22 réponses à ce sujet

[Rolo Kipp]

 <expanding...>

What I would like, and don't have time to get up to speed on, is a modification of the dock groups (piers, actually) for various tilesets.

I don't want any change to the visual aspects, just a flat walk-plane on level with the pier so that we can have ship placeables come in to mooring and then have them walkable.

Related to this month's CCC, I want to make an animated Spelljammer that descends and docks (and the opposite) and is boardable. Leave it up to the builders to use invisible blocks to keep the PCs from walking on air, but give me ships I can board! :-)

Please =)

<...his horizons>

[Rolo Kipp]

<looking for...>

Along those lines, any one know the height of the walkmesh on the different piers?
I'll need to make ship decks the same height or we'd have to establish a standard ( like a gangway ramp up to 2.5 meters above the water ;-).

<...standards>

[Oseryn]

Not sure if I have exactly what you want, but I use modified tile set groups that have only the walkmeshes of the ship deck and a *dock to ship ramp walkmesh*, as well as the water and underwater planes. I use these tiles with an animated placeable ship, a placeable ramp and an invisible blocker to allow player to board the placeable ships after they dock. Is this the sort of thing you are looking for? If so, it sounds like it could easily be adapted to other ship or airship groups. I could post a mod with a hak if you wanted to see it in action with ... say... the tcn01 city ship docked.

[Rolo Kipp]

<picking...>

Actually, that is almost *exactly* what I was asking for :-)
Would love a demo & hak :-)

<...to not be picky>

[henesua]

Actually, Oseryn, I would like to see that too.

[Oseryn]

I do this with other tilesets also, and this is the TCN01 version. There's no reason you couldn't do this with airships also. In fact I have a animated airship the comes in from high overhead (off to on animation), lands (on animation), then will take back off again (on to off) and park *offscreen* (off) waiting till it's called again. . I never finished a real dock location for it though - just started working off the tcn01 raised terrain next to water - with a gangplank extending out to the docked airship. I thought of doing this off the TNO high walls too - next to water - with airships. It shouldn't be too difficult.

Mini-maps are problematic though - but that's a minor detail for me. I just use the mini-map for the docked set ... and when the ships is away .. well

There's a lot that could be improved on - for example, instead of a gangplank that appears and disappears, one that was animated to raise and lower would be cool (humm... actually, like the tcn01 drawbridge add-on - but maybe a bit longer and narrower. Animations could be refined for certain. I'm sure there are lot's of other tweaks that could be made.

Timing is everything on this stuff. Having the gangplank appear and the blocker destroyed needs to occur shortly after the off-to-on animation has completed. This may sound more complicated then it really is though. Just a little trial and error and a stop watch ap on the smart phone makes it pretty easy.

Anyway, here's the basic working concept: http://social.biowar...m/project/8951/

[Oseryn]

Well the projects section here is nice - but was a little awkward to understand. I finally figured out I have to go to *Manage Files* and make the files *available* so they can be downloaded. Sorry for the delay.

[Rolo Kipp]

<screaming...>

I'm dealing with some health issues, so it'll be a bit before I can play with this. Don't want you thinking the tree fell in the forest with no one to hear :-P

This looks like just what I want :-)

<...with no mouth>

[Proleric]

Very useful.

I also found some walkable water tiles on the vault. I can use them as-is, but did anyone ever develop that idea into a more complete tileset?

[Bannor Bloodfist]

Proleric1 wrote...
Very useful.
I also found some walkable water tiles on the vault. I can use them as-is, but did anyone ever develop that idea into a more complete tileset?

It truly depends on the various tilesets.  And what you mean by walkable water.  It is farily easy to batch change one surface type to another, but this leads to various issues.  If you globally change a "deep water" face to be a "walkable surface say type 6" and then go in game to use the tileset, you will find several issues:

1) folks can walk up and down cliff faces, actually jumping from deep water to whatever ground level is walkable next to them, so a shark could follow you OUT of the water and just "swim" across the ground and attack whatever it wanted anywhere in the tileset.

2) Pathnodes would also have to be changed or you will find your companions and npcs, walking off the face of ground down into the water etc... if you DON'T edit the pathnodes, you will find companions and NPC's getting stuck all over the tileset.

CTP was working on a so-called Tropical set, which was actuallly a merge of various other outdoor rural type tilesets and groups to enable you to travel down into the water at various locations and then walk around uner the water. To accomplish this we had to edit the wok to add a non-walkable stretch of material just below waters edge to prevent what I was referring to above.  It is a royal pain, and to be honest, was killing me as I was the only one editing those types of tiles.  That set has roughly 1400 tiles in it, with likely around 600 that had water in some walkable fashion, that required specific attention to detail. 

