7 réponses à ce sujet

[Shadooow]

Hey, I am looking for some addons like "trees" and raise/lower terrain from rural tileset into FOREST which doesn't suit me very much, but I really do not want some mega combo with airships and elves tree houses.

Couldn't find this on vault...

Modifié par ShaDoOoW, 25 mars 2011 - 11:08 .

[Shadooow]

found it: http://nwvault.ign.c....Detail&id=4372

just had to remove DLA canopies

Ok, new question:

How to "port" one terrain from one tileset to another? I learned how to port single tiles, but not whole terrain.

I would like to port raise/Lower feature from caste/rural and especially ridge terrain that is used in conjuction with the raise/lower feature. I don't think that anybody did this already so I guess I would have to do that myself.

[Bannor Bloodfist]

ShaDoOoW wrote...

found it: http://nwvault.ign.c....Detail&id=4372

just had to remove DLA canopies

Ok, new question:

How to "port" one terrain from one tileset to another? I learned how to port single tiles, but not whole terrain.

I would like to port raise/Lower feature from caste/rural and especially ridge terrain that is used in conjuction with the raise/lower feature. I don't think that anybody did this already so I guess I would have to do that myself.

Ummm... you would have been much better off importing the raise/lower and ridge from that castle-rural instead of going for the hills first from some other set, then the ridge from castle-rural.

The raise terrain in castle rural starts with a low hill type terain, the ridges are crossers that paint down on top of the hills.

The "ridge"  will NOT be compatabile with what you have already done.

Terrains and crossers are two different things.  The "Hills" you imported are a crosser that paints on the edge of a raised terrain tile.  That raised terrain tile by default already looks like the "ridge" from castl-rural anyway.  

Castle Exterior Rural - TNO by it's original name, is a HUGE set.  It is not directly compatable with other Bioware rural sets.  The Raise optioin in Castle-Rural is lower than standard raise of a Bioware original Rural set, so the ridge looks lower than the edge of a standard tile that is raised.  Which is likely why you want it.  However, you can't have two different raise heights on the same terrain unless you really want to create from scratch, all the necessary differences between the two heights.  That would not be an easy task and I mean TRULY NOT EASY to accomplish.  The engine has no way to determine which type you want when your raise a tile.  So it will just grab one that fits the location, you have to create the second set for the lower height, and then "erase" as many times as necessary for the engine to "find" the other height you may want.

Anyway, assuming you create the 50-150 tiles you will have to create, you could get them all into the set by just adding them at the end.  However, if you have different heights of the default terrain, you will run into a MAJOR issue that raised terrain is NOT a separate entry.  That issue is that a flat section of the now raised terrain, will default to the main raised height of the .set  

This means that if you have a secton that raised only 2 meters and the main raised height is 5, when you paint that lower 2 metter height section into an area, anything that is 3 tiles wide would have a raised tile in the center that would float 3 meters above the rest of it.  The engine only understands the main tile raised height of the set, it has no way to determine that you have a lower tile next to a higher tile except by that main number.

So if the .SET file sais Transition=5 it means that the base terrain when raised will be 5 meters above the normal flat ground.  You can only have one definition for this.  Anyway, it will paint a normal flat tile at the raised height of 5 anytime it finds a raised tile on the side.  So, you have a tile that is flat at zero, with a bit that is raised by 5, then a flat tile at 5, and a tile that is raised by 5 on side and returns to flat at zero. 

As to directly copying/merging different terrains or crossers, you have to manually read every tile in the .SET file and look for the definition data:

[TILE7]
Model=tctl0_a03_02
WalkMesh=msb01
TopLeft=grass
TopLeftHeight=0
TopRight=grass
TopRightHeight=1  <<-- this means that this corner is part of a raised terrain
BottomLeft=grass
BottomLeftHeight=1  <<-- so does this.  So this tile is a raised tile.
BottomRight=grass
BottomRightHeight=0
Top=  <<-- if anything was on this line this would be a crosser 
Right=  <<-- if anything was on this line this would be a crosser 
Bottom=  <<-- if anything was on this line this would be a crosser 
Left=  <<-- if anything was on this line this would be a crosser 
MainLight1=1
<snip>

Once you copy all of the tiles that match your criteria into the set, you have to adjust the \\[Terrain Types\\]  section and ther \\[Crossers\\] section of the .SET file.

