57 réponses à ce sujet

[Nissa_Red]

Spice of life is in the little things, yes ^.^ ?

So with that in mind, I come to you with a couple of observations that I've made of small things which in my opinion have the potential to make our games more enjoyable on the long run if we paid more attention to them as builders and cc creators. Please feel free to contest, or contribute to them :

1/ making it so that sounds conform to the material that is being used. Walking on something, interacting with or hitting something, and not hearing the sound that we would expect in our real lives, can be very counter-productive, especially to players with the more musical ear among us.

2/ coming up with more materials soundsets isn't a route that has been widely explored, and would be awesome. The options are near endless : glass, ceramic, food, bones, paper, plastic, rubber, etc., on creatures, placeables, footstep sounds, weapons, etc. Project Q already offers improved SFX'es in their latest rendition (and how refreshing that is!), but more are always welcome. I intend to contribute in that department as well in time.

3/ making efforts to reduce the gap with historical disbelief, as much at it may sound like a weird concept in mostly 100% fantasy worlds. Each time I enter a BW interior, I can't help but think that it really wouldn't have hurt them to have hired some history-savvy people on their teams (or were they just busy replicating mostly modern US architecture designs all over Faerun ?). I don't want to enter the debate of what is historical and what not. Each builder is completely free to imagine their world as they see fit of course, but Six' and Cervantes' (I think) thatched home interiors in Project Q for example, despite seeming relatively simple and sparse, are so much more convincing homes to live in for people that still may use swords and daggers to defend their families, or horses as fastest non-magical vehicle to move from one point to another, that I would like to encourage more builders to read about history and (especially) use these fine tiles when appropriate. For the exteriors, look no further than recent releases of quality with Six's Wildlands or Zwerkules's Medieval city.

4/ watching that our creatures use the proper racialtypes, sizes, blood types, and (of course) appearancesndset settings. Some would even add to these the right stats, and creature abilities. As a builder, it almost seems to me like an affront to the original cc artist to neglect these in favor of simply pointing at the right appearance in the template, and call it a job done. Unfortunately, most "compilations" or "mergers" are a bane to such level of detail, which is why I learned to shy away from most of them with time.

5/ checking that clothes and weapons have inventory icons (thank you, SpiritedLass!, no further comments ^.^), that placeables in our modules come with proper use nodes (that's very easy to fix, even for relatively novice builders), that metallic weapons or helms have the proper reflective environment maps (sometimes erased by lazy 2DA copy/pasting), etc.

6/ designing tiles or placeables with walls or trees that allow our rangers and rogues to hide behind. I noticed that trees almost never get more attention from cc artists than a flat no-walk plane at their base. That is something which I can "fix" easily, so I don't want to request or insist on it too much, should it appear as a purely personal preference, but I wonder why it is ? Yes, there will be more "OnPerceive" events fired, but isn't it secondary to the point of a forest or a city with alleys allowing rangers or rogues to feel at "home" ?

7/ last, but not least, a little pet peeve of mine : visible texture/lighting seams in tilesets. Have a look at this desert screenshot (CTP Babylon), and then the next one (CTP Babylon) :


(click to get an enlarged version)


(click to get an enlarged version)

The same happens in Project Q's desert by the way :


(click to get an enlarged version)

so I am sure it's no trivial matter to fix, if it's even fixable at all. As a builder, this prevents me from using these tileset features, or even whole tilesets, like Bloodmonkey's Rocky mountains, because to me (and most of my players) it really kills the quality of the rest. Now I understand NWN uses tile-based environments and is very much subject to this. LordRosenkrantz managed to effectively hide these horrible "seams" (if I can call them so, since they are not seams as visible gaps in the geometry, but rather in the lighting) in his mountain tileset thanks to great texturing, but as soon as someone attempts retextures (in a winter or desert environment, for example) they would instantly appear again. Knowing the level of expertise of both the CTP and PJQ teams, and having inspected the tiles myself to search for missing smoothing groups or some such and not finding any obvious culprit, I wonder if there is something that could be done. Maybe Bannor, Six, Zwerkules or another tileset guru could shed some light on this for us (or at least me) ?

That's it for now.

Please be safe, all.

Modifié par Nissa_Red, 15 mars 2013 - 09:15 .

[Bannor Bloodfist]

A reply to question 7 only:
You can not accomplish what you are asking for. Not really. The problem is two fold and no one has found answer for EITHER of those problems.

