The Fake Exterior System allows builders to create Exterior looking Areas using this Tileset.
Currently the system provides 1 open floor tile with an extremely high ceiling, and a SkyDome placeable object which you can use to place over top of your areas to represent the sky.
This system works best using 32x32 area sizes, but can function on smaller scales too.
Future Improvements currently planned:
- Open floor Metatiles of various sizes to make filling in the area easier.
- No walkmesh tiles to more easily limit area movement.
- Bumps, Hills, Cliffs, Ravines metatiles to add some variation to the landscape.
- Creek/River tiles
- Nature path, dirt road, and cobblestone road.
- More ground texture variations in the form of tiles, or placeable ground layers. (Sand/Desert, Rocky, Grassy, Cobblestone, Dirt Variations, Forest)
- Cloud placeables
- A working collision box for the base of the Skydome.
- A better description of useful Environmental property settings and Lighting systems for more realistic time of day effects.
More detailed descriptions of known issues as well as installation instructions are included in the README.txt.
If you find any bugs, or think of any more improvements or additions that could be made to the system please post them here or in the forum post linked above and I will see what I can do.
I would love to see this be updated, NWN2 needs some tilesets for exterior areas... A PW is gonna need way more exteriors then they can afford to make with the textures. Love the new exteriors but they are too large to be used at whim... _________________________ Shadow Mountain & Shadow Mountain 2: Riparia Link
Well its been a rough month, but things have settled to some degree. Unfortunately I've had to move out of my home, spend alot of money recently to get out of this situation, so I've had to shelve all my previous plans especially where they involved money, most of my stuff is now in storage. And at this point all I want to do is get out in the sun and enjoy it.
I'll see if I can pull the work I've accomplished so far even in its incomplete state its fairly use-able. At this point I have to set aside things like this project and focus on getting back on my feet. Depending on how things go and where the wind pushes me I may or may night return to continue this work in the fall/winter. But right now the best thing for me given all that has gone on is just get outside and have some fun again.
Wish you all the best, hope someone can make use of what I accomplished before hell broke loose in my life.
I just wanted to update that for the next week or two I won't be spending any time on this project or anything computer related right now. Things have happened in my life of a very personal nature that makes my home environment very tense and unhappy for me, but once my Ex has moved out and the place is not a complete disaster and the things have smoothed out I will be able to sit down and focus on this project and the PW I'm working on again.
Sorry to do this, but its impossible to sit and concentrate on this when I'm surrounded by the current state of affairs it affects me too much, and my friends and family are doing their best to get me out of the house and getting my mind off these things until this transition has passed.
Expect an update on new progress after the start of the next month.
Yea I was actually browsing the NWN2 forums and noticed of the dev's talking about address the StrREF vs Labal issue, if they actually fix that problem that will eliminate a significant ammount of file editing needed to add the tiles to the toolset, I'm also hoping they will clean up the Hakpak a bit, but I'm definately thinking of releasing sometime just after 1.05.
Aha! I looked over the Shadow Fortress tiles and saw the use of that flag. I never heard of using that in tiles before, but I'll definately update all the terrain models and give it a test run, if that solves the interface pointer issue I will be very pleased. Thanks so much for your help Denice.
Posted by Denice at 2007-03-09 10:39:41 Voted 10.00 on 03/02/07
For me plaçable or Tiles are made with RIGD mesh, and this flag can be set for all RIGD mesh. Shadow Fortress Tileset does have this flag set on most of the tile.
Thank you for the suggestion, I am still learning alot as I go so I will definately look at this. Work has really demanded alot of my time lately as a seemingly simple job has turned out to be a total mess, I do instrumentation and we've essentially had to rewire a whole wing of a school, so alot of long days, add to that some personal drama and I've not been in the mindset to get much done with the system, but I'm hoping things will settle back down again soon and I can take a good hard look at what is done and needs finishing, I will PM you about more information on this flag setting and the issues I'm seeing, if it addresses some of those issues I'd be really very happy.
Just after my last posting of those links I managed to get some initial work done on angled hill tiles which I think will add alot more variation to their use. And I've noticed there is a new Community Foliage update and I'm looking at how this can be used with what I have to add more variation to the ground system, and possibly as an aid in creating my overlays.