Raised terrain is NOT a seperate section in the .SET file normall, it is just a combination of all tiles that have raised corners.  These could be ANY of the terrain type(s) that the tileset has.  IE, raised sand/grass etc.

I could easily go into more detail, and more explanations, but I can safely assume that I have discouraged you from attempting what you are wanting to attempt in this instance.  It simply won't work without MAJOR effort and even with that effort, you WILL end up with glaring errors when you create an area with two different raised heights.

[Shadooow]

Well I dont need two different hills in one tileset, I needed the rural trees into this tileset, hills was extra and so far I dont know how to use them anyway.

And still I can make a new forest tileset.

So if I will be satisfied with lower raise terrain from TNO it would be possible to add ridge right?

Modifié par ShaDoOoW, 26 mars 2011 - 10:47 .

[Bannor Bloodfist]

ShaDoOoW wrote...

Well I dont need two different hills in one tileset, I needed the rural trees into this tileset, hills was extra and so far I dont know how to use them anyway.

And still I can make a new forest tileset.

So if I will be satisfied with lower raise terrain from TNO it would be possible to add ridge right?

Yes, but you are talking copy a large number of tiles, AND having to populate those new tiles with trees that are not there in the Castle-Rural.  And likely, when you think about it some, you are going to want some "hills" without trees, and some with... so more duplications.

The default terrain in Castle Rural is grass.  Plain grass.  The raise/lower starts off as gentle hills, always smooth sided hills.  The "ridge" are addtional crosser tiles that paint on the edges of the raised hills.  Few, if any of those tiles will have forest trees in them.  Using grass and painting placeable trees might work, for a small area, but if you create a 16x16 sized area with grass and then populate each tile with several placeable trees, you will kill your from rate entirely.  Likely making the entire area unusable.  Placeables are fine in small numbers, but they add up quickly to the load on the engine, and totally break fog/sight distance issues as well.  A placeable tree might be visible due to the canopy, where in a normal tileset created with Forest tiles, that entire tile would be hidden by fog.  And that just covers what is visible, when you attempt to run through an area created with a large number of placeables, your henchmen or NPC's or creatures will get "stuck" in all sorts of places since the placeable blocks the walkable area.  IE, pathnodes become useless.

Seriously, take tilesets that are already out there, and just ignore the extra groups/features you don't want to use.  You are not saving yourself or any potential users of your mod anything by duplicating and renaming tiles that they likely already have in the hak folder.

Having extra choices from a tileset.hak file doesn't hurt anything.  So a larger set/hak doesn't hurt anything.  That expanded forest by Jackal, is likely a good bet for containing most of what you want.  If it has extra bits you don't need, just ignore them. 

I am not trying to discourage you from learning things, in fact, I encourage that.  However, what you keep attempting to do has already been done with the exception of copy tiles from Castle/rural.  There are wayland's hills, which are a lower variety, more rolling type and the normal hills crosser in that Forest Hills Plus by Jackal.  Yes, it has other "features/groups" in it, but you are NOT forced to create areas using those extra features/groups.

I can tell you that the CTP_Forest, when it finally gets released, will be a huge tileset, it will have all sorts of terrains, crossers, features, and groups in it.  Things that the community at large has forgotten are out there, as well as a huge number of NEW things created by CTP.  However, that tileset is on hold until we finalize the CTP_Tropical-Oriental set that we are currently working on.  We are spread thin, so it takes quite a while to accomplish creating a working tileset, with as few bugs as possible.

[Shadooow]

Hmmm.

Well, from my understanding of game engine, player is still forced to load all tileset datas when he enter an area no matter if those airships and elven houses are used in that location or not. I guess its not so noticeable just in forest, but we have noticed this with old city exterior combo we used (think it was CCS?) and also with new castle/rural, which Im now trying use as few as possible.

I have a better computer, but I remember those days where loading an area (CCS/worm's tilesets) took almost minute. Even with better computer loading times are still noticeable higher than default tilesets. And since NWNCQ came out, default tilesets become much better choice than before.