1) Aurora auto=rotates tiles.
2) Aurora ONLY rotates ALL textures on a given tile to the same direction. Unless you override this setting nbd pick any SINGLE texture, Aurora will then auto-rotate all textures it paints on THAT tile in the same direction as the first object using that texture in whaever area you are building.

So. for example if you had a road texture, with two wheel routes dug into it, when you first paint that tile, the road may be pointing up or sideways. If you alt-click etc to get the various choices you still only get two basic variations. So, you can paint a row of tiles that all point their road piece upwards, but that is going to look like someome started - re-started and re-re-restarted a road and only stopped one tile wide. (Obviously not what you wanted) or you can paint that same time in the alternate position, and get a continuous road.

This applies to whatever texture you choose to paint, but primarily affects what gets chosen for the ground texture. Seamless texture in photoshop seems to be what you want, but it truly doesn't create seamless texture. You end up with a texture that leans/points in a single direction. When Aurora auto-rotates you completely lose the seamlessness that photoshop creates.

Believe me, we tried everything we could think of for Babylon. It can NOT be accomplished the way the toolset and game engine paints the tiles.

p.s. Edit:  Yes, it is related to how the engine uses lighting as well.  The only real way to avoid the issue is to create a tileset using only groups. and force the builder to rotate all the groups in the same direction.

Modifié par Bannor Bloodfist, 15 mars 2013 - 10:38 .

[Shadooow]

Nissa_Red wrote...

that placeables in our modules come with proper use nodes (that's very easy to fix, even for relatively novice builders)

can yo point me how? I recently come upon few placeables with bad ude node causing massive pathfinding lags etc. and would like to fix it, from what I read on several tutorials it seems I need 3dsmax for this, havent seen other tool to produce/modify pwks.

If there is easy way a notepad modeller like me can do it i would be grateful, right now this is most critical problem on my to fix list...

[Rolo Kipp]

<fumbling about...>

A simple, if somewhat blind, method would simply be to alter the x and/or y value of the usenode (in the *.pwk file) so it is sure to be beyond the envelope of the pwk.

Ex: if the pwk contains

node dummy a01_pwk_use01
  parent cherry_pwk
  position 0.0 0.0 0.0
  orientation 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
  wirecolor 0.105882 0.694118 0.580392 
endnode

You might change
"position 0.0 0.0 0.0"
to
"position 0.0 1.0 0.0" (y=1.0meters) to be sure the use01 node is outside the pwk.

<...in the dark>

[ShadowM]

I can reply to 4, I have made some custom changes to the appearance.2da and my scaling function so now you can set any creature to any scale and to any size from D&D (this will changes there stats according to D&D rules. NWN creaturesize.2da does not recognize the custom sizes and treat them as medium. It kinda hard to explain and it not perfect I had to add bonuses and penalties for the custom sizes but it will allow you to easily make all sizes of creatures pretty easily graphically bigger/smaller and by rules.

[Tiberius_Morguhn]

I'm having trouble with the use node as well ShadoOow. Even following Nissa's origianl remarks in another thread that Rolo reiterated here, I still have some placeables that insist on using the geometric center at ground level as the use node. I have remade some mine carts that actually fit the track width of the Biomines (and Zwerk's awesome retexture) but to be able to use them is simply not working. Grrr.

[Master Jax]

I have a question... whenever a creature appears for the first time, we would be talking about an OnSpawn event, right? And whenever it goes away from point of view and re-enters, that would be an OnPercieve event, right?

So, what kind of problem would cause every OnSpawn event to freeze the game momentarily, while not affecting OnPercieve events. I would be interested on how this could even happen on a high end rig and even on a clean-install.

[Bannor Bloodfist]

The very first time a creature/npc or object is loaded by the game, the game opens the related file(s) and "compiles" them to fit the engine dynamics. This is really apparent using horses, but will show up more and more as you load more detailed creatures, objects, tilesets etc.

For tile-sets, it also affects groups loading etc, the first time a specific group is loaded in an area, that entire group must be loaded and compiled.

After that initial load, the object/creature/group whatever, stays loaded in a cache memory location and thus loads faster. This was heavily tested and proven with DLA during the development of horses and WCoC.

Since NWN is a 16bit app that has been ported into/onto 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems, you really can NOT use all that extra ram for it. It only can recognize so much.

