Alright folks, since the day I learned to grill a steak I decided to throw a barbecue party in my large garden. All sort of people showed up, since it was for free, but overall it still was good fun. I enjoyed grilling new steaks for everybody and didn't even mind when they took them home to feed their families instead of inviting them over to the party.
But at one point some started to tell me it was -their- party, and that I should be grateful they came to grab and eat anything they wanted, as that allowed me to grill more steaks. Quite a few even started to pee in my garden.
A wise person needs to understand when the party must be over, and I realized that this was in fact -my- garden, -my- barbecue and -my- steaks. I thought I was sharing them with friends, but the majority visited just because they were hungry and expected me to -serve- them for free as cook and waiter.
I won't be throwing any more barbecue parties for this town. I was organizing a bigger and much better one, but I don't like ill-mannered guests around, so from now on, I'll only have private dinners with friends.
*bows out*
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I'll keep maintaining this thread and package for everybody to download, in particular to keep it up to date with further versions of the CEP, but there won't be further developments. I am also disabling votes and comments, at least for now, since I won't be checking this thread as often as I used to do. If you need to contact me you can use paulokrantz[dot]dev[at]googlemail[dot]com, or simply use the vault form to send me an email. Just click on my username.
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Fir trees: While adding the new Fir Trees terrain to the Rocky Mountains v12 (to be released), it came up as a good idea to convert the trees into placeables that can be used both in conjunction with the current version of the mountains, or as a stand-alone package (self-sufficient and including all necessary blueprints, models and textures)
Statues: Again while working on the Rocky Mountains tileset, I made the new exterior wall towers to be the perfect place for area customization through placement of statues, which I haven't included to avoid forcing a particular settings on the builders. I thought "they'll be able to place any kind of statue they need, in those slots". But then I realized that there were very little good statues available in both standard and custom content.
So I decided to make some myself, adding them to this placeables pack. I started picking among of the best looking creatures around, in most cases made by DLA for Bioware's Premium Module program. As you can see, I froze them in some interesting animation frames, and created new textures to turn them into various stone materials, making sure that the main details were preserved in the conversion.
Crystal spiders: As I was working on expanding the stone statues pack with more creatures, I thought that spiders would be a rather interesting addition, especially given the number of Underdark and Drow fans out there. It soon became evident that both the "underground" settings (which make easy to find the material) and the overall stylish design of the underdark civilization, almost make mandatory using crystal. So the crystal spiders were born. I experimented quite a lot with the material and its reflectiveness/transparency/lighting settings, and I must say that I am very happy about the result. I added a "broken glass" soundset for them, to go together with the "explosion of crystal" event upon destroying the spiders.
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Credits:
DLA and Bioware for the creature models and animations that I have used as starting material for the statues
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Special thanks to:
_six_six_six_, for being the one who pushed for the initial release of the fir trees, the first bunch of placeables to be added to this package, so thank him if you like it. Or blame him if you don't. ;)
the girls and guys over at neverwinterconnections IRC channel, for their patience when I was spamming the channels with screenshots from alpha and beta stages of the work. Their feedback has provided me precious informations
ragnarok_mr4, for pushing me to build the hanging stone structure after I had discarded the idea in the early stages as it sounded too time-consuming. He talked me into actually giving it a try, and although it -was- time consuming in the end, the result was well worth the efforts. He also provided me insightful and honest feedback all along
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Version history
12-08-08, updated CEP version to CEP2.2 - as requested by etanward11
12-01-08, removed outdated 1.68 versions - as the latest game version is now widely used, removed the outdated versions for the previous patch (1.68), as they were not getting any downloads anymore.
06-07-08, updated version 2.5: - following a request from red teflon, released a version compatible with CEP 2.1 and patch 1.69;
- also tweaked the naming convention of the other versions for better clarity;
02-07-08, uploaded version 2.5: - released 30 crystal spiders (15 models, each comes in small and large size);
01-15-08, renamed to "RK Placeables Pack v2": - renamed models, textures and blueprints to a new naming convention (backward compatible);
- removed TGA textures from the package. Anybody experiencing issues with their graphic card (highly unlikely nowadays) just drop me a line to get a TGA version;
- replaced the placeables versions of the tree textures with their tileset equivalent, as this enhances performances when the trees are used in conjunction with the Rocky Mountains tileset. The package is still self-sufficient and can be used as a stand-alone hak;
- moved all blueprints to separate erf files (that need importing in the module) and not longer as hak resources. It allows for an easier customization;
- added 8 Tiny Fir Trees;
- added 50 statues (25 models, each comes in small and large size);
12-26-07, initial release as "Fir Trees Placeables Pack": - released 26 Fir Trees (10 Small, 8 Medium, 4 large, 4 Huge)
I am releasing this package under the followingTERMS OF USE, which I kindly expect not to be broken:
Everybody is (obviously) allowed to use any version of this package for their modules.
Inclusion in module-specific or server-specific compilations is allowed, but would be nice to be informed when it happens, so that I'll be able to notify updates and bugfixes and maintain a consistent quality across the various distributions
Inclusion in general use compilations is not allowed, unless I explicitly authorize it upon being requested so. If anybody needs to use these placeables in conjunction with already existent compilations, they are free to extract the placeables.2da from the hak and add the required lines to their custom 2da file, to ensure compatibility, but not allowed to extract and merge models and textures with other material, which must always be added through their original hak. I will however always keep a version that is already CEP2 compatible, and I will be glad to add specific versions that are compliant with other compilations out there, if I am requested to do so
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