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[Tchos]

As I mentioned in another thread, after having been tempted to try out the DAO toolset for a long time, and especially seeing the nice quest mods in the community contest and by various talented individuals and groups, I finally sat down this weekend and watched some video tutorials for how to use the toolset.  I made a little playable area with some custom texturing and such, and decided it might be feasible to actually make a quickie standalone quest mod while I still have some free time.  To that end, I'm thinking small, and going for speed, so I'll consider it a self-imposed "challenge", which is the only way I believe it'll be completed.

Day 1:
My first area, which I designed to get away from the dirty, ugly-looking landscape of the rest of Ferelden.  Seriously, there's no reason for a pre-industrial country to have such smoggy-looking skies.

This wasn't bad at all, and the landscape shaping and texturing was pretty much the same as in Oblivion, which I've used before.  I hit a pretty big snag with the lightmapping, though, and that added at least 4 or 5 hours to work through.



I'm also not happy with the 8 texture limit for an area's terrain, but I'll make do.

Day 2: 
I spent another few hours searching through the game resources, poring over the wiki, and searching the forums for information on where the terrain textures were located, so I could add my own, but had no luck.

Posted a couple of screenshots of my work on the forum here. DarthParametric answered my question about the terrain textures.  Did some touchup work on the landscape.

Watched some more tutorial videos for NPC work.  Created a questgiver NPC.

Wrote my first conversation and the bare bones of a plot.  I had always considered NPC dialogue to be a daunting task, and had never learned how to make them in any game I've modded, though I came close with Morrowind and Fallout 3.  In this toolset it turned out to be a smooth and easy task.



That last line in the dialogue was a temporary option for testing one of the mechanics, by the way.  I've already removed it.

Day 3:
Spent most of today trying to get an NPC to go hostile if you choose a particular dialogue option.  Hours and hours of study, trial and error, searching and trying suggestions with custom scripts and generic ones, and nothing was working.  Finally found a very simple solution that worked, on this wiki page.  But wow, that was a frustrating ordeal...even worse than the lightmapping one.

Also spent a few hours trying to start the module in a way that lets you level up to the appropriate level for the mod, and choose your own stats and skills.  I tried a few approaches, with different degrees of success, but I considered them mostly unsatisfactory, so I just enabled the ability to let the user import a character from a save in any of the user's other modules.  This worked.  I'll suggest a recommended level character for the user to import in my readme.  Possibly also supply a premade character of my own in case the user doesn't have any.

Tuned my first enemy to provide a decent fight.

Next I'll either create another location for the quest to take place in, or create a location where the PC can hire some party members to help.  I'm guessing I'll need around 7 locations for this thing total.  Ideally I'd like to have one particular location with a small open mausoleum or shack with an inside and out that you can see and walk into without needing an area transition, but I'm not sure if there are any of those in the toolset.

Modifié par Tchos, 20 octobre 2011 - 07:06 .

[Tchos]

Day 4:

Decided to deal with the party necessities today instead. Spent several hours studying the wiki to learn how to set up a follower system. There were no video tutorials for that subject, unfortunately, and the text seemed to leave out some information here and there. "Put this code in your event handler." Oh, okay. What the hell is an event handler? "Now make these Excel files and run them through the converter." Converter gives errors! "Oh, and if you're an OpenOffice user, it won't work. Use this program instead." Argh. Had to re-enter all those cells.

But after dealing with the troubles and finding the missing info I nevertheless got a functional framework in place for hiring party members and choosing them on the character select stage.

Next, I created four new hireable NPCs, two male, two female, each suited to a particular archetypal role in a party: Tank, rogue, mage, and healer. Since you can import whatever class you like as your PC, this lets you pick 3 out of the 4 for your party, leaving behind the one whose role you plan to fill yourself.



I wrote some flavour dialogue for each of their conversations when you hire them to give them some personality, but the main purpose was to get it all functional, which I did. More flavour can come later, when I've roughed out more of the overall mod. Best to get everything working first before doing the little details, to maximise the likelihood of completion in my limited time. Full steam ahead! For now, say hello to Flint Vanderhuge, Speedy Lightfingers, Sigil Flamerune, and Salve McHealy. I'll probably replace the names with more conventional names later, but I needed to have a little fun after dealing with the whole party thing.

