60 réponses à ce sujet

[Zwerkules]

I hadn't planned more rocks on the 'water side' of the walls, but I've already planned to add rocks on the outer walls on dirt and grass and maybe some cliffs behind some of the walls so that one can build a city that looks as if it was built at the foot of a mountain.

[Zwerkules]

Walkable townwalls made with raised city terrain are finished. I also added a few gates.
The gate house is one of my favourites:

http://www.rpgmoddin...ttachmentid=763

http://www.rpgmoddin...ttachmentid=764

[cervantes35]

Most excellent Zwerk, keep up the great work. This project is really shaping up well. Congratulations!!!

[Tarot Redhand]

Dang! You've done it again. I only asked for walkable walls but you've put round towers at the corners! Now I've got to wait for the next release and then make a new castle because you've just blown the opposition away ().



TR

[Zwerkules]

This is only raised terrain that can be used as a walkable townwall. There will also be townwalls that originated from Stilgar's Castle Construction Set, but are changed and will have different towers and gates. The castle terrain will be added later - when the alleys and the buildings placed in water are finished. I haven't decided yet if they'll be more palace-like or rather like a stronghold.

Someone asked for ships. Well, there are already a number of ships in this tileset. Those from the rural tileset and from the TNO tileset as well as two ships from NWN2.

The remaining ships from NWN2 are pretty low on my to-do list, so it will be a while before you can use them. There will be docks and I'll make a few warehouses for the docks, but there's a lot more stuff I want to add before I get to work on docks and ships.

[Zwerkules]

There was no update to this tileset last weekend because I'm now working on castle terrain and while I have finished quite a lot of castle/grass, castle/water and castle/pit tiles, I haven't made any castle/city tiles yet. So this terrain can not be used near buildings or raised city terrain yet and is of little use so far. I will upload an update once I've made a few castle/city tiles.

This is what a castle on grass looks like atm:
http://www.rpgmoddin...ttachmentid=765

Oh, before I forget! Tarot, I've already made a round tower for the castle corners. There will be at least two different round towers and three different  'square' towers for the corners.
As you can see some of the tiles are based on the keep tiles from DLA's tno tileset, but this castle terrain will also have roofs, round towers, towers on all kind of castle tiles (not just corners) and timber framing wall parts.

Modifié par Zwerkules, 26 octobre 2010 - 09:21 .

[Tarot Redhand]

That is looking great. Quick couple of questions can you place water upto the castle walls (ie a moat)? Do the castle entrances come with built in portcullis as a door? What about a drawbridge and/or a causeway?



Thanks for the round towers btw.



TR

[Zwerkules]

The castle entrances I made so far all have standard doors. Water goes right up to the castle walls and is all finished. I just haven't finished the roof tiles and all the castle/city tiles.

There will be drawbridges. I'm not sure about causeways. I only know causeways in swamps or shallow lakes. What is a causeway in a castle like?

Today I made a belltower. It is all finished except for the rope. I think about making that a danglymesh.

http://www.rpgmoddin...ttachmentid=766

[Zwerkules]

This has nothing to do with the medieval houses. I just made a small greek temple today to see if the spirited lass will really jump up and down.



http://www.rpgmoddin...ttachmentid=767

[DM_Vecna]

Do you have a timetable for a general release to start building with this. I think i might use this for one of my main pw city rebuilds. It is a port town and I think the water edges are really nice.

[Zwerkules]

The alleys and the castle terrain will be finished in two weeks, I guess. After they are finished, I could ask Cervantes if he can help me out with making mini maps again. Then I can upload a hak that has all the haks combined.

There will still be updates to this tileset after that because I have to add docks, houses in water and more ships and cliffs only work in the forest and near water so far. I also planned to make a path crosser which you can use along the edge of a cliff to make something like mountain pathes.

If you don't need the docks etc you can start using this tileset in two or three weeks.

Finishing everything else I want to add might take til the end of this year.

[TheSpiritedLass]

This has nothing to do with the medieval houses. I just made a small greek temple today to see if the spirited lass will really jump up and down.

To blatantly steal from the PM: *Squeals in delight then proceeds to jump and dance about the room in my pjs while screaming like a crazy person.* ZWERKULES IS WONDERFUL!!!



Very nice looking. The fading colors and cracks up and down the columns looks great.



*Blissfully frolics about the room, pausing every now and them to come back to my desk and gaze upon the spiffy temple.*



-- Mistress, whose signature will read "Zwerkules is WONDERFUL!" for the rest of the day. =)

[DM_Vecna]

Great, I think I will start using it right away. I will use the dock area a lot since the main town in my pw is a port but I can build the other parts until you finish with that. This will be he centerpiece for my pw and the place my players will spend the most time... no pressure seriously though, great job!

[DM_Vecna]

This tileset would be really nice with alleys

[Zwerkules]

Working on it

[DM_Vecna]

Not sure why but I instantly lag when entering this tileset in game. My fps drop way down. The are that I am in is 16 x 16 with no placeables (just tileset) and no tile animations.



any thoughts?

[_six]

DM_Vecna wrote...

Not sure why but I instantly lag when entering this tileset in game. My fps drop way down. The are that I am in is 16 x 16 with no placeables (just tileset) and no tile animations.

any thoughts?

Actually, I get the same thing on my pc. There appear to be issues with using too many large (1024x1024 or greater) texture sizes in NWN on a number of relatively older graphics cards, which is quite possibly a cause of the issue - particularly on the NWN2 ripped models. The polycounts could also be an issue, but in my experience NWN can handle pretty large amounts of polygons even on older machines, so IMO the large amount of texture data the tileset requires is a more likely offender.

