old Builder. We felt this was best left to individual designers, or done with permission.

Due to minor game changes, some mansions were broken. For example:

- Mansions where levers were stylistically lowered one brick below the ground, so that only the top portion of the lever was sticking out. These levers cannot be pulled in the new Game. I believe this was a side effect of Vern 'fixing' it so that levers could not be pulled mid-air. Some mansions were *full* of levers like this.

- Some mansions used portions of the ladder in unusually decorative ways. They ended up not resembling ladders whatsoever. The new game doesn't allow these ladder pieces to work, which broke a few puzzles.

- The behavior of some of the disappearing platforms changed so that if you jumped from a disappearing platform from one screen onto a floating platform in another screen, that platform might not be there to land on.

We noted these issues, and took no action unless we had permission. Once we had done as much as we could, we intended to ask for permission. We should have at least sent a PM (I know that I felt a bit like I was intruding by sending unsolicited email). These issues would have been fairly easy to fix, but required access to an editor. I wrote some scripts that could at least identify some of the issues quickly.

The largest problem was the custom graphics, because the graphics were overhauled for this new version. Jacob completely redid *all* the graphics. Up until today, I thought the changes were limited to being twice the size, and featured new art, but I thought that all the figures in the art were in the same positions as before. I realized I was wrong when I compared the Jack graphic in the Discotheque of doom and the graphic for Jack.

My guess is that those mansions that feature a large amount of custom graphics will probably need to be redone completely (at least the graphics). Simply scaling the graphics larger doesn't look that great. I tried a few experiments with DoD today and the results were mixed. *None* of the admins wished to make fundamental changes to anyone else's mansion. Like I said, I think the intention had always been to contact those designers whose dungeons didn't convert cleanly. After the initial flurry of activity, we all got busy with other things, I guess, and I think it was forgotten. Brell *did* post about conversions, and some of the issues with mansions. There was certainly no disrespect intended.
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Re: At last! Discotheque Of Doom ins running for me...
Reply #17 - 29.04.2012 at 14:19:46
 
rose wrote on 29.04.2012 at 13:38:53:
You can convert pict files in Preview to png!!! Though I don't think you can batch convert.


You know, I *thought* you could do this, but when I tried it only allowed me to export as .pdf. Perhaps this changed in Lion? I had to look for other alternatives.
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Re: At last! Discotheque Of Doom ins running for me...
Reply #18 - 29.04.2012 at 14:56:50
 
Semi-Native wrote on 29.04.2012 at 10:00:28:
Even though I've only built one mansion and contributed to Catacombs for one section, I'd be more than willing to pay for a new Level Builder. After all, it wouldn't be expensive, and I would hope most people would be willing to shell out a few bucks for it. I do realize a lot of work goes into these games, and this is the best game I've ever found, hands down.


I didn't mean to imply that no one would, just that no matter who works on it, it would end up being a labor of love more than anything else, since there's no way the costs for doing it would ever be recouped. Unfortunately, this means it's going to necessarily take a back seat to efforts that better help to pay the bills. This doesn't mean that the Builder will never be done - it's just not as high on the priority list is all. Then again, who knows? I suppose there's always the chance that Vern could suddenly figure out a way it could be done quickly and easily and surprise everyone.
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Re: At last! Discotheque Of Doom ins running for me...
Reply #19 - 29.04.2012 at 15:12:55
 
Rob Seegel wrote on 29.04.2012 at 14:19:46:
rose wrote on 29.04.2012 at 13:38:53:
You can convert pict files in Preview to png!!! Though I don't think you can batch convert.


You know, I *thought* you could do this, but when I tried it only allowed me to export as .pdf. Perhaps this changed in Lion? I had to look for other alternatives.

No, I don't have Lion and will not buy Lion either. You have to use the Save as, where you can choose the format. How you do in Lion I don't know. It is probably File > Duplicate, File > save as???
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