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.
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 on03/02/07
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 on02/23/07
Keep up the good work, Demarii. Will stay like a rock by your side...!
Posted by DM at on02/07/07
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. Can't wait to test it out. _________________________ LotR: Heroes of the Third Age
Posted by Demarii at 2007-02-1014:08:07
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 at on02/07/07
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
Posted by Demarii at 2007-01-3116:55:12
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.
Posted by Demarii at 2007-01-2822:51:03
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.
Posted by Demarii at 2007-01-2722:50:14
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.
10 - A Masterpiece, Genuinely Groundbreaking 9 - Outstanding, a Must Have 8 - Excellent, Recommended to Anyone 7 - Very Good, Deserves a Look 6 - Good, Qualified Recommendation 5 - Fair, Solid yet Unremarkable 4 - Some Merit, Requires Improvements 3 - Poor Execution, Potential Unrealized 2 - Very Little Appeal 1 - Not Recommended to Anyone
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