[DM_Vecna]

I am playing on a new Macbook Pro with a decent video card. But the speed drop literally makes the tileset unplayable for me at this point. I am going to experiment with smaller areas and see how it goes. Perhaps this is something that could be fixed in time.

[Zwerkules]

The poly count on the medieval houses is pretty high compared to other tilesets, on the other hand it is pretty low compared to some of Lord of Worm's tiles, so I guess that is not what causes the lag.
The textures however could cause the lag if you use the NWN2 houses. They had 1024x1024 textures for a building which contained all the textures for that building and some of the textures were only 128x128 which was too small for more detailed textures, so when I retextured the buildings, I increased the size of many of the textures to 2048x2048.
Also the tileset as a whole is becoming too big. I started this tileset as a tileset with houses from NWN2, but now those are just a very small part of the tileset.
This is my first attempt at creating custom content and as you can see I started with things that already existed (the NWN2 houses) and just retextured them and added walkmeshes and doors.
Then I started adding Bioware tiles and changing them. There were a lot of tiles that were like 50% made by me, but still nothing I made from scratch.
If I had to make this tileset again, I wouldn't use any of the flat tiles from the Bioware tilesets, but back when I started I had to do that because I couldn't make terrain that wasn't flat.
I think about putting the city tiles without the NWN2 buildings and the DLA buildings in a separate tileset which will only have the medieval houses I made myself plus the city walls and castle tiles which are based on the DLA tiles, but which I changed a lot. Then the walls from the Castle Construction set and the terrain types that are needed for the city tiles I made, like water, grass and pit. For cliffs behind the city walls I will make a cliff terrain myself rather than using the cliffs from the Bioware forest again.
I hope a medieval city tileset will run alot faster because it will only use 512x512 textures and it will be a lot smaller. The poly count however will still be rather high, but I already removed so many details from the houses that I don't want to remove any more. The beams used to have rounded corners and the like and I changed them to simple boxes.
I'm not sure if the poly count is really a problem though. In Lord of Worm's forests there are tiles where the many mushrooms alone have as many polygons as one of my houses and they don't cause any lag.

So if you want to use this tileset for building a city and you don't need the NWN2 houses, maybe the separate tileset will work for you.

Something else I could do would be taking the NWN2 houses apart so that there is a mesh for each part that uses a different texture and not one for the whole house. Then I could use lots of 256x256 textures. But taking those houses apart would take forever and a day and I don't really feel like doing that

Modifié par Zwerkules, 03 novembre 2010 - 07:38 .

[DM_Vecna]

I will try and expiment and see if I can figure out what is causing the lag

[_six]

I have to say, I would love a version dedicated to just the city aspect, as personally most of the rest of the tileset (in particular the NWN2 stuff) isn't of nearly as much interest. Not to say that it's bad in any way, but NWN has been in particular need of a proper medieval city for a long time.

[Zwerkules]

Yes, I will make that a separate tileset and I think the docks I will make I'll just make for the city tileset because the NWN2 houses tileset is becoming too big to add more new terrain or crossers.

I think that I'll have to use ships from the Bioware tilesets, the DLA tileset and NWN2 though because I don't think I can make ships yet.



There is something else I was wondering about which probably isn't a cause for the lag but makes the mdl files bigger than they need to be. Whenever I remove faces which are for example the undersides or the backsides of some beams which won't be visible anyway, when I do an unwrap UVW the tverts from those faces are still there. Now unwrapping the UVWs on everything and removing unused tverts would be a rather tedious work.

I was wondering if Clean Models does remove unused tverts. I never got Clean Models to work

Even though Estelindis and Christopher helped me a lot with providing different versions of the needed dlls files than the ones I got from the swi prolog website, I could never get it to work under Vistas, not in compatibility mode or admin mode or anything.

So while I remove unused tverts whenever I find some, my models aren't as clean as they could be.

[_six]

Zwerkules wrote...

I think that I'll have to use ships from the Bioware tilesets, the DLA tileset and NWN2 though because I don't think I can make ships yet.

Actually, using the DLA and Bioware ones I think is a good idea, in order to maintain continuity across sea journeys in modules.

There is something else I was wondering about which probably isn't a cause for the lag but makes the mdl files bigger than they need to be. Whenever I remove faces which are for example the undersides or the backsides of some beams which won't be visible anyway, when I do an unwrap UVW the tverts from those faces are still there. Now unwrapping the UVWs on everything and removing unused tverts would be a rather tedious work.
I was wondering if Clean Models does remove unused tverts.

You can fix this by you applying a UVW Unwrap, go to Edit, select all, and using the Weld Selected option listed under Tools. I had a similar issue with tverts with my Catacombs tileset - I somehow managed to get one tile to 40mb that with tverts welded ended up being around 150kb. CM3 will also make these edits for you, but if your tverts are a serious enough problem it can take literally hours per tile to handle.

Though if you have no tiles greater than 1 or 2mb then I'd reccomend CM3 - just remember to turn all the settings in the GUI off. This will make it only run the standard fixes, and leave things like smoothing groups and shadow meshes intact. The only issue you may find, which ruled out the use of CM3 for me in my Wild Woods is that the animations it generates for emitters are actually broken, as they will never turn off ingame, and it has a habit of deleting working ones entirely.



Edit: I didn't read that you were having trouble getting CM3 to work entirely, so you may as well ignore that part of my post. However I'll leave it intact in case anybody else reading learns anything from my issues with it

Modifié par _six, 03 novembre 2010 - 09:01 .

[TSMDude]

DM_Vecna wrote...

I will try and expiment and see if I can figure out what is causing the lag

Wasn't the orginal problem with that grass SunShadows and turning those off in the Area options made the FTP rate stop going, as the highly techinacal term I am using, baloomey fart?