[Randomdays]

Nissa, for #6, how would you do that? Would you use a 3D shape for the pwk instead of a plane?

Jax, I usually see the freeze on encounter spawn events, not so much for a spawn due to a spell or script. For the encounter, from what I've read, when the encounter fires, the game has to calculate the cr of the pc/party, number of creatures to spawn and the most demanding action, where to put them. If the encounter doesn't have a spawn point set, it will spawn inside the encounter area farthest from the triggerer. With spawn points, it will try to spawn at a spawn point out of sight of the triggerer. No spawn points, or too many, can cause the game to pause as it decides where to place them. Also, when spawning, each creature will also fire off scripts like creating items on the creature, setting things like stealth mode, etc.

Not sure if this helps or if its what your asking for, but there's a lot more going on with a spawn than with a perceive.

[Nissa_Red]

I would like to thank everyone for taking some of their time to reply to these observations. It's truly a boon as a builder to know that not only we're lucky enough to receive all these fine creations/contributions of you cc artists to play with, but that also that their creators care enough about them that they wish to support them.

So without any further delay, here is how I proceed to add missing "use nodes" on placeables, without ever touching GMax/NWmax, even if it's of course strongly recommended to do so in a second time, be it only to check if the model is otherwise "valid" and that your "use nodes" are properly positioned.

I will take the example of the trebuchet, coming from this hakpack (full credits to Some_Ux for the original model, and to NWC Snake for the animations).

The placeable lacks proper "use nodes", which unfortunately makes it all but useless once in game : your player character will helplessly bump against it while trying to use it, which is funny, mind you, but probably only for a while ^.^ It has other issues one can only see in GMax/Nwmax (unwelded vertices, missing/redundant animations keys), but for the purpose of this short tutorial, I'll stick to my initial goal, and only ever use notepad++, and only suggest fixes to "use nodes". You may of course use whatever text editor has your preference.

1/ export the placeable model with its pwk from the original hakpack
-> we will get two files : "PLC_trebuch.mdl" and "plc_trebuch.pwk"

2/ decompile them if needed (with NwnMdlComp)
-> in our case, they already come as ASCII files, so it's not needed

3/ open the model file and rename all the internal references from "PLC_trebuch" to something that fits the format recommended by Bioware :
-> <prefix>_<suffix>, with total length NOT exceeding 12 characters
-> I chose "plcsiege_a01"

4/ rename the file itself
-> we now have a first file called "plcsiege_a01.mdl", with all internal references matching

5/ do the same for the pwk file
-> we now have a second file called "plcsiege_a01.pwk", with all internal references matching

6/ in your pwk file, add the following lines at the very end of it :

node dummy a01_pwk_use01
  parent plcsiege_a01_pwk
  position 1 -0.5 0.7
  orientation  0.0 0.0 0.0  0.0
  wirecolor 0.878431 0.341176 0.560784  
endnode
node dummy a01_pwk_use02
  parent plcsiege_a01_pwk
  position -1 -0.5 0.7
  orientation 0 0 0 0
  wirecolor 0.878431 0.341176 0.560784 
endnode

I don't think that the "wirecolor" reference really matters, so pick whatever you like. Notice the format of the "use node" name however DOES matter. If you followed what I was saying at point 3/ (and I hope you did ^.^), getting the name of the "use nodes" is the result of a simple substitution :

- model name : <prefix>_<suffix> = plcsiege_a01
- use node name : <suffix>_pwk_use<index> = a01_pwk_use01 (for the first index)

Ignore the "red" part, switch the "green" part from suffix to prefix, and add the "yellow" part at the end.

-> see below the hierarchy of the Bioware "Armoire" placeable as a further illustration.

(click to enlarge)

8/ Alter the values after the "position" reference to fit whatever seems fit for the placeable. Values come as measured in meters from the placeable base, and in an X, Y, Z order. In the case of the trebuchet, I chose two "use nodes" on each side of it, at the level of a human hand (so that the player character doesn't look down when it looks at the placeable) :

position 1 -0.5 0.7 -> at X = 1m, Y = -0.5m and Z = 0.7m height level from the placeable base (ground level usually)

9/ Add the new placeable to your "placeables.2da" file, then to your hakpack, and see what it gives in game.

PS : I hope this will work. This is my first time using the Bioware forum project features, so please be kind to me if it doesn't. I promise to fix whatever I can, and if it really doesn't work, I'll just switch back to Google documents or whatever. This forum and me aren't really used to cooperate >.<

Modifié par Nissa_Red, 16 mars 2013 - 10:48 .

