As seen in the works of Michael Moorcock, the classic symbols of Law and Chaos can now be used as banners in Neverwinter Nights! Fly the White Arrow of Law, or the Eight Arrows of Chaos at the castle or town of your choice. Perfect for modules that take place in Moorcock's Multiverse or any other setting in which the principles of Law and Chaos apply. For me, it had to be made!
Contains two hak paks: one for Neverwinter Nights v1.69 and one for CEPv2.2c3 Two .erfs are included with Law and Chaos banner placeables already made. One .erf for the CEP version and one for the non-CEP version. Just import the one that applies to your module. :)
Look for the banners under Special / Custom 2. This seemed like the safest place to put them.
Inayity, thanks for the info about the RLE compression! The rainbow lines was exactly was I was getting when I had converted the TGAs to DDS, so now at least I can avoid that in the future. Good to hear from a fellow GIMP user, too! It really is an awesome program.
Posted by Inayity at 2009-09-06 17:21:31 Voted 10.00 on 09/06/09
Again, great work!
On the woes you're dealing with when it comes to TGA --> DDS: The BioWare DDS converter works very well. If you're getting other-than-expected output, make sure RLE (Run Length Compression) is off on your TGA. Now, AFAIK, the only two things which are going to regularly bite you with TGA to DDS are going to be:
A. If the TGA has RLE compression (as a GIMP user myself, when you do a "Save As..." it should pop up a dialog asking if you want to compress it and from which corner to start that compression algorithm- you want to uncheck that.
B: If you don't have the right bit-depth for your TGA. I can't remember right off the top of my head what the correct bit-depth is but you can find that on the BioWare forums.
C: (Just remembered this one) Powers of two resolutions. So 32x32, 64x64, 64x512, 512x512, etc. Most modern video cards (NVidia GeForce 6800 or better, IIRC) can do non-power-of-two resolution for textures and users with those cards won't notice any problems. However, anyone with anything older than that (which is a pretty fair number of people in the NWN Community, I'd wager) will get hideous slowdowns. Your textures in this case are power-of-two so everyone's card should be happy but I just wanted to toss it out there because it's the next-common after those two issues, as far as snags to run across.
BTW, if you get the black background with rainbow lines on a TGA-->DDS conversion, IIRC, that means RLE compression was on, on the TGA that the TGA-->DDS compressor was fed. So, in development, you can spot that that might be the case.
GIMP _ROCKS_! I love it and rarely have any complaints.
Thanks for the votes, and for the interest in these custom banners! :)
To be honest, I have no idea about how to use Gmax since I've never used it. The process I used to make these was a surprisingly simple one, actually, and it did not require the use of GMax. I began with two of the existing banners made by the community, to use as model templates. Then, I converted their textures from DDS to TGA using one of the tools for that, that are available here on the Vault. I then opened the textures in GIMP 2 and reworked them in order to accomodate the new images. The Law and Chaos symbols themselves I downloaded off the Internet as image files and I resized them to fit on the templates. Then, I added them using copy - paste. After that, I saved each template as a new TGA file, I settled on numbers for the banners that would not conflict with any existing custom banners, since they go up to 75, and when all that was done I oriented the new textures so they wouldn't show up upside-down (which took me a while of testing in-game to make certain of). The .2da entries, and making the Hak Paks, were the easist part of it all.
The only reason I didn't include *any* DDS textures in the finished version is because although I have a fabulous DDS to TGA convertor, my TGS to DDS convertor is imperfect and typically messes up the textures it's supposed to covert. So, since a lot of folks actually prefer TGA textures anyhow, I decided to go with them instead of the trickier DDS format. I must say, these did come out much better than I has expected for my first *ever* placeable reskins. I learned a lot of new things in the course of making these. ;)
Lastly, I highly recommend GIMP 2 to anyone looking for a free alternative to Photoshop! Without it, I couldn't have done the template work properly.
Posted by Daijin at 2009-09-05 22:36:16 Voted 10.00 on 09/05/09
Thanks for making these :) _________________________ Dream Well, Faith, Loyalty, Truth, Honor, Friendship always.....
Daijin Dreamweaver, Leader of the Dream Warriors for 32 years, going strong.
Posted by Inayity at 2009-09-05 11:58:53 Voted 10.00 on 09/06/09
Great! Really nice looking.
Quick comment from a modeling standpoint: Textures can be irregularly-shaped as long as they conform to the powers-of-two. So instead of having a 512x512 for the pole, you can have a 128x512. Similarly, the UV map for the cap can occupy the same space as the UV map for the shaft. So it'd all fit in 128x512. It could also be reduced in size (as long as the ratios were the same) because most of the detail is lost because the wood bar is so small.
Same with the banners- 3/4 of the width of those is not used because of the way the UV map is worked. You should be able to have a 128x512 where the UV map takes up the whole image.
I'm looking at this in Max you should see the same thing, esp. in regards to the UV Map in GMax.
They look great though, thanks for contributing.
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