So, it CAN be accomplished, but the more water tiles or water-ground tiles you have, the more editing is required on every single one of those tiles to make them truly usable without immersion breaking issues.

CTP is now dead as a fulll project team, and not likely to re-emerge as the few remaining members in the community have moved on to other things.  I truly wish it was otherwise, but the fact is, a SINGLE tileset can kill a team faster than just about anything.  Tilesets just require too many tiles, and when folks add this or that feature (most especially multiple landscapes or multiple crossers like roads, bridges etc) the tile numbers just grow exponentially.  CTP found that no matter what we added, it was never enough as we constantly were requested by the community at large to add this and that, sometimes we could, but most times the requests were just unrealistic time wise.

[Mecheon]

Was that based on the Bioware tropical?

... How horrible is that stuff to get working? My own tileset forays tend to end quite badly, but heck knows if its something I can clunk through notepad I'll have a lot better luck

[Proleric]

Bannor, thanks for the explanation.

Though it's not pretty, I guess there are times when using a single "trick" tile, with scripted entry, exit and containment, is pragmatic, compared to the complexity involved in making a complete tileset.

[Proleric]

I'm working on the city walkable water tile from that hak. I had to fix the water plane geometry and texture to match the regular water tiles which prevent creatures escaping to land / ships. I also had to lower the walkmesh to match the CEP swim animation.

Unfortunately, the water isn't very transparent, so creatures are hard to see. There may be combat issues, too. I'll play around with this, but I'm beginning to wonder if it wouldn't be easier to raise the ship tiles to elevation level, then flood the area with static placeable water?

[Bannor Bloodfist]

Mecheon wrote...

Was that based on the Bioware tropical?

... How horrible is that stuff to get working? My own tileset forays tend to end quite badly, but heck knows if its something I can clunk through notepad I'll have a lot better luck

No, the CTP Tropical was a merge of several tilesets and addons for tilesets long before Bioware released a Tropical tileset.  However, when Bioware DID release their set, we did grab a few groups and such, a few terrain tiles to merge in with ours for variety sake etc.

The issue is the merging of the various terrains and crossers.  Everyone wants everything to be inter-connectable and that requires a huge amount of work to generate tiles that will merge the various terrains first, then get(s) duplicated again for every single crosser you have in the given set (with a few exceptions).

To give a slightly better explanation, a single terrain, say grass, needs at minimum about 9 tiles to get it working.  Now add raise/lower and you have to generate a bunch more, I can't remember the multiplier number but it is there.

Now, add a second terrain.... sand... to get it to paint next to grass you have to generate a tile for every possible combination of flat AND raised/lower tlles... if you have crossers, you just multiplied again.

Now add Water, after all what good is a beach without water?  Now you have to generate tiles that will merge Water with Sand, Water with Grass, and Water with Sand And Grass on a single tile (this also means Water with Grass and Sand - left to right on a single tile...)  Again, add crossers (fences, roads, paths whatever) and you multiply again...

Now add Trees (what type of tree by the way?  Tropical Style like Palms or Rural / normal trees and you end up with BOTH) then all the previous mentioned multiplications again.

A single tile has four sides AND 4 corners, you have to generate a tile for all of those positions that will allow you to paint them down in Toolset.  They also may or may not have up to 4 different crossers conecting via the sides and one for full left/right or top/bottom and depending on other terrain types that connect.... the list grows exponentially.

NONE of that is hard to do, but ALL of it takes time, the more tiiles in a set, the more time it takes to generate/create them.  That is why tilesets take sooo much time to release, and why most NEWER tilesets have much fewer terrains to have to deal with.  TNO or Bioware Rural/Castle from 1.69 has over 1200 tiles, I forget the exact number, and it was STILL missing tiles for certain possible locations in a given area, IE there may not be a tile created that allows you to connect between certain types of things.  Not just crosser issues, but also terrain issues.

At one point, there was going to be an update to nwmax, to be relased by Thrikeen, but when he was let go from Bioware, he stopped all development of said update.  That upgrade to NWMax would have had a true helper system to generate all the tiles necessary (as blank tiles) to get two terrains and/or crossers added into a set.  No one else has ever attempted such a thing.  It is sorely needed, heck, just generating the empty filenamed.mdl files that would then have to be edited, would have been a HUGE savings in time, and reduction in missing tiles.

Velmar's TSC (Tile Set Creator) was the best helper I have ever seen beyond the original nwmax, to aid a tileset creator with filling in all the necessary details for a given tile or tileset.  Unfortunately, it no longer runs at all in 3dsmax past version 9. 

Michael Darkangle is likely the only person left in the community that might be convinced to try to fix those issues or to actually generate the tool(s) that Thrikeen wished to add, but he already has more than enough work to keep him busy.  It is so sad that we lost folks like Danmar, Velmar, Joco (nwmax originator), Thrikeen etc... few folks have the inclination to learn a scripting system that changes every time 3dsmax updates, which is every year now.