[Nissa_Red]

@Bannor

Aww, okay.

I think I understand what you say about the engine rotating the texture to match the "direction" of the tile which needs to fit in with the other tiles. Believe me, it's among the first things I've explored (among others, like smoothing groups), even if it would have surprised me to find any default related to it in a CTP tileset. Not stating that the CTP is perfect (nothing ever is, unfortunately), but I have learned to expect high quality from it.

Please accept my praise, it's really deserved and genuine ^.^

I also understand that "groups" of tiles do not follow the same logic as standard tiles, in that they they have an "internal" orientation, so my example with that dune group wasn't perhaps the best, but I could easily produce other examples in other tilesets.

About seamless textures, yes, we agree again. No texture will ever be 100% seamless, unless you made it of a plain color I guess. However, the effect, whenever it happens, is so pronounced in my experience, and the base ground texture usually so "simple", that I wondered if it could be related to incorrect UV map settings. Taking the same texture covering a flat ground, and painting over a geometry that transitions from ground to raised, it's intuitve to understand that it's stretched (hence altered, and needing mapping to return to the same "granularity" than the ground level texture).

Yet again, I saw nothing wrong, even if I am far from being "autonomous" in that field, and prefer your opinion as valid over mine.

Bioware tiles have no transitions from ground level to raised level to speak of. Their geometries are extremely "blocky" as a whole, with plenty of 90° angles everywhere, which makes it easier on the texturing job. There is however a "ramp" feature, which I inspected next. Also, I returned to "CTP Babylon" which has some fantastic dunes crossers, which do not display that horrible seam. If they do, the effect remains in a very acceptable range to me.


(click to enlarge)


(click to enlarge)

So why is it that in both cases, BW's ramp and Babylon's dunes, the seam effect is not noticeable, and in the other cases it is ? Is it the lighting (ambient, specular, selfillum didn't seem to differ) ? Something in the UV mapping or smoothing groups I'm missing ?

While I understand that in some extreme cases, like Bloodmonkey's rocky mountains, more or less followed by LordOfWorms' and Senemenelas' rocky terrain, we will never be able to fix the visible seams because the angles on each side of the meshes are so steep, but other attempts at producing hills/mountains do not produce these visible artefacts. Proper texturing helps alot of course (see LordRosenkrantz's mountain tileset), but again, why do Babylon's dunes mesh in perfectly, and Project Q's don't ?

I blame it on OTR, but I've grown fairly rebellious towards the limits of the Aurora engine now.

There has to be something, please help me finding it ^.^

Modifié par Nissa_Red, 16 mars 2013 - 11:43 .

[Pstemarie]

I see a lot of references here and elsewhere in these forums to "notepad modelers". With the exception of swapping bitmaps, changing parameters for emitters, duping animations, and other rudimentary tasks, using Notepad to edit models requires a certain level of pre-existing expertise most new modelers do not possess. Granted not everyone can afford 3DS Max, but everyone can certainly afford GMax which is FREE.

Although limited compared to 3DS Max, GMax is more than capable of modifying and creating models for NWN. To specifically address Shadoow's comment - You CAN use GMax to edit pwks by editing the mesh attached to the pwk node.

Shadoow, you really ought to get GMax. You're a great scripter and with your at times insane attention to details, you'd make an excellent modeler.

Modifié par Pstemarie, 16 mars 2013 - 04:30 .

[Nissa_Red]

@ShadowM

That sounds reasonable to me.

To be honest, I don't expect every cc artist to always check the MM and properly set stats, creature abilities and spawn settings (not that it would help much in your case, for example), or to know about each and every quirk of the engine, before ever releasing their creatures to the vault. We module builders have to contribute to the general effort as well, and some people already do that (see the Community patch, or other related efforts), which is also why I went through all 50 or so pages of this very forum in the recent days (I know, that is really NOT reasonable, but I'm very passionate when I happen to be... passionate about something >.>), and learned tons of stuff I intend to put into good use.

I just wanted to point out that if a lazy Bioware designer decides to take a shortcut by deciding that a mage skeleton should have a pure neutral alignment instead of an evil one (or just did not set it at all), for example, it affects a ton of players down the road. If a butterfly flaps its wings in New York, it could potentially yield a tsunami in Tokyo or a hurricane in Paris. The same applies to community cc artists of course. While it might not seem much, or unnecessary, at the time of the release (and I imagine how someone may feel about wanting to getting something out, and be done with it, after pouring countless hours into creating it), it may cause tons of more hours of (this time) totally useless work on returning something to a "proper" state afterwards.