Its hard to say how much time I'll have to work on the system this weekend, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to make some serious headway in the near future. Thanks all for your encouragement.
Posted by Denice at 2007-03-02 03:30:43 Voted 10.00 on 03/02/07
About the Interface pointer :
The Projected_texture flag doesn't work ?? I used this flag on ramps and walls above 0 (+2,+4,+6) and it's working (And they could be rotated). But my floor mesh is not rotatable (and flat). You can mp me on bioware forums
And this flag should be set in order to made a good walkmesh connection with placeable walkmesh.
Posted by puket at 2007-02-23 17:52:18 Voted 9.00 on 02/23/07
Keep up the good work, Demarii. Will stay like a rock by your side...!
Posted by DM Entropy at 2007-02-20 19:25:39 Voted 10.00 on 02/07/07
Heyas. Thanks for your continued development on this project, Demarii. I've had great luck with your system as is already and with the heights that you are doing now, I'm sure I'll be able to find many more uses for it.
I can't really see the texture well in those links, but I can see the height and I'm very excited about that.
Well the last few days have been spent focusing on trying to address some nagging issues that I've been having with the tile system, mostly mechanical ones. And while I've addressed a few, and came up with a few answers I needed for the upcoming Cliffs phase, I've also realized that there are a couple issues I simply can't resolve because they seem to be a product of the game engine.
Basically the Collision meshes are only used to a degree by the engine with tiles. For instance my collision meshes work for line of sight, so a mage can't stand on one side of the hill and throw a fireball through it, they are forced to crest the hill for the spell to work. But the actual spell effect itself disregards the collision mesh entirely meaning once in a rare occasion a meteor from a meteor might pass through the top of the hill on its way to target. Not a huge issue imo, so long as the Line of Sight functions, but still a bit annoying.
But there are a few more. Another one that I've been really working hard on but just can't make function properly no matter how many ways I've tried to solve the problem is Carmera Collision, for some reason I can't get the camera to collide with the Collision 3 mesh for the steeper hills. So that means it is possible to put your camera inside the ground if you are in a particular camera state and position in relation to the tile. I find this rather annoying as I can get collision to work on Placeables, but not tiles. At first I thought it was because some tiles do not span a full tile unit (4.5) high, but I just rebuilt a hill making it very steep up to a full unit and still the collision is not working for the camera but it works for other mechanics. Ugh! I think this is another case of the engine only looking at Placeable colliders for camera collision and not tiles.
And lastly another slightly annoying thing that I can't defeat do to the setup of the game is the Interface pointer. In placeables you can tell it to display the interface pointer on a mesh, but for tiles there is no such value it automatically defeats to Z axis value of 0. And that means that any tiles above the default XXXX or Open Ground lowest level tile will not display a spell or movement information pointer. Now there is one work around for that issue, but I really don't won't to have to use it, because basically it would result in the tileset becoming 4 times larger as I would have to rebuild the entire tileset to use a Floor mesh which is not rotatable and that means there would need to be 4 instances of every tile for facing different directions, and thats just too clunky, requires alot more drive and memory space, and also imposes some redesign for future tiles. Its just not worth doing simply to simply allow the pointer inferface to display ontop of the tiles imo.
At this point I think I am just going to have to lick my wounds and accept that these limitations while a bit annoying are unavoidable unless I can talk to the developers themselves and see if they can make some small changes on how these things are handled by the engine.
Aside from these issues the tileset is in really good shape, and only needs some cosmetic cleanup still and a bit more editing and testing, and possibly the creation of about 18 or so more unique metatiles to be considered complete enough for this next phase to be released. I had wanted to get this out by the weekend but I also wanted to try to see if I could fix these issues before releasing, but sadly these things seem unfixable from a modelling standpoint. Atleast the line of sight, and collision functions on the important areas of gameplay, I just wish they would work across the board.
Posted by DM Entropy at 2007-02-07 07:57:34 Voted 10.00 on 02/07/07
I have to say that this is truly groundbreaking and so versatile. Yes it works as a hak. I am very anxious to see updates to the system. Perhaps we should all find the creator and chain him/her to their computer to get more groovy stuff out of them. :) _________________________ LotR: Heroes of the Third Age
Well I'm still not 100% happy with the texture but its alot better then before and I have some ideas for how to cover up anything really noticeable plus allow for transitional pieces so you could essentially transition from dirt coloured tile, to a green grass coloured one or a sandy beach one. Right now the texture I've settled on is pretty much a sand one as it rotates the best and does a fairly good normal map. And when coloured it takes on the look of anything from snow, beach sand, desert, and rough dirt.
