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.
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.
Posted by OccupatedVoid at 2006-12-1918:11:48
When will there be cobblestones and grass? I was wanting to make a city, but there is only dirt. Thanks. BTW: ERFinder works with v1.03 now, I believe.
Posted by Demarii at 2006-12-1712:32:11
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.
Posted by FERRET_LOVER at 2006-12-1610:21:32
i would say sea and lake beds since the both look diffrent.
Posted by Demarii at 2006-12-1415:28:31
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.
Posted by FERRET_LOVER at 2006-12-1404:30:41
can you do a sea bed and a lake bottom.
Posted by Demarii at 2006-12-0816:23:54
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 16:10:11 Voted10.00
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
Posted by Demarii at 2006-12-0812:30:00
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.
Posted by demon_horde_665 at 2006-12-0811:50:11
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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