OK, this HAK has a history:
When Diademus worked on his Evergreen placeables (snowy trees, see here: Link he asked for suggestions at Nevermonkey's Hut. I contributed a few ideas, and so got interested in the project. As much of his placeables dealt with the "woodcutter" theme, I asked him to do an axe (the tool, no battleaxe) item. He wanted to do only placeables, so I did the axe myself. This was a rather minor work, but then the whole idea got the better of me and I did a bunch of animals which I thought fitting for a northern forest. Diademus agreed to publish the whole bundle together. So in the first place, those critters were never planned to be published on their own.
Unfortunately, Diademus ceased working on NWN, at least for now. He sent me a really sad mail, seems to be burned out in some way. I really hope he will be better soon and continue to do his great CC. If you like the Evergreen HAK now (and it IS great), you know nothing - he was workig on so many great things for it!
Diademus suggested that I publish my contributions on my own for now, so here they are.
Hope you like them.
Contents
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
- Seven new creatures: Red fox, Polar fox, Reindeer, Moose, Boar, Lynx and Swarm.
The Boar is bigger and looks "meaner" than the bioware one.
The Swarm (OK, I know, inscets are not particulary often seen in winter, but I liked it) is made of small generic black insects, so you can use it for Bees, Wasps or whatever. It's animation is still not perfect.
There's also the Bison from CEP and a new portrait for the wolf.
- One placeable: A wasps' nest. The idea was to trigger a "Swarm" spawning in when the nest is destroyed, but this dosn't work yet (I'm not a graet scripter).
- Two new weapons: the "woodcutter's axe" (technically a twohanded axe) and a snowball.
The snowball can also come as a brown ball (mud ball or horse dropping) and a stone, when choosing colors 2 or 3 in the toolset. It is technically a shuriken, and when thrown, a shuriken will be displayed. CC builders will know - throwing weapons are a pest in NWN. If anybody knows a solution (other then comletely override the shurikens), I would be grateful.
- A demo mod (really nothing than a demo - no plot!)
Hint: use this to import the creatures into your mod - no ERFs needed! Just import a copy of the area (you can delete it later), and bang! you'll have acess to everything.
Constuctive Critics are always welcome.
I put this together with the Hak editor of 1.68, otherwise it would work on earlier versions, I think. Perhaps someone can test it.
Credits
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First credits must go to Diademus, for giving me the idea.
The Reindeer is based upon a very detailed (static) reindeer model from De Espona Infográfica, published in "500 3D Objects" Vol. 2 by Taschen (and yes, it's legal, the book comes with the license). I had to remodel it heavily to reduce polycount (The "optimize" tool of 3Dmax did't give good results), and to make it fit for NWN. Of course, the animations stem from the Bioware deer (again, had to be worked over to fit).
The Moose is a remodeled version of the Reindeer.
The Bison is not my own work, it comes from the CEP, but I included it because I thought it fits the theme. I slightly altered the textures, because it was SO ugly (now it's just ugly :) ).
All other creatures are made by me, based of course on Bioware models.
The portraits are scanned from "Aanloop" (Kampen 1993) by Rien Portfliet, a really great illustrator. They are given here without copyright. I just wanted them because I like Portfliet's work so much (technically, this one IS illegal, I just hope it's a minor fault - I ment it as a hommage).
The weapons I did from the scratch.
Things to do:
- Upload the demo mod ...Done
- "dieing" animations for the swarm
- Resizing the moose ...Done
- Retexturing the moose ...Done
- Nest -> Swarm transition script (will test No-One's script, thanx again)
- Throwing weapon solution (Every help is welcome).
Posted by Joern Preine at 2011-11-13 11:09:39 Voted 9.75 on 11/13/11
I only found this today, otherwise I'd have voted earlier. The lynx and the foxes are perfect and sure worth a ten, however some of the other textures could look better - especially the antlers. That's why I'm only giving this a 9.75.
Posted by wmb1957 at 2011-05-03 22:40:28 Voted 10.00 on 05/03/11
nice work.
Posted by Almighty God at 2009-07-11 10:03:47 Voted 10.00 on 07/11/09
Moose! _________________________ [...] And the world was created. [...]
Posted by UrkOfGreyhawk at 2008-10-18 14:20:11 Voted 10.00 on 10/18/08
Great work! _________________________ If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
Updated:
I
- cleaned the HAK from some old versions of the item icons,
- resized the Moose (as Graymaster suggested, I hope it's right now) and slightly brushed up it's UVWs,
- corrected the "large" version of the Bison and the Boar portraits,
- took the CEP entries out of the appeareance.2da, so the speak strings won't show up anymore when you are not using CEP. When everything else is finished, I will upload a CEP-compatible and a Non-CEP version,
- finally uploaded the DEmo Hak!
Please don't discuss the quality of CCP here. My question only was about the general agenda of CCP, which was not immediately clear to me when wathcing the forum linked in Jdea's first post. All your comments were helpful, but now this queston is answered. I definitely will have a closer look and judge for myself. My personal pro's and con's I will post at CCP.
Thank you for the great feedback!
In chronological order:
No One:
Great thanks for the script! Will try it and include it (can't do it now - I have Internet accession only at work)!
Diademus:
Nice to hear from you again!
The appeareance scrolldown problem is certainly caused by the appeareance.2da - I just used the CEP one and added my own things. Just didn't want to cause problems if Modders would use both. If I would include the CEP tlk table, then all CED creatures would appear in the list, and users wouldn't know which are useable. This way, the speakstrings are clearly recognizeable as "dead" links.
As for retexturing the Bison: you're most welcome! The less work I have to put into patching this, the better. I'd like to work on the Facelift heads again soon.