I still think placeable grass is the best way to go for that but atleast having the ability to tint the tile to different colours will accentuate any grass placeable you would put on top of it but I won't know exactly how its gonna go till I get more time to play with that part. The only big thing about grass placeable is it won't sound like grass unless I create certain tiles that way, I"ll have to test things more before I can make any final decisions.
Right now its really just clean up and basically redoing a bunch of stuff using the new walkmesh values, and then retesting it all to make sure there are no glaring errors.
I've also discovered a few oddities which aren't big deals, but its important to be aware of them when using this tileset or else some wierd stuff can happen, but I'll try to document those as well as I can in the next readme.txt.
Well I have made some good progress on some aspects of the elevation system, namely the tinting aspects. Its now possible to create anything from Snow covered terrain to pitch black. Which is really very cool.
But I'm totally stumped on how to create a good texture and normal map that will seamlessly turn in all four directions of rotation. I'm calling it a night, and I'm asking any texture guru's out there if you can lend a hand with this, I'll also be posting on the NWN2 forums for help. If nobody can solve this problem for me I might have to resort to doing things a little different, its more clunky, it take 4 times as much space as well and I really don't want to do it so if anyone has any ideas let me know.
This is the last obstacle in my way holding me back from doing a more finalized version which I can release. So any help will just get the next phase out faster.
I am still actively working on this system, I had to take a few weeks break as RL got hectic and there wasn't enough time to sit down and spend the hours necessary in a night to get anything done. But I just finished a base test of the hill tiles with all their pieces, on several levels and its working quite well.
I would like to do some cosmetic clean ups on the corners and transitions a bit as well as expand upon the base some more with more variations of each type and there is still much work to be done with the texture side of things which I think will go along way in making the whole system look alot nicer. I would like to have the texturing figured out and settled to some degree before trying to finish the base tiles as it will save me time in the long run if I don't have to go back and change the whole set later on. The tricky part about the textures is that I want a good generic texture that can rotate well in all four directions and still be seamless, and allow for tinting so that it looks less repetitive, but can also be used as a base layer upon which overlaying textures of Forest Ground, Grass, Cobblestone, and possibly Desert can be layered over top in a future phase.
Part of what I am working on right now is also giving a decent amount of noisy type ground for the open tiles and slopes and hill tops as well as shallow ditch and gully tiles so that the land doesn't look too uniform even if your using the same type of tile one next to the other. It is coming along nicely, and really the big task left is on the texture side of things, and then creating a complete 10 level set of all the types I've created and been testing with.
There are alot of tiles in this next phase, with multiple types of sloping from gradual to steep, and about a dozen or so types of pieces to make up the elevations, of each of those I'd like to have a few subtle variations and possibly some specialized tiles for certain cases, and so it takes alot of time to test them all and then construct them across all 10 levels of height.
Once I've gotten the texture and tinting issues sorted out and have completely figured out all my sloped ground and elevations I can then use that as a base to create all of the other tile types I have planned which will add alot more landscape features, things like Cliffs, Creeks, Rivers, Lake/Sea shore and beds, and Cobblestone or Road tiles, as well as doing variations for Forest, Grass, Desert etc. But I need to settle on the base so that they will all conform and be interchangeable.
Well currently I am focusing on creating elevation tiles, I tried the -Z but it did wierd things to the camera when crossing tile boundaries, so what I have currently is the Base default level and then 10 levels of gradual slope and 10 levels of flat open terrain for each. I think I'll try to provide variations on the sloped and flat terrain to give them a bit of variation. Once I have those fully done and tested I want to put in corners and rounded hill top tiles, and shallow gully or ditch tiles for all those slope level tile, this should give a fairly decent ammount of variation possible for subtle elevation change.
The other big thing I'd like to try to work out is the generic texture, for starters I'd like to allow for tinting of all the tile floors.