Also created a new item for the healer to wear. I enchanted one of the noble dresses with stats similar to a mage robe because I'm tired of the best mage robes being those things with the furry shoulder pads.



Next up is the tavern where you'll find these people to hire, and the first enemy encounter area.

Modifié par Tchos, 27 juillet 2011 - 07:54 .

[DarthParametric]

Tchos wrote...

Converter gives errors! "Oh, and if you're an OpenOffice user, it won't work. Use this program instead." Argh. Had to re-enter all those cells.

If you want to stick with the vanilla GDA compiler, you should be able to run your OpenOffice spreadsheets through Google Docs to convert them into a viable XLS. I believe the wiki mentions it.

[Tchos]

Good tip. I'll stick with the standalone program, though. It works fine, and that XLS converter has the dodgy tendency to want to access the internet when I used it.

[Tchos]

Day 5:

Numerous times now I've run into the length limit for dialogue lines.  This impedes my writing of roleplaying options.  I shudder to think how much the BG Redux team has had to truncate the long options available for the player to choose in Baldur's Gate 2 for their remake.

I think I have a title and theme for this mod now, but I'll hold off on saying so just yet, because it depends on whether I have time to add something.  For now, I'll just focus on the main quest and worry about frills later.

The plot I've settled on, by the way, is that old Narham Galthach here is having some trouble with some distant relatives who have moved into his home and won't take the hint and leave.  In other words, the angry undead spirits of his ancestors have crawled out of the family catacombs and infested his tower and its environs, tainting the local area.

I drew an ugly little topographic map to guide my landscaping for this area.  I'm going for some varied, Duskwood-like geography here.

Landscaping went fairly smoothly, but I've only textured a bit of it so far, because it's a pretty complicated layout, and much larger than the first one.

Ran into another slowing snag.  Seems like there's something for each task.  This one was in placing props.  For some reason, the toolset slowed to molasses every time I expanded a prop folder, taking at least 30 seconds to make each prop appear in the world, and this was just to see what some of them looked like, since the wiki doesn't show pictures of every prop.  I should try out the model viewer if this persists.  Once I got the props into the scene, they moved normally, though.

Lightmapping and posting to local takes a long time on a level of this size (16 minutes, according to the log).  I won't be able to do test runs as frequently with this landscape, or else perhaps I can just redefine the exportable area size for small local tests.  That could work.

Worked on the lighting for the area to get the effect and colours I wanted.  With the lightmaps on, and in-game, it shows up much brighter than I wanted here, so I actually had to reduce the sunlight to nearly nothing, and raise the ambient light strangely high, and I'm still getting very dark shadows (on the objects, not the characters.  I haven't set up the character lighting on this set yet).

Spent an hour or two looking through text tutorials, wiki info pages, and videos, trying to find information on how to place practical lights (like torches).  None of them explained that step.  All the tutorials that showed lights at all just placed lights with no physical light source.  I found torches and fire pits in the props and placeables, but none of them had fires attached.  I thought maybe they'd show up if I placed them correctly, but I couldn't tell if I was supposed to put them in the level designer or the area designer.



Ultimately found animated fire effects separately.  These, unlike the props, are scalable (the inability to resize normal props and pieces of architecture is another unpleasant limitation of this toolset).  Tried it out, and determined that to make a fire pit, I had to place the pit, then the animated fire, and finally an animated point light over it to actually generate the light.  Same with torches: Torch + fire + light.

Began populating the area with mobs to fight.  Need to find out how to assign movements to them, so they can walk around.  Also need to lower their perception range and possibly tweak their abilities.

Modifié par Tchos, 28 juillet 2011 - 07:52 .

[DarthParametric]

Tchos wrote...

Numerous times now I've run into the length limit for dialogue lines.  This impedes my writing of roleplaying options.

Dialogue isn't my bag, but I believe that you can ignore the warnings to a degree - I think the actual limit is about twice what it warns you about. There should be some posts about it somewhere around here.

[0x30A88]

Looking good so far. Keep it up.

[Tchos]

@DP: Thanks for that info.  I assumed that it would refuse to save or "compile" if I left those warnings alone.