Anyway, I'm much more forgiving in the case of a cc artist releasing stuff to the community, and forgetting something in the heat of it. That's why feedback exists, and usually cc artists are sensible to it, and "fix" their own creations in time. I am much less lenient towards compilations (I am not going to name any, because it's not my goal to fuel any flames here), which still has tons of those improper creature, placeable, clothing and various other settings, even if it has been pointed out to them as such. This is something I really do regret.

Anyway, such is life, yes ?

[Nissa_Red]

@Randomdays

Yes, I would. Actually, even if I'd appreciate it, placeables do not matter that much to me, as I rarely use placeables trees, walls or buildings, and alot of them remain on a flat ground (so their flat PWK is valid and sufficient), but tiles, I use alot. I happened to see whole tilesets with no meshes reflecting walls or tree trunks in their WOKmeshes.

While I can understand why tileset creators would do it to save time and efforts (and spend it elsewhere), I wonder if there is more to it. Perhaps areas with such WOKmeshes would be way too laggy in the context of a PW, for example, because in a LAN/SP context, it doesn't seem to affect us (my players and me) that much.

[Nissa_Red]

@Pstemarie

I am only being indirectly adressed, but I have to disagree with you ^.^

Nothing ever replaces or surpasses the power and versatility of creating or altering models with GMax/nwMax, and I think everyone  should follow your advice on learning at least the basics of these tools.

However fixing models in notepad++ (or any other editor) is significantly easier , faster and not to mention cleaner, if one knows what one does, of course. This goes for the model itself, the associated files and its internal content (like animations).

What does "CleanModels" or equivalent tools do, if not working as "notepad modelers" ? Are you implying they're bad practice, or useless ?

Also, I've learned alot about the structure needed for models to properly operate once in game thanks to just looking at the text files, instead of being mislead sometimes by GMax/nwMax.

[NWN_baba yaga]

There are a few ways you can overcome these gaps or lighting bugs or whatever you want to call this issue. you can use the tilelights and place them to a point where these gaps occur and use them to fix the light (you basically illuminate all the vertexes of the tiles that share an edge.

I did this in every tile for the underdark spider caves. Every single tilelight was placed carefully because I knew i will have lighting problems later... but i think i managed it quite well

Or you do the way Zwerkules and rosenkrantz did and overlap the tilegeometry by a few cm etc. and so the landscape looks smoother.

Still the lighting for nwn is just bad to work with. No other game has such a dumb system to work with where logic seems not the thing to use when trying to enhance it...

I worked a long time with the quake2 engine and my experience with vertex light was pretty advanced. The falloff radius is what you have to take care of a bit but no one ever except me changed any light i guess

And OTR´s examination was very interesting with the ambient/diffuse reference. Either you have a very nice single shaped lit object in ascene but with interruptions almost everywhere or a dull but 100 % balanced lit geometry that looks 2D.

It´s difficult and suxs to also take care of that thing when you create a tileset because you sit in front of your PC with bleeding eyes for hours fixing stupid lights and vertices and you make no progress in general which demotivates you heavily.. me for sure!

Modifié par NWN_baba yaga, 16 mars 2013 - 01:44 .

[Pstemarie]

Nissa_Red wrote...

@Pstemarie

However fixing models in notepad++ (or any other editor) is significantly easier , faster and not to mention cleaner, if one knows what one does, of course. This goes for the model itself, the associated files and its internal content (like animations).

What does "CleanModels" or equivalent tools do, if not working as "notepad modelers" ? Are you implying they're bad practice, or useless ?

Also, I've learned alot about the structure needed for models to properly operate once in game thanks to just looking at the text files, instead of being mislead sometimes by GMax/nwMax.

Let me clarify - when I use the term "notepad modelers", I'm referring to modelers that solely rely upon notepad to edit model parameters. I'll never say that text editing doesn't have its place and, for certain tasks, is far easier and preferable (i.e. for emitters) than working in 3DS or GMax. However, I'm concerned that newbie modelers who see all this talk of notepad modeling might be mislead into thinking that text editing is the sole way to go. It's not, and as an experienced modeler, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that notepad's place in modeling is secondary to 3D modeling tools such as 3DS and GMax.