Posted by _six_six_six_ at 2007-10-08 14:07:49 Voted 9.50 on 10/07/07
"the problem i´ve posted bigbene could be that you made the creatures CEP compatible right?"
I'm not Big Bene obviously so the question wasn't adressed to me but yes that will be the problem, the speak strings are because the CEP .tlk file is missing. _________________________ --- What can Q do for you? --- Undead Redux 2 | Wild Woods Tileset
Posted by _six_six_six_ at 2007-10-08 06:46:48 Voted 9.50 on 10/07/07
"WE don't mind criticism, but to say that the majority of the work is "medicore" is not at all true and flies in the face of all the votes and what many have e-mailed us to say. WE have a few models that need improvement, but the majority is still very well made and took a lot of work on the part of the modders to do. It took as long as this project to get these monsters out into the community because a lot of these models/creatures were a challenge to make (i.e. the hydras). So no one is "poo pooing" anything. If you would care to make "better models" please do - otherwise keep your "criticisms" to yourself."
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cause any offence. And by mediocre I meant averagey rather than actually low quality. Also note that I said 'mostly' mediocre, there are a few little gems in there too.
Anyway I'm not a creature modeller, so I've no idea how difficult they were to make - although in fact I'd say that it's more a couple of textures that I feel don't really fit...
Can I also point out that I did mention you were improving.
Posted by jdeavila at 2007-10-07 19:08:15 Voted 9.00
The point is...there are enough people to say otherwise.
WE don't mind criticism, but to say that the majority of the work is "medicore" is not at all true and flies in the face of all the votes and what many have e-mailed us to say. WE have a few models that need improvement, but the majority is still very well made and took a lot of work on the part of the modders to do. It took as long as this project to get these monsters out into the community because a lot of these models/creatures were a challenge to make (i.e. the hydras). So no one is "poo pooing" anything. If you would care to make "better models" please do - otherwise keep your "criticisms" to yourself. _________________________ Imtherealthing
I dont usually post......but six six six made an honest observation. A critique isnt an discouragement. It would be MUCH worse if he lied and said he liked it. I've looked through the CCP a few times. Your guys are learning, cool. Don't toot your own horn, though; its immature and not conducive to improvement. Many of your models are mediocre at best. This is an honest assessment; I'm a practicing fine artist, myself. Don't poopoo good criticism or you will REMAIN mediocre.
Posted by NoOneReally at 2007-10-07 17:11:19 Voted 9.50 on 10/07/07
Nice work mate. While we use the CEP2 in our mods, have been avoiding the 'wildlife' on account that they really look ordinary when you put them beside things like the WCoC Horses and Diademus's trolls. These guys will finally give my PC's something to hunt for food :)
With your script, I use this little script for all my creature spawning placeables. I have it on the OnClick, OnUsed and OnDamaged.
void main()
{
//Spawns a creature with the same resref as this objects TAG
object oPlace = OBJECT_SELF;
string sPlaceTag = GetTag(oPlace);
location lLoc = GetLocation(oPlace);
//Get the number of spawns from the placeable variable "nSPAWN_NUMBER"
int nNumber = GetLocalInt(oPlace,"nSPAWN_NUMBER");
if (GetLocalInt(oPlace,"nDO_ONCE") != 1)
{
int nCurrent = 0;
while (nCurrent < nNumber)
{
object oSPAWN = CreateObject(OBJECT_TYPE_CREATURE,sPlaceTag,lLoc);
SetLocalInt(oPlace,"nDO_ONCE",1);
nCurrent = nCurrent + 1;
}
}
} _________________________ *************************************************
Posted by _six_six_six_ at 2007-10-07 12:56:53 Voted 9.50 on 10/07/07
"What is the CCP about, anyways? To me it looks just like a forum to talk about custom creature related problems. Or are there plans to do a specific creature collection, like the CEP or the like?'
They have released a couple of creature packs, admittedly mostly of somewhat mediocre quality, although their next update has been said to be going to get much better.
I dunno... I'm not a great team worker... Of course, if I can help with something...
What is the CCP about, anyways? To me it looks just like a forum to talk about custom creature related problems. Or are there plans to do a specific creature collection, like the CEP or the like?
Rescaling the Moose would be easy, I could do this using the "rescale" tool of NWmax. How big do you want it? :)
As for the horns, I used a Bioware texture ("Tusk"), to cut cown on the Hak's size. Sorry, there's no better fitting one. Perhaps I'll do a new one, have to think it over...
Nice :) Maybe its possible to make a litte bit better texture foor the moose and the horns for it and the raindeer.
Still it looks really cool keep it up :) _________________________ My Vault stuff
------------------------------------------------
Mine and Sixthrice's Imp-provments ^^ Link
---
Ghoul Reskin & repack: Link
---
Some Backgrounds: Link
Posted by Jezira at 2007-10-07 10:06:58 Voted 9.00 on 10/07/07
Posted by Graymaster at 2007-10-07 09:38:58 Voted 10.00 on 10/07/07
With all the great "Nordic" tilesets out there this is a Godsend! As well, I would like to commend you for the touching words about Diademus. I have to say I think you're over-modest in describing your work - it's excellent and if some 'clunkiness' exists, it's inherent to NWN's engine and toolset. Not that it matters a great deal, but as a Canadian resident this last little while, I have to point out that moose are a LOT bigger than your model! Still, as I said, that is hardly relevant, nor does it in any way detract from your work. Please, do keep up your efforts and know they will be greatly appreciated.
I'm excited to see this.. I'm working on mods for my kindergartener and I guessing these will be perfect. I'll vote after a play with 'em! _________________________ Enjoy!
Here's a Link to The City of Torencia prefab.
Check out this Link to my Jack and the Beanstalk module... Do you have what it takes to be Jack?!
oh.. and my entry in the NWN2 area contest.. Treasure Island! : Link
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