22 réponses à ce sujet

[darkling lithely]

I'm very curious to know what module builders think about the number of people that dwell in any place.

To get an idea of how I might create a city (in the toolset), I googled a place in the US with about the same population as the city in the FR campaign setting book that I'm interested in.  I had not imagined that the city I'm thinking of creating would be so big as a city that actually exists.  After considering the many nwn/nwn2 games and modules I've played, I'm feeling that there is a huge disconnect either in what is given in the game OR in my interpretation of what is given in the game.  Of course, it may just be better to dismiss this type of reality for the sake of playing a game, BUT

I would very much appreciate knowing what any of you think about this and how it may have affected your module building.

Modifié par darkling lithely, 10 août 2012 - 09:01 .

[kevL]

well, if you're going for a medieval feel, remember that they didn't have the beaurocratic & organizational overhead that present-day cities have:

- a hamlet of 10 pop. gets by on a few buildings and a roasting pit.
- Rome, on the other hand, had a pop. of several million in its heyday.

[kamal_]

Well, it's obviously essentially impossible to make a city on a 1 to 1 scale. That would be a whole lot of houses and npcs and such to make that had nothing to do with the plot of the game. And just walking between shops would be a long process. Inevitably you have to shrink things, with one commoner representing some large number of citizens, and not trying to map the entire city. The standard way for games to handle that is having wards or districts. Many cities are set up in that manner per official lore anyway.

All in all, it depends on what city you're interested in.

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

Remember, it's all about perception. A big city doesn't really have to be that big, just big enough to get lost in.

I like to think in threes - some cultures even limit their counting numbers to one, two, and more than two, so there might be something neurological about it. One thing is a thing, or rather THE thing. Two things is a pair, a couple, obviously in a vaguely exclusive relationship with each other. Three things, though, that's just a bunch of a things, a crowd. Four is even bunchier, but three is enough.

So if you want your city to seem big, give it three or more sections. If you want it to seem small, just give it one section. Two sections means it's big enough for something interesting to happen, but nothing terribly complicated.

And by section I just mean any kind of geographic area that your brain registers as something different and distinct from the rest of the area, say the main road, the back alley, and the dingy part next to the tavern. If you really want the place to seem big, divide each of your three sections into three subsections, each with their own distinctive and memorable look.

For example, my Wassau city-area is just one 16x16 exterior, but I think it feels bigger than the other settlements in the module (Danaan Unvanquished, or just look up the Wassau pre-fab). It has roughly three areas, the Gnomish, Imperial, and Temple quarter. The Gnomish quarter has a long street with palms, a bunch of tenements clustered about a courtyard, and the Bagnio. The Imperial section has the forum, a massive Arsenal building, and the docks. The Temple quarter has a temple, a rich-people neighborhood, and a big impressible commercial building. You feel lost just reading about it, right?

The same works with people, too. For gameplay reasons, you want most of your townsfolk to be nameless, generic town walkers, so the player doesn't go around thinking they owe him a sidequest. But you can customize them with animations and props. So a simple village just has some villagers, all more or less the same. A small town has a blacksmith and a drunk and a merchant. A city, though, has multiple blacksmiths and drunks and merchants, each doing their own little thing. It's not really about numbers, its about showing the divisions and diversity organic to a larger settlement.

[rjshae]

I think Lugaid summed it up very nicely. Larger cities probably also display a greater disparity between the classes, contain multiple power groups, and have more convoluted politics. Also, the larger the settlement, the more likely it is to support and sustain very specialized crafts and guilds. That's where you'd go to buy higher powered magic items, for example.

Modifié par rjshae, 13 août 2012 - 07:04 .

[kamal_]

For reference, Mysteries of Westgate did Westgate in 3 main exterior maps.

If you've got a lorebook covering your city, which it sounds like you do, you're aware of the regular powers in the place, the major guilds, families, churches, threats.