I use CleanModels myself and for working with and fixing tiles (not to mention other models), CleanModels has no peer. However, unlike the "notepad modeler" that stumbles - sometimes blindly - through a model, CleanModels uses a set of parameters that were developed by an expert (IMO) in the field of modeling. BUT, as you point out above, you need to "...know what you're doing."

On a parting note, I've spent a tremendous amount of time fixing models that were previously "fixed" by someone using notepad. In my experience, for most model tasks, notepad is a poor substitute for 3DS or GMax. 

[Nissa_Red]

@Baba Yaga

Awesome input, that's precisely what I was looking for when coming forth with my question. New ideas, explanations or takes on the issue.

I've walked the route of attempting to design a system that would cement/merge all the tiles of an area to prevent this very issue ("lighting seams"), making a single group/geometry out of them, like Bannor suggested. Initially, it seemed promising, since one could potentially build *any* kind of landscapes with it.

I quickly abandoned the idea though because 1/ I don't have the talent that you, Six or Zwerkules have at creating tilesets from scratch, and 2/ to me it goes against the very nature of the game : building inside the toolset, with tiles that one can easily and quickly assemble according to our needs and desires as builders. There are rules that go with that, but so be it. It's more flexible than having to change things inside GMax each time.

I guess I'll have a closer look at how you proceeded, because "Spider caves" is of course another of those tilesets that manage transitions between raised terrains without a *single* seam that I (or my players) ever could notice through all the time that it has been used to bring distraction and tons of fun to our evenings.

Thank you very much, Baba Yaga ^.^

[Shadooow]

Pstemarie wrote...

I see a lot of references here and elsewhere in these forums to "notepad modelers". With the exception of swapping bitmaps, changing parameters for emitters, duping animations, and other rudimentary tasks, using Notepad to edit models is BAD! Granted not everyone can afford 3DS Max, but everyone can certainly afford GMax which is FREE.

Didnt know there is an alternative, I downloaded it and experimenting with it already thanks for pointing me into this, hopefully I will be skilled enought to understand it :happy:

[Pstemarie]

ShaDoOoW wrote...

Pstemarie wrote...

I see a lot of references here and elsewhere in these forums to "notepad modelers". With the exception of swapping bitmaps, changing parameters for emitters, duping animations, and other rudimentary tasks, using Notepad to edit models is BAD! Granted not everyone can afford 3DS Max, but everyone can certainly afford GMax which is FREE.

Didnt know there is an alternative, I downloaded it and experimenting with it already thanks for pointing me into this, hopefully I will be skilled enought to understand it :happy:

Glad to point it out - we need more modelers in the Community. Harvest Moon, which has all the old RPG Modding Forums archived, should still have some great tutorials available.

[Nissa_Red]

@Pstemarie

I don't wish to argue with you, since I think we both mostly agree on the essential, just disagreeing about the usefulness of a decent text editor in the hands of a capable user, and that my little quabble would not further the point I am really trying to make to hopefully raise public awareness among the community (players, builders, but especially cc artists) about issues that may be too quickly disregarded sometimes.

If we can achieve that, please call me a happy builder ^.^

[Pstemarie]

Nissa_Red wrote...

@Pstemarie

I don't wish to argue with you, since I think we both mostly agree on the essential, just disagreeing about the usefulness of a decent text editor in the hands of a capable user, and that my little quabble would not further the point I am really trying to make to hopefully raise public awareness among the community (players, builders, but especially cc artists) about issues that may be too quickly disregarded sometimes.

If we can achieve that, please call me a happy builder ^.^

Public awareness is always better than public disawareness (is that even a word?). I have no desire to argue either - notepad only modeling works for many people and that's great. The more talent we can assemble and get building stuff the more fun it becomes to play and build with NWN. 

I mainly wanted to point out, for newbies that might look at the text version of a model and have an aneurism, that notepad modeling is an advanced mechanism and other alternatives do exist. I see - in the spirit of being fair to both sides of the issue - I need to revise my initial post to clarify this.