Day 6:
Built my first interior level: the tavern where you'll find your party members, and where the bartender will serve your vendor needs.  I based the interior on the shape of the building I used for the tavern, with minor liberties.  Again, the lightmapper was my enemy here, and I had to use the workaround where you render the lightmaps in the Single Player module, and move the generated folder manually.  A painting on the wall fails to appear in the area layout, inexplicably, showing only the shadow behind it, but it appears normally in-game.  There are still some black spots that I can't get rid of, and which I'll try to cover up.  It's a small place, and rather plain at the moment, but I think the size is all right for a small roadside tavern.

Somehow I lost the character ambient lighting and water from the first exterior, and will have to replace it.

Figuring out how to place and use doors was another lengthy task, especially since the wiki page for "doors" appears to be based on pre-release information and isn't written very well.  Apparently there are no area transition doors ready for use in the toolset, if I understand correctly, so I followed Qkrch's instructions on making one in one of his videos.

The name of the location doesn't appear on the tooltip when you hover over the door.  For that matter, I can't get the minimaps or local area map to show anything, and I have tried setting the minimap area and posting the minimap to local.  The wiki entries on "maps" only talk about the world map with the pins for different locations, which I'm not using in this mod.

Looked into ambient animations and movement for both the party NPCs and the mobs.  Would be nice if the poses, at least, would show up in the area layout so I can see if they're positioned properly in relation to the props.  Spent way too long getting a character to sit in a chair.  Had to disable physics on her, which works, but as soon as she goes into conversation, she stands up.  I've tried all the possible variables
for her ambient system state, and none of them seem to help.



The lighting is getting darker as I work on it, probably due to the lightmapping.  I had to remove some props because they became covered with shadows despite being under a light.  It's much darker than it should be.  Here's a brightened up version of the screenshot that shows what it should look like.  I'll have to increase the brightness of all the lights to compensate, and hope that doesn't screw up the lightmapper even more.  I hate pitch black shadows!

[jackkel dragon]

Doors: There are some pre-made area transition doors, but there aren't many types and they all are named "door". If you want a door to give the name (or a hint) of where it leads, you have to explicitly create a new door resource and give it the correct model and name.

Conversation cancelling animations: Unfortuneately, the way the conversation system works (letting the builder select animations played each line) means that you'll have to manually set the branch of a conversation to make the character continue to sit. If you do this on an early line, lower lines in the same branch tend to inherit animations unless specifically changed.

[Tchos]

@jackkel: Could you explain the setting of the branches further, or point me toward an reference resource? I tried your suggestion just now, looking under the "Cinematics" tab of the conversation window. I set the first line and last line to "revert to idle at end of line", with no apparent effect.

[jackkel dragon]

I don't remember anything about "revert to idle", and I can't find any info on the wiki about that. What I meant to mention is the "pose" under the cinematics tab. You'll need to set it to a sitting animation for the first line, then all lines below it (or at least new lines created below it, not sure if it's retroactive) will keep the pose unless you change it. I'm not sure what happens after the conversation ends, I've never tried to make someone continue sitting after a conversation ended.

[Tchos]

Okay, I'll try that out too, but the sitting is something I'm willing to sacrifice for the sake of getting this out the door.

[Tchos]

Day 7:
Got the lighting in the tavern acceptable by changing the animated lights to static lights. Believe it or not, after working on it some more, it had gotten even darker than the previous screenshots! Some of the ambient occlusion shadows are still a bit ugly, but I'm done with it.

Started on one of the other locations, and it's one of the exterior locations used in the main quest (a graveyard), where there will be some fighting and a mini-boss. I like exterior level designing much better than the interiors. Sculpting the landmasses, texturing them, and placing vegetation and props is rather enjoyable, actually. I'm dreading the prospect of dealing with the light mapping on this level before it's done, though.

My dread was justified already. I had to render the light maps in Single Player again for this one, due to a gigantic black square appearing on the landscape.

I placed the mobs on the map, and learned how to make them patrol the area. Did the long process of posting to local, copying the folder to my mod folder, reopening my mod, reposting to local (otherwise my trees were all gone!), exporting, and finally got the graveyard in-game.