There's a couple of DnD books covering city adventure. One's a 3e book called "Cityscape", it's on running city adventures in general. If you're making up a city, it's a good book. If you've got a city in mind already it's ok. (Much of it covers the general stuff of various fantasy city types). The other is the old Lankhmar sourcebook. While it's not set in Faerun, and a chunk of the book is about rules for it's setting (very few mages, spells take 10x normal DnD casting times etc), it is chock full of the kinds of flavor you would look for in a typical medieval type city. There are 20-30 pages of individual npc descriptions for instance, and most of those could be dropped right in to any campaign.

Modifié par kamal_, 13 août 2012 - 10:01 .

[Dann-J]

Ironically, Neverwinter seemed like a much larger city in SoZ when you could only access a small portion of it. The view from the lookout platform of the buildings in the distance made you feel as if you were inside a huge city (especially at night, with the glowing windows in the building card placeables).

The OC felt like the few sections you were confined to were all there was of the city, even though you had more room to move about in than in SoZ.

[rjshae]

DannJ wrote...

Ironically, Neverwinter seemed like a much larger city in SoZ when you could only access a small portion of it. The view from the lookout platform of the buildings in the distance made you feel as if you were inside a huge city (especially at night, with the glowing windows in the building card placeables).

The OC felt like the few sections you were confined to were all there was of the city, even though you had more room to move about in than in SoZ.

True, and building up an entire city may not be the best use of your time. Many of the buildings will end up with non-functional doors and, as a player, it just feels like you're touring the city. I like it when there's a smaller area with concentrated activity plus a decent view off into the distance to provide scale.

[kamal_]

rjshae wrote...
True, and building up an entire city may not be the best use of your time.

Unless you're planning the whole campaign in the city, it's not.

[Leinadi]

I'd also recommend checking out the mod called 'Almraiven' for NWN1. An excellent example of how one can portray a city. The various areas are basically confined to just a few streets/alleyways. And through "thickening up" the atmosphere with plenty of NPC movement and a good soundscape, it totally comes off as a real city. It's one of the most successful cities I've seen done in a RPG.

[kamal_]

If you want lots of npcs in an area, you need to use pain's csl ai. It can handle a hundred a side battle of solars versus illithid (so lots of special abilities and spell effects in use).

[rjshae]

Iveforgotmypassword wrote...

I realise that most computers now have no problem with running NWN2 but there ae issues with frame rates and long/crashing area loads to consider before you pack your city with NPC's running various heartbeat scripts.

I made an underground dwarf "city" and it kept crashing until I removed the torches from the patrols on walkabout. I realise it was probably the dwarves not wanting them as torches are for sissies when you can see in the dark but it certainly put me off doing too much like that again as my PC is pretty powerful. But you start fighting or letting off spells in a packed out areas and things soon start to stutter when you have the graphics cranked right up.

Best city I saw in any game was in the Witcher and even that wasn't too busy I also liked the one in Thief with just little areas and views of skylines.

I'd heard there are performance issues when there are a lot of shadows in play. Maybe shadows from the torch lights were having an impact? (Not sure if they do have shadows set, so just an idea.)

[kevL]

am playing on a 4 yr. old machine and say that shadows hit hardest, 4x as hard as normal mapping, bloom, and waters combined. yep

[Dann-J]

kevL wrote...

am playing on a 4 yr. old machine and say that shadows hit hardest, 4x as hard as normal mapping, bloom, and waters combined. yep

Given how crappy the game's shadows look, and how much of a drain they are on resources, it's barely worth having them turned on. I usually just have creature shadows turned on - and even they can look downright wacky at times (especially when the sun/moon is close to the horizon).

Plus the speed at which time advances in the game means that shadows are constantly on the move, which is often very distracting.

I wouldn't mind the framerate hit if the shadows looked better. As they are now, it just adds insult to injury.

[kevL]

... right now i'm giving it a go with just the little drop shadows under my char's

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

I set most all of my placeables and EO's to have shadows from directional light only. That's the light set in the day/night cycle, while things like torches and spells would be point lights. Shadows are really important to me, they're the difference between something looking fake and looking real, between shallowness and depth. It might be odd to think about directional light in a cavern, though. I like to add a black or grey fog to cavern areas, and that can fake the sense that your torch is lighting up the nearby stuff, and everything else is in darkness.