Also please let me say that the "lower" raise terrain feature is useless for me if there is not "ridge" feature. I know the lower raise terrain for a long time, it has its issues (though it may be bugs in particular tilesets) and its not looking god to me. However when building in TNO, I found the ridge crosser and it amazed me because I could make a "hill" where is archer that will shoot all the time. The standard bioware high raise terrain looks better for me, but if I put archer here, he won't see below into lower levels and player is safe there. And AFAIK no forest tileset out there have the ridge feature. But anyway thats a extra for me, I am quite satisfied with the current hak from Jackal_GB though I maybe start from a scratch with a more feature forest hak and try to remove those things I don't like.

And I really consider to add NWNCQ hak version into my module so if I would do that, I would probably want to update the rural trees in forest to new NWNCQ look (because they are a new copied tiles with retextured floor).

I guess I won't start porting any terrain in nearest future, but I would like to someday. So I understand the strict explanation how to recognize which tiles are "raised" and which are "crossers". Can you tell me more about actual porting? Its possible to use a current tile from rural without making a copy? That would probably not very useable in this case since I must retexture floor (which is possible only via new tile right?) but it could be useable somewhere.

Modifié par ShaDoOoW, 27 mars 2011 - 11:25 .

[Bannor Bloodfist]

ShaDoOoW wrote...
Well, from my understanding of game engine, player is still forced to load all tileset datas when he enter an area no matter if those airships and elven houses are used in that location or not. I guess its not so noticeable just in forest, but we have noticed this with old city exterior combo we used (think it was CCS?) and also with new castle/rural, which Im now trying use as few as possible.

  Your information is wrong.  The engine reads/loads only what is in the current area, It reads the hak until it find a particular tile, and loads it, then searches for the next one.  Each tile that is used in a specific area is loaded into cache ram so that if it is used again in the same area, the engine doesn't have to go searching again.  However, the engine does NOT store the entire hak when it reads, only the files it is actually using in the area.

I have a better computer, but I remember those days where loading an area (CCS/worm's tilesets) took almost minute. Even with better computer loading times are still noticeable higher than default tilesets. And since NWNCQ came out, default tilesets become much better choice than before.

  Here you are comparing apples and oranges, and there really is no comparison.  Most of the newer tilesets created by the community, have either a) increased / improved grafics (read textures)  nwncq is an override resource, so you are actually loading the same tile but loading it individually from the override folder instead of searching for it inside of a hak.  I am not exactly sure how the engine would handle that.  It would theoretically be able to search through a hak faster, since it is a single read, where if it has to search the HD for each file then load it would theoretically take longer.  However, on that specific issue, I have not data to support either case.

I do know that Worms tilesets have issues, and most specifically the CCS is VERY laggy, primarily due to the way the tileset was created.

Anyway, things that cause lag when opening an area are varied:
1) Size of area, anything over 16x16 is begging for trouble, many PW owners will keep things even smaller.
2) Total number of placeables in that area.
3) Fog distance as defined by the area creator.
4) Total polygon count of the area, Here you have to be really careful.  TNO is a huge drain on resources, well worth it, but it is very highly detailed.  Any tileset created by copying the TNO tiles will take even longer to load than the same area created with the original.
5) Animation on any tiles, these include day/night animations and anything related to say "falling leaves" etc.  Animated grass, bushes that move when you touch them, etc.  Any animation increases the lag.
6) Total number of creatures/npc's.
7) Any special scripts.  Most particularly heartbeat scripts.

There are other things that can cause lag, but those 7 are likely the biggest.  Now add a horse to your area, and you lose a minute in processing just to get one horse.

Also please let me say that the "lower" raise terrain feature is useless for me if there is not "ridge" feature. I know the lower raise terrain for a long time, it has its issues (though it may be bugs in particular tilesets) and its not looking god to me. However when building in TNO, I found the ridge crosser and it amazed me because I could make a "hill" where is archer that will shoot all the time. The standard bioware high raise terrain looks better for me, but if I put archer here, he won't see below into lower levels and player is safe there. And AFAIK no forest tileset out there have the ridge feature. But anyway thats a extra for me, I am quite satisfied with the current hak from Jackal_GB though I maybe start from a scratch with a more feature forest hak and try to remove those things I don't like.

Umm... you have to "Raise" TNO before you can paint a "Ridge".  The ridge crosser is the opposite of the "hills" crosser in other tilesets.  DLA just reversed the way they are implemented.  They decided to go with smooth hill instead of the normal cliff type raise edge on a raised tile.  Then gave you the "ridge" to get back that raised ege look.  TNO is also using a much lower raise, DLA chose to "raise" the terrain by 2 meters instead of the normal 5 meters used in Bioware Rural and other exterior sets.