Finally a chance to have some fun with this! I hired my party and tried it out. The rendering came out very nicely, but I think perhaps I should turn bloom on, and maybe increase the fog. The patrols worked, though it seems the game makes them stop patrolling once the party is "in combat" even if they haven't spotted us yet. I think I may have made them spread out a little too far, but then again maybe I should just add more of them, because it was over a little too quickly. Usually I play on Hard mode, but for this I actually took it up to Nightmare (which I never use usually), and it became quite a fun experience! I'll try to scale up the difficulty a bit, if possible. I'd like it to be tuned nicely for a level 11 or 12 character, so the party can have access to some decent abilities.

Need to find a way to specify what abilities the party members pick when they autolevel. Also need to be able to specify their default tactics, or else I'll just put my suggestions for what to pick in my readme. Still no luck with the map or minimap.

Next area will either be the farm or the tower exterior, then it's on to the interiors. I have 2 of those to do, or 3 if I have time. Then I'll do some touchups on the rest of the landscapes, distribute loot, rewards, keys, etc., and fill out the dialogue, and it'll be done.  I'm deliberately not showing the entirety of the graveyard here, so some of it will be unfamiliar when you play it. 

Modifié par Tchos, 30 juillet 2011 - 11:26 .

[Tchos]

Day 8:
So I've been at this for a full week. I'd better hurry it up.

Anyone who's read my blog posts on the subject can already guess that there won't be voice acting in this mod, because in general I find V/O in my games to be unnecessary, to say the least. I won't prohibit other people from adding voices if they really want to, but how likely is that?

Decided to do the farm, due to its placement on the map. Finished that, and did a little work on the tower exterior as well. Need to look into placing ambient sounds and see how to choose the music. No big constrast in colour scheme between this new area and the previous one, since it's a different area on the same map, which is the case for the tower as well.



One thing that I liked in the Oblivion construction set which seems to have no equivalent in the Dragon Age toolset is that there's a set of landscape textures that you can pick which generate grasses on the terrain in-game. I don't know how much grass I can have in a level like this before it affects performance, and the farm area is already pretty packed, so I'm going easy on the grass.

There's a haystack in the toolset that I'd like to use as set dressing (pictured below), but it's astoundingly low resolution, seemingly due to bad alpha channels. Possibly I can fix it, if no one else has already.



I'm getting to like this area! It could support more quests than I have planned. Possibly I could revisit it as an additional add-in in the future. Here's a bird's eye view:

Modifié par Tchos, 01 août 2011 - 12:54 .

[DarthParametric]

Most of the vanilla props are pretty poor all round. Model-wise they are often inefficiently built (wasted polys, intersections, bad poly flow, etc.) and texture-wise they are often poorly UV mapped (a long Bioware tradition) with very low-res textures. The texture res is no doubt a dual legacy of both the original PC target specs for a game that started development 5 years before it launched in 2009 and the fact that consoles were added as a platform.

[Tchos]

Yes, I've seen a really bad house plant in the vanilla game too that I'd be embarrassed to use in a mod of mine. And the cart's issues are known. But this one's alpha channel looks so bad as to be a mistake!

[DarthParametric]

It's not a mistake as such, just poor implementation. A 256x256 DXT1.

[Tchos]

Day 9:
In between modding sessions, I've been playing more Dark Times, and I noticed I accidentally left the settings on Nightmare from my testing of my own mod, and it was unexpectedly still playable. I guess the drop in difficulty I've been experiencing is due to the fact that I had to patch DA:O to the latest patch to play Dark Times, and one or more of those patches reduced the game difficulty. So the difficulty of my mod is probably where it should be, and people who want more of a challenge can install mods that make things tougher overall.

Despite all the vegetation on my farm, like that big wheat field, the performance in-game seemed perfectly fine, so I'll feel free to add more grasses as I develop the last areas of this map, which should be done in this session.

I think the ambient character lights have been diminished somehow. I'll wait until the area's done strengthen them to intended brightness, so there won't be any more surprises. I think I should raise the gamma a bit for the rest of my screenshots, as well. Or enable the bloom.

One of my hills completely flattened out at some point when I was placing trees elsewhere. I have no idea how that could have happened. This wasn't a small hill, so there's no way the smooth tool could have accidentally brushed over it at some point and eliminated it. So I quit without saving and restarted the toolset, and reloaded the level, and it was back to normal. I didn't lose much work.

