This is an area that I have been working on since the pre-release toolset came out. It is by far my favorite area I have ever made, and is the culmination of over 200 hours of experimenting, tweaking, rebuilding, texturing and pretty much learning the toolset inside and out. It is quite a resource-intesive area, but it is well worth it, I think. My system runs it really well on medium settings, so you might need to tweak your settings a bit.
This is 100% hand made, I did not use YATT or any other terrain generating plugins. My inspiration came from the natural formation of mountains and I really tried to capture that in the area design.
Requires RWS Bridge Hak @ Link and Sorceress Ashura's Visual Effects @ Link
I encourage any feedback both negative and positive.
The download is corrupted I think. I downloaded it twice & after extracting the module, it loaded into the toolset but no area appeared.
From the screenshots, this looks like a neat area & I would like to check it out. Maybe you could upload a working .erf file of the area? _________________________ Ugly_Ducks Portfolio
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Posted by acshaw at 2008-07-22 09:16:23 Voted 7.75 on 07/22/08
oops forgot to actually add the vote on my last submission, whoops 8p
Posted by acshaw at 2008-07-22 09:15:31 Voted 7.75 on 07/22/08
Nice artwork. I don't much care for the shrubs. The pro's imo r the nice path design, good use of height, fine texturing, appropriate terrain molding and nice tree layout. the cons imo is the clutter of the shrubbery, the tightness of some ledge work (in relationship to actually playing a game of nwn in the area), and the clunkiness it runs at. I run a core duo x6800, 2 gigs of corsair pc8400, and an 8800gtx, which imo isnt super fancy, but it isnt exactly junk either.
i'd like to see area prefab authors start making there showcase area + a streamlined version for ppl who want to maintain a framerate not only in an empty area, but also once the area is populated and magic missles r flying about.
thanks for sharing ur piece. i appreciate all ur hard work.
i'd like to rate it higher but imo the functionality of it is a major consideration for myself.
i believe it is very nice, deserves a look, and possibly for those like myself, a quick tweaking of flora in the toolset will be enuff to use it for our own designs. a 7.75seems appropriate in this case.
Posted by PoisonTheMonkey at 2008-04-11 12:58:43 Voted 9.50 on 04/11/08
Beautiful work :) _________________________ Obsidian Shore, a HoF 9.8 heavy roleplaying PW. Dark and gritty fairytale world with the opportunity to do and change the world as you wish. Link
Greycliff, a brand new NWN1 heavy roleplaying PW. A broken kingdom is all that remains from a bloody civil war. Link
Guys and gals, please vote on these areas that we all have worked so hard to put together. Not just my area, but those of all area designers (both contest and non.) I see dozens and dozens downloading areas and only a few voting. We need your feedback to make these the best we can!
Posted by Liso66 at 2008-03-31 13:22:22 Voted 9.75 on 03/31/08
This was one of my favorites by far. The area design was amazing. The river flow under the bridge was in perfect motion and the exploration was fun. I liked the hidden tree path to the cave.
oh yes. Needed a couple gnomes for throwing practice. "that was hilarious"
Best of luck!
Liso
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I have uploaded an .asf (Windows media player) video. The quality isn't great, but it's better than Youtube would allow. You will have to download it (~106MB) but it will be good for those of you that can't run the area due to system limits/hak conflicts. I uploaded via FTP so it may take a while for it to appear, but I emailed BTP so hopefully it will be soon. Thanks all.
So much for uploading the video I mentioned to youtube. After 5 hours of uploading it timed out. Until I find a more reliable video service it will have to wait. I wish I could tho, because I have some commentary in there, too.
MokahTGS... thanks for the kind words. I do plan on having more areas to connect to it. At one point I had rolling hills to the south, but Tanita's Watermill corrupted the area (and apparently all the backups I had made as well somehow - at least the ones done after I started using watermill.) I do look forward to remaking that area later as it really wasn't going the way I wanted it too, anyway. And too the north I plan on making a snowy mountain pass (maybe a canyon pass in between first.)
faulerzauber... yeah, the sound was almost an afterthought on the map. I wanted to get it up on the vault with enough time for people to rate it before the contest was up and I spent a lot of time upgrading it from the original. I kept trying with the birds to make it sound more authentic, but the way the sound works the sound would just "pop" into existance when you got close enough and for some reason the random positioning wouldn't work too well. I will work more on it in another release. As for the vertex shading, I totally agree. The way I have the textures now is not the way I truely like them, but again for the time limit I could not work on those (I would rather have no vertex shading than just some of it.) I wish I had gotten my copy of NWN2 to work again sooner so I could have more time, but I kept getting authentication errors so I couldn't change too much in the editor without testing it first. Thanks for your comments.
Posted by MokahTGS at 2008-03-30 08:43:25 Voted 9.75 on 03/30/08
I've always loved this prefab. It would be nice if there were more that connect together into a complete mountain journey over a glacier and then off into a valley.
Posted by faulerzauber at 2008-03-30 07:27:50 Voted 9.00 on 03/30/08
I love the height map. Great views on the little glen. The atmosphere, texturing, details are all done very well, too.
I would just tweak two things to make it perfect, but of course that´s just my own taste.
First, I would make heavier use of vertex colouring. Some greyish hues to shade the mountains, some dark brown and green for transition between rock and grass or for small hollows. I made the experience that I can do without a lot of grass and textures by adding realism via vertex colouring.
Second, I would vary the sound a little. When going through the area I was under the impression that one flock of obtrusively chirping birds was chasing me..;) Plus maybe some gusts of wind in the heigher areas, louder sound for the magnificent waterfall (blocking out bird chirps)...
But these are just small ideas for improvements, all in all i DO like the area very much!:D
Posted by aadatepe at 2008-03-30 03:40:27 Voted 9.00 on 03/30/08
Very nice area would like to see more, thanks for sharing. Good luck on the contest.
Posted by Zodiac at 2008-03-29 19:17:31 Voted 9.00 on 03/29/08
Well I am standing next to a mountain, and I'll chop it down with the edge of my hand.
Screenshots are up. Sorry for the bad quality. NWN2 didn't seem to want to take the shots so I had to use Fraps which is, well, let's just use it for video from now on, eh?:)
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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at 2010-05-11 03:23:53