Anyway, a raised tile is always necessary to get a raised edge type look.  In TNO, they just smoothed the normal raise, thinking that folks wanted hills more than they wanted ridges, and so they made the ridge the "crosser" instead of the hill.

A tile has 4 corners.  Typicaly you can view it in quarters.  To get a raised "tile" you actually have to build half of it high, half of it low.  So, you have corner A, upper left, Corner B upper right, Corner C lower left, and Corner D lower right.  If you want to have raised terrain, for a basic straight edge, you would raise both corner A and B. 

A crosser connects between those corners never actually touching the corners themselves.  So, for the raised tile, with corners A and B raised, you would paint the "ridge" crosser across the edges between A+B and C+D.

And I really consider to add NWNCQ hak version into my module so if I would do that, I would probably want to update the rural trees in forest to new NWNCQ look (because they are a new copied tiles with retextured floor).

I guess I won't start porting any terrain in nearest future, but I would like to someday. So I understand the strict explanation how to recognize which tiles are "raised" and which are "crossers". Can you tell me more about actual porting? Its possible to use a current tile from rural without making a copy? That would probably not very useable in this case since I must retexture floor (which is possible only via new tile right?) but it could be useable somewhere.

Hmmm... Terrains and crossers can be a bit confusing if you think too hard about it.  But terrains are just that, grass, sand, etc.   Crossers can be anything like roads, streams, bridges, and in this general discussion, what we are calling "ridge" from the TNO set.  Crossers never connect at corners, only in the middle of tile edges.

By definition in the set, they are handled by the crosser section of each individual tile.  As each tile has the option to have a crosser connect to it, if it is defined to have one.

You really have to read a .set file, and likely look at a tile in a modeling program like gmax to get a better handle on that.

As for actually merging terrains/crossers into a new set, use Jlen's Set Editor B85.  It can do most of the work for you in finding the different terrains/crossers and copying them into a net .set for you.  Be warned though, that this tool has NOT been updated to work with 1.67-1.69 content, and can corrupt pathnode information for tiles that have the newer path nodes.  It has other bugs related to it being way out of date as well but for simple copying of terrains or crossers over, it does pretty good job if you set up the filters on the import tiles/groups page of the program.

Terrains tiles are typically named xxxx_a01_01, xxxxx_b*.* , C, D, E, etc some sets go a bit higher in those letter groups depending on how many terrains actually exist.

Crossers typiclly start in the G range of letters, H, I, J, K are the 5 most common.

These are NOT hard and fast rules, but those are the most common letter groups used for terrains and crossers.  Features, groups etc, can be varied, and really depends on the whim of the tileset creator.  Most of the sets I havfe seen use L through X.  The Z letter group is reserved for edge tiles, the tiles seen at the edge of an area that you can not walk on, the ones that fade out into the distance.

[Shadooow]

Bannor Bloodfist wrote...

Anyway, things that cause lag when opening an area are varied:
1)
Size of area, anything over 16x16 is begging for trouble, many PW
owners will keep things even smaller.
2) Total number of placeables
in that area.
3) Fog distance as defined by the area creator.
4) Total
polygon count of the area, Here you have to be really careful.  TNO is a
huge drain on resources, well worth it, but it is very highly
detailed.  Any tileset created by copying the TNO tiles will take even
longer to load than the same area created with the original.
5)
Animation on any tiles, these include day/night animations and anything
related to say "falling leaves" etc.  Animated grass, bushes that move
when you touch them, etc.  Any animation increases the lag.
6) Total
number of creatures/npc's.
7) Any special scripts.  Most particularly
heartbeat scripts.

When I tested those tilesets (worm's seasonal forest and CCS) I made a area 10x10, without any placeables, with only grass there, no groups, default fog distance basen on exterior, clear environment, no NPCs and no scripts. Still it took 30 seconds on my old computer or my current laptop. And that unthinkable for me.

And I believed its except textures and polygon counts where is worm's unbeatable also due to number of features because CCS had default textures and polygon counts (and it matched the default bioware tilesets which is a good for me btw). But if you say that CCS is just badly made then I will believe you, but will still avoid large combos anyway if just only for hak size. I will rather take some time and combine my own which will suit me in all ways.

Anyway thanks, I learned something new.