I have setup my naming conventions for the exterior tile systems so that I can allow for the addition of area type specific tiles such as City/Cobblestone, and Grass, Forest, Desert, and Swamp etc. But I am not certain at this point doing this in tiles would be the best way, it might be best to include a set of placeables that lets builders place cobblestone and grass overtop of the tinted ground layer as providing a decent variation of those that would suit all possible purposes could be tough, using placeables might be better in the end. But I want to get all the possible elevation tiles and their subsequent angle sorted out first.
All I can suggest at the moment is to use the current Curb system in the toolset for your city.
I've looked at ERFinder some more, but while I think it works ok with placeables, I have not had any luck with getting a module to load custom tilesets using a hakpak. Custome tiles may very well work in a hak for client use, but the toolset loads tilesets upon initial loading, not when the module is loaded up, so for builders I think the models will have to remain in the override, and there will be some new tileset icons needed for toolset use, but some parts of the system might be able to be used in a hak, but I'm not sure about this as I haven't tested hakpak's out extensively, been to busy working on new tiles and testing and eliminating issues to bother right now.
Yep I am planning to have those be possible. The thing is I want to do this in a way that makes it all very versatile. One thing is for certain, tiles will mostly be used when the terrain needs to go into the -Z or down under the standard walkmesh because placeables can not do this, but placeables can raise the terrain and offer alot more variation possibilities.
So things like Creeks, Rivers, Lakes, Sinkhole, and terrain elevation changes down to other levels will be done via tiles, and more then likely single tiles to allow better mixing of all the possibilities to make something more unique.
Whereas raised roads or paths, hills, cliffs and things like that would likely better be accomplished with placeables so they can be more maleable to the builder and not so set in placement and size.
What I'm currently focusing on is a base set of single tiles that offer Flat, Noisy, and Sloped terrain and I'm thinking I will likely go with several overall elevation levels down, this way you can have shallow rivers, or deep ones, and you can have elevation changes on several levels which can be accomplished in many different ways. Also I'm going to try to make all future versions of tiles be tintable, but I've only just started looking into how to accomplish this so far.
Then you simply use placeable bumps, hills, cliffs and such to increase the base elevations to your desired heights.
I'm also thinking metatiles will be restricted to only terrain that needs the width or length to achieve a desired effect, because you can not have alot variations of metatiles as doing alot of metatiles will greatly increase the metatiles list for Fake Exterior pieces and require alot more TLK entries. Plus building a terrain formation from small pieces instead of one bigger 2x2 or 4x4 tile allows for more variation of the terrain. Not to mention a pile of metatiles that can only achieve one thing is not as useful as a bunch of tiles that together can achieve the same and more for about the same ammount of disk space and memory.
Things like Winding Creek or River parts, and Gradually sloping of greater elevation changes would be best for these larger tiles.
But to do this right I'm building totally new tiles and metatiles which use more polygons to create the floor and walkmesh so that they can all work seamlessly together in any variation.
Do you mean a Sea and Lake bed set of tiles, or an under-water tileset? Both are do-able but the Sea and Lake bed tiles added would be much easier to accomplish imo.
Hehe point taken. But the thing is the server does have to load the whole module into memory on load so essentially it is RAM we're concerned about as there is a current 2 gig maximum memory limit to the server process.
Posted by AramilAmastia at 2006-12-08 16:10:11 Voted 10.00
Not to be a stickler, but that would be hard drive space. Memory is used when players zone in PWs, and anything being done on it. You know, RAM. :)
But I can't wait for the desert and forests from you. :D
Sorry I mis-typed, what I meant to say was memory. Using the games Exterior area system to simulate Deserts and Forests is very memory intensive a 32x32 area can be in excess of 50 megs big. And you'll need more then just 1 32x32 to simulate a desert well, so thats alot of memory. Using this method you can build exterior areas 32x32 big and they will likely end up between 6-10 megs big, so you can build alot more giant areas to simulate that environment and use a fraction of the servers memory budget.
Actually Large areas are teh way to go with nwn2 . the way the MP is handled excessive area loading points cos more lag than just having more large areas atleast this is what i ahve heard from buildres who already ahve thier mods hosted up on the web _________________________ If it's broke, fix it.
If it's not broke, Make it better.
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