A problem with some of the better-looking grasses is that they're in wide clumps which require a flat surface for none of the bits to float, and the vegetation implementation doesn't allow me to rotate them in two of the axes to orient them on the surface, even though I have the "orient on terrain surface" option set to "true". Many of the less-wide clumps are still so tightly packed they make very noticeable patterns instead of natural-looking grass. Another problem is that there are so few decent-looking grasses, and none of the common kind that I'd like in this terrain. I think I'm wasting my time with the grasses here, and I should just move on.

Moving around in the landscape editor is very inconsistent. At seemingly random times, the panning amount is reduced by at least one order of magnitude, regardless of whether I have anything selected. All I can do is keep slowly moving, moving, moving at bit at a time, until suddenly for no apparent reason the panning amount goes back to normal and I can pan across the screen at a reasonable pace.

Finished the landscaping, texturing, and planting of the rest of the map. Now to place a few more creatures and the door to the interior of the tower.

Did that. Exported and tested. My vista objects aren't showing up in-game, for some reason, and I'm having trouble placing the door where it needs to go, since the tower doesn't have a door frame to let the door placement widget snap it into place. I can't find an option to disable physics on the door, so when I try to place it against the tower surface it tries to climb the wall instead, floating in front of it like they're magnets of the same polarity. Will have to deal with that after I do the room it leads into.

The ambient character lights are still not working, even though I brightened them when I finished the level. Will look more into that tomorrow.

No screenshots today. Today's work was an area about the size of the past two areas combined, but since it's just more of the same type of thing, I don't think it would be particularly interesting just to see screenshots. Best to just let you explore it yourself.

[DarthParametric]

Which vista models did you use? I recall a thread or two in the level editor forum about the same problem.

[-Semper-]

Tchos wrote...

Moving around in the landscape editor is very inconsistent. At seemingly random times, the panning amount is reduced by at least one order of magnitude, regardless of whether I have anything selected.

yeah, that's a nice "feature". if that happens again try pressing ctrl while panning and it should move noticeable faster.

Tchos wrote...

Did that. Exported and tested. My vista objects aren't showing up in-game, for some reason.

did you alter the area's borders (red, yellow and green zones). the green one is the playable area and the red one should be touching (or completely including) your vista objects. you have to post your level from single player or else you will still run into problems.

Tchos wrote...

The ambient character lights are still not working, even though I brightened them when I finished the level.

hopefully you are not talking about real ambient lights because you can only have one in your level. character lights should be 3 static lights with a huge radius to cover your level only affecting characters, and none of your geometry. place them in triangular shape around your level with light colors and low intensity.

[Tchos]

Thanks to both of you! The vista objects I used were vst_cliff_01_1 and hro_den_City_1. I think the problem is that the red zone is not currently completely enclosing the vista objects. Only one of them even slightly intersects with the yellow zone. I'll expand those and try again. I've also been posting from Single Player just when I render new light maps, but I guess I'll do that every time now. I'll definitely be trying that Ctrl trick, too, for the panning.

The character lights are in fact point lights (static), not ambient lights, of which I have only the one, and they are indeed set up in a triangle around the level with a radius large enough to enclose it, set to affect characters and not geometry. As for intensity, I have them set at .5, .75, and .9, with a very light blue with low colour saturation to simulate night lighting. Perhaps too low of an intensity?

[-Semper-]

Tchos wrote...

As for intensity, I have them set at .5, .75, and .9, with a very light blue with low colour saturation to simulate night lighting. Perhaps too low of an intensity?

nope, they're perfect. is there a chance that there are other static lights in your level affecting characters? da:o's eclipse engine has a limitation of 3 lights per character/prop. if you are using more than 3 then you will notice strange shadow bugs and lights without effect. i would switch all other static lights of your level to the trash zone (so that you can reactivate them easily) and look what happens.

[Tchos]

Day 10:
While I was searching for tutorials in this past week, I also came across examples of mods in Neverwinter Nights 2, and came to realise that I'd probably enjoy that game quite a bit, and it would probably be easier to make the kind of mods I'd like to make for that game, considering its larger selection of architecture, placeables, textures, and creatures. However, I'm sure we've all learned from the lesson of Duke Nukem Forever's extended development time that it's a very bad idea to switch game engines in the middle of a project. Plus, I couldn't just jump into modding it
without playing the game first.