Come to think of it, is there any way to make a torch that looks bright and emits a bit of light, but doesn't ever cast shadows?

[Dann-J]

You can certainly set placeable lights never to cast shadows (as I always do for things like candles or flickering fires), but the equipable torch relies on a VFX light property. I've never looked into the settings for light effects. There might be a 'do not cast shadows' setting for light effects in the effects editor (or there might not be).

There is an option in the graphics settings that determines whether point light sources cast shadows or not. Turning that off prevents torches from casting shadows.

[Edit: A bit of investigationing reveiled that there is the option of turning off shadow casting for light effect properties. So it would be possible to edit the torch effect to stop equipable torches casting shadows even with point light shadows enabled in the game.]

Modifié par DannJ, 16 août 2012 - 10:44 .

[darkling lithely]

Thanks for all your input. Neverwinter in SoZ does have the feeling of being much bigger that in the OC. The lack of population and places in Neverwinter in the OC always bothered me but realizing what constitutes an actual city of that size has only made it that much more annoying.

Almraiven does offer a pretty good solution--much like NW in SoZ but on a bigger scale.

kamal_'s Begger's Nest in the Path of Evil (which I recently started though I may not have time to finish until next summer) does a great job of addressing my interest because the area is fairly big, it seems crowded, there are plenty of people standing around and on the move, and it is given that it is only one area of a larger place. Had I started this mod before posing the question, I'd probably not have.

On the issue of shadows, I played with all shadows on medium, low or off from the time the game came out until recently. The number and quality has never changed my enjoyment at all. I now have a new evga 670 so every setting is maxed. It does look pretty and doesn't drop below the refresh rate. While I'm incredibly satisfied, I also can't say that I enjoy the game more.

[kamal_]

Well thanks. My version of the Docks District is directly connected, so you can take a look at that as well any time you want. All those areas I released as prefabs, so you are free to use them if you want. The npcs are a combination of the placed ones and ones set to walk randomly between waypoints in the area.

I'm actually playing Almraiven right now, since I have my own city campaign and Almraiven is widely considered the best city. From a purely city design perspective this is what i think: Good: the music and ambient sound (it's really good, if Fester released it then someone should make it usable in nwn2), the descriptions of people when you walk to them, the cluttered feel of the streets (this is excellent and missing from almost all other NW series cities). Bad: map travel is via street sign, not walking, lessening the sense of scale (Fester Pot made an official map, but since you cant walk between places the layout doesn't matter). When you talk to people, 80+% of everyone is from somewhere else, so it's not a coherent population (it feels more like a way to add lore about different parts of Faerun). All maps are narrow streets crowded by buildings, it's impractical from an economic perspective (narrow streets are fine but there needs to be some larger streets for transport of goods in the city). It's definitely the best/most alive/most "realistic" NW city I've seen.

[darkling lithely]

kamal, great description of Almraiven.  I agree and appreciate the novelty of it but ultimately found it lacking.  Have you played A Dance with Rogues?  Betancuria is my initial inspiration.  I feel that without the place (in adwr), there'd be no story. 

I really want to make a place first and let the story happen second.  I guess I really want a better Betancuria, which means in addition to facts that constitute lore and NPCs who share history, I imagine a bigger mythology where a larger number of factions perhaps interact or not, and the hero/heroine navigates a maze of possibilities because of all those factions.  Considering that I barely have time to read the forums, it might be a bit ambitious.

It's awesome that you've put your areas out.  That might be the incentive I need to get less sleep and try to build a module.

[kevL]

darkling lithely wrote...

... I imagine a bigger mythology where a larger number of factions perhaps interact or not, and the hero/heroine navigates a maze of possibilities because of all those factions.

prepare for issues ... but that's really my ideal too, create a world that the player gets thrown into (as it were), and s/he can choose to be the hero/ine, or stay a nobody and just watch events unfold,


/fantasy

[kamal_]

Ultimately, you have to do what makes you happy, not what you think would make others happy.

If you want factions, replay the first part of Path of Evil (until your "graduation quest") with a different character archetype. There's four faction paths, that's where the "Path" came from. Some of the factions interact with each other, and two are fighting directly.