Modifié par Bannor Bloodfist, 15 janvier 2014 - 01:28 .

[henesua]

Bannor Bloodfist wrote...
To give a slightly better explanation, a single terrain, say grass, needs at minimum about 9 tiles to get it working.  Now add raise/lower and you have to generate a bunch more, I can't remember the multiplier number but it is there.

I'm confused here. I don't think I understand you. My understanding is the following for terrain without a raise lower option:

if you only have one terrain, you only need 1 tile.

If you have two terrains you need at minimum 6 tiles for the two to work together.

[Mecheon]

Bleh. Was hoping it was something I could help with, though I still use an old version of Gmax which I believe might have the tileset creator still working? Never actually clicked it

CTP is seriously my favourite thing from the Vault so if there was a chance at anything else sliding out I'd jump on it like that to see what I can plug in

[Proleric]

So did no one ever make a walkable / swimmable water tile (as opposed to tile magic)?

[Zwerkules]

For a few tiles this is okay, but it doesn't work for a whole tileset. I made the water in the caves tileset walkable for sea creatures but the shores non-walkable so they couldn't leave the water. This had undisireable effects like pathfinding issues and encounters without a pre-defined spawn point placing creatures like ogres in the water which they were unable to leave.
I changed it all back to the way it was.

[Proleric]

In the end, I was able to tweak the tile (see video), adjusting the height of the creature models to fit.

[Bannor Bloodfist]

henesua wrote...

Bannor Bloodfist wrote...
To give a slightly better explanation, a single terrain, say grass, needs at minimum about 9 tiles to get it working.  Now add raise/lower and you have to generate a bunch more, I can't remember the multiplier number but it is there.

I'm confused here. I don't think I understand you. My understanding is the following for terrain without a raise lower option:

if you only have one terrain, you only need 1 tile.

If you have two terrains you need at minimum 6 tiles for the two to work together.

Technically speaking, that is correct, but that is one super boring tileset.  Even with two terrains, with only the single variation of that one center tile, it is going to be really boring. 

Anyway, I think I was confusing myself a bit in that description, I was actually thinking crossers, and speaking terrains... not quite the same thing. I was also considering the raise/lower (which every builder wants when creating an area) and of coruse that adds tiles to the minimum as well. Even then, my math was off. 

Singler terrain, NO crossers, NO variation in Height, == 1 tile.
Add Raise/Lower = 6 (works like a crosser, even though it is counted and painted as a terrain, this typically ASSUMED to be part of the main terrain)
Add additional terrains... well, the numbers climb quickly.

Single crosser, 1 tile that dead-ends in middle of tile, only connects on only one side(or top or bottom, all is the same to the engine for this bit) one with a connection for each pair of sides top-bottom, leftside-top intereact with each other. One more that gives a T style intersection in the middle.  This is also assuming NO raise/lower. If you add raise/lower to the terrain, typically you will NOT have a T intersection in the middle of the tile as that is where the upslope or downsloped begins/ends, BUT you will have to double the single side dead-end so one stops in middel but at lower side of the hill, one dead-ends in middle but on top section of hill.

For variety, you really need to add multiple variations on each individual tile.  That is what kills ya in the long run, the question of "Do I make a boring set, or do I make one with enough variation to give the builder some real choices when he creates an area?"  I always shoot for the later.

Anyway, it gets confusing really quickly, and it is also VERY easy to forget to create certain tiles when adding additional terrains or crossers, and the raise/lower bits and pieces needed.

Modifié par Bannor Bloodfist, 20 janvier 2014 - 05:55 .

[Bannor Bloodfist]

Proleric1 wrote...

So did no one ever make a walkable / swimmable water tile (as opposed to tile magic)?

If you search for undersea or underwater on the vault, you will find a few.  One of the better ones in the choices is Undersea 1.1 by Runemaker but there are likely others out there as well that may or may not be what you are looking for.

[Proleric]

Yes, there are some promising candidates for underwater areas, but I'm currently working on surface action around a ship, as shown briefly in the video. I take Zwerkules' point, too; I'm sure it's not easy to make a general-purpose swimmable tileset, but, within a single module, it's more straightforward to control the deployment of a few bespoke tiles.

Modifié par Proleric1, 20 janvier 2014 - 09:46 .

[henesua]

I generally prefer walkable terrain to blocking terrain, and have thus far managed to avoid unintended spawns in walkable water. For tidal water, thick brush, and marsh I use triggers and AOE's to determine if a player has entered the watey area.

Now that I am using NWNX I am curious if we can capture footstep change events, and apply terrain effects based on footstep type.