[Nissa_Red]

@Pstemarie

No need to, really, even if I appreciate the tact. As usual, I feel proud to belong to this community ^.^

I had prepared a rather lengthy reply, observing that nwMax could potentially introduce bugs that did not exist in the original model (due to rounding issues it seems to have, if I understood OTR correctly), that also it would allow us to import faulty models but would not let us export us faulty models (even if we're not really interested in fixing those, like unwelded vertices or missing anim keys, see the trebuchet model I "fixed" above), which could frustrate/confuse novice users, but I discarded it. Honestly, it's not what matters to me in the end.

You have the experience that I don't : getting content routinely out to our community. THAT I definitely won't argue with. Instead I want to respect that, and keep showing gratitude for it, which is why I want to save you any disgressions about my personal preferences in matters how *I* prefer to work. I use nwMax for at least 50% of the time, and a text editor/batch/other tools for the remaining 50%. Whatever suits other users best is ultimately for them to determine, keeping in mind though that nwMax is definitely worth learning for the long run. They should listen to you.

[NWN_baba yaga]

@Nissa_Red
thanks and glad I could throw in some usefull informations. I also had the single tilegroup for a whole scene in mind and did that with success. Still the lighting or more the shadows were just to dull and I I abandoned it. In my ravencast forest you can realy screw it up with the wrong or "hard" lighting that is like the "exterior area" default env. setting and I cant do anything against it. So i would never use a desert environment with any kind of blueish color for ambient of diffuse and you have to use colors that match the tilesets color a bit... well if thats possible for some

For outdoor areas i have a little idea in mind like a grid light placeable thats matches exactly the red grid of the toolset with a little bit of white lighting not to intensive to screw up the builders setup. You would need to get rid of it by night but it´s a thing that might work for tilesets that were build W/o any attention to this issue.

Modifié par NWN_baba yaga, 16 mars 2013 - 04:50 .

[OldTimeRadio]

@Nissa_Red, Bannor_Bloodfist - Point 7:

Nissa_Red wrote...
7/ last, but not least, a little pet peeve of mine : visible texture/lighting seams in tilesets. Have a look at this desert screenshot (CTP Babylon), and then the next one (CTP Babylon) :


(click to get an enlarged version)


(click to get an enlarged version)

The same happens in Project Q's desert by the way :


(click to get an enlarged version)

Those first two screenshots.  The first one is the "good" and the second one shows the problem, correct?  That issue in the second screenshot appears to be caused by the vertex lighting (what I normally call "shading") and not anything tricky or unusual.  When faces from two different tiles meet at tile edges, they must have the same angle of incidence.  In almost all cases, this basically means that tiles must meet at completely flat edges.  In that second shot, what's happened is someone probably used Soft Select and pulled the land "up" but their Soft Select radius was too wide and it included vertices which were part of an edge triangle.

I just made up a demo module which shows exactly what the issue is by showing correct and incorrect settings on the same edge of the same tile.  Basically, you need a buffer of triangles which are on the edges and are always flat.  "Good" is in the foreground (witha  buffer of triangles), "Bad" in the background, where the face angle of edge faces was changed.





So, the problem depicted in the second screen shot is solved- is it not?

Existing tiles which suffer from this and which need to be "repaired" should be able to be fixed by selecting the offending faces, going into Top View, in subobject mode (i.e. with the face(s) selected) going to the Edit Geometry rollout and clicking on the View Align button.  Then moving all verts of the triangle to 0 Z or whatever the appropriate edge Z height should be.

On the third screenshot: From the way my eyes read the shading on that tile, it really looks like the same thing as in the second screenshot.

Bannor Bloodfist wrote...
This applies to whatever texture you choose to paint, but primarily
affects what gets chosen for the ground texture. Seamless texture in
photoshop seems to be what you want, but it truly doesn't create
seamless texture. You end up with a texture that leans/points in a
single direction. When Aurora auto-rotates you completely lose the
seamlessness that photoshop creates.

Believe me, we tried
everything we could think of for Babylon. It can NOT be accomplished
the way the toolset and game engine paints the tiles.

If you (or anyone else) can describe exactly how I can set up a simple test to reproduce what you're describing on my end, I'd like to take a crack at it.  When something is described as being "impossible" I get all hot and bothered to find out if it really is and if so, why.

NWN_baba yaga wrote...
It´s difficult and suxs to also take care of that thing when you create a tileset because you sit in front of your PC with bleeding eyes for hours fixing stupid lights and vertices and you make no progress in general which demotivates you heavily.. me for sure!

"It is not hands that call us!  It is...desire."
-Pinhead, Hellraiser II

Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 16 mars 2013 - 04:57 .