I've experienced the trouble with static lights when placing the torches around the place. One lesson learned: view the boundaries of the terrain "chunks" before you sculpt your terrain and arrange your layouts so that you can strategically place your static lights to avoid the illumination limits. But baked lights simply aren't working for me. I can see them and their effect on the environment when they're set to static, and then I change them to baked, and render the light maps, and there's just nothing there. What is this "trash zone" you mention, Semper?

Learned how to make invisible area transition objects with meaningful names for pathways, and connected the areas with them. I'll also name the door to the tavern.

Got the minimap working! Happy! It also doubles as the local area map, I see.

Raising the intensity of the character lights did the trick. Last time I tried brightening them, I had done so by making the colour lighter, which is what didn't work.

Semper's tip on holding down Ctrl to stop the slow panning across the screen worked a treat!

Got the door to the tower positioned correctly, after trying in vain to attach it to the ball in the door frame. It just refused to get close enough to the tower to snap it into place, even with a frame there. It only occured to me later that the rotation and translation tools also worked on placeables. Usually, for doors, you use the arrow tool because of the snapping, which is why it took that long to try it. It was still difficult, since it kept snapping up the wall or completely out of sight whenever I moved it sideways or forward (which I had to do to place it manually, trying to match it at non-right angles), but it still obeyed my command to go down into the frame when I moved it vertically.

My vista objects still aren't showing up in-game, even after expanding the yellow and red borders of the area. They appear in the area layout view, though. If necessary, I'll just reshape parts of the map so they hopefully won't be necessary.

If I didn't need a circular room for the tower, I'd be tempted to use Semper's library level resource for the wizard's study. As it is, I spent several hours trying to get the tower interior pieces to fit together properly, but had to sort of fake it. There shouldn't be any skittering textures, though. I was thinking of extracting one of the original campaign tower levels, but decided it would take too long, and I had a reasonable solution at hand anyway. My tower interior needs to be smaller than any of the ones in the original game anyway. There'll still be a bit of a TARDIS effect, but that was an issue with the original game as well. This is not the main fighting area, so it should look like a normal living space, if a bit disheveled from the recent ruckus. It's still unfurnished as of this writing, but I'll post a screenshot anyway so no one thinks this project is tapering off. I think it's safe to say this will have been a 2 week project.



Spent (wasted?) some time fixing things like floating trees and sharp edges on parts of the landscape that I noticed in the last playtest, even though that's low-priority stuff that should be done in the final polish pass.

Linked the tower interior and exterior with the doors. Next I'll finish furnishing the tower interior, figure out how to put items in chests, and start on the final area where the quest objective is.

Modifié par Tchos, 03 août 2011 - 01:41 .

[Tchos]

Is it possible to disable the collision on a model in the level editor? This is a major stumbling block.

[-Semper-]

Tchos wrote...

Is it possible to disable the collision on a model in the level editor? This is a major stumbling block.

you have to use the "trash zone" aka scratch space on the left bottom corner of your toolset. whatever you drag'n drop there won't be posted to local. to disable collision you have to trick the export process. it's import that while generating your pathfinding the props with disabled collision have to be inside the scratch space so they will be ignored.

to do this you have to do the following steps:
- build your level and finish geometry, prop placing, lights and a lightprobe
- render lightmaps and lightprobes
- move the props to the scratch space
- generate pathfinding
- remove the props from scratch space
- don't click "tools > export > do all local posts" but instead "tools > export > do all export operations"
- another window pops where you disable the exporting steps you did manually beforehand (lights, lightprobes, pathfinding), the other steps should be enabled

Tchos wrote...

But baked lights simply aren't working for me. I can see them and
their effect on the environment when they're set to static, and then I
change them to baked, and render the light maps, and there's just
nothing there.

just in case: after rendering lightmaps you disable the "full lighting" toggle and enable the "light map" button, right? they're the yellow buttons on the top menu bar on the right side. if that doesn't work there's the chance that your light map's got corrupted. you have to delete all rendered lightmap textures and the erf file which contains the lighting information. rerender your lightmaps and it should work.