649 réponses à ce sujet

[Draygoth28]

Just wondering how it's going?

[MerricksDad]

We're withdrawing from the home buying process for the year to plan a vacation instead. These home suck horribly for the cost. And the people we've dealt with are not much better. This has been such an emotional drain, and apparently the biggest waste of time I have ever committed.

 

So! good news! I'll be back on this project probably next week.

 

Also good news, we'll likely be taking my son to the Black Hills this summer so he can know what we have been talking about all these years

[3RavensMore]

Also good news, we'll likely be taking my son to the Black Hills this summer so he can know what we have been talking about all these years

 

Best news of the post.

[CaveGnome]

Sorry about your house woes, but happy to see you back to Nwn. You have a lucky son, those Black Hills look like a beautiful place...
cheers...

[rjshae]

Houses are machines designed to make you do extra work. It's a labor generating device.

[Verilazic]

We're withdrawing from the home buying process for the year to plan a vacation instead. These home suck horribly for the cost. And the people we've dealt with are not much better. This has been such an emotional drain, and apparently the biggest waste of time I have ever committed.

 

So! good news! I'll be back on this project probably next week.

 

Also good news, we'll likely be taking my son to the Black Hills this summer so he can know what we have been talking about all these years

 

I remember the 3 months it took my boss to buy a house for the first time. He's one of the most energetic, intense, resilient people I know, but I remember that time period very well because he was an absolute zombie during it. You're not alone in hating the process.

[kalbaern]

A whole month and no new screenies? I'm having withdrawals now. Hope all is well and can't wait, however long, to give this set a whirl.

[henesua]

I'm missing your presence around here too, and hope all is good on your end, MD.

[MerricksDad]

Funny that you guys posted these this week. I'm finally back. Had two more houses to check out, which we should not have done. But we're out now. No more. Vacation planning in full now. 3 weekends and two weeks in black hills coming up!! woot!

 

 

Anyway, yesterday I was tinkering with the streams and decided I wanted to play with env maps some more. I found this interesting bit, and I'm not very happy:

 

• If I assign an env map to an area via the tileset, that envmap is applied to all objects in that area unless otherwise specified. This is good.
• If that object then moves to another area, with a different envmap, the original envmap carries over with that object. This is bad.

So to counter this, I found this bit:

• Forcing a reload of the character model updates the area-specific envmap. This is good.
• Dropping carried items displays them on the ground with the previous envmap. This is bad.
• Picking them up again refreshes the envmap. This is good.

I haven't looked yet, but is there a script method to force this without removing gear or forcing a model load? I could force a model reload (or two stage) via script, I know that. And I could unequip objects and redraw them with script. But I'm looking for an easier idea.

 

What I'm doing is giving my lava caves a dark upper, and bright lava lower, envmap so that the armor reflects as such. Rural outside has a nice grassy bottom, a gray center, and a blue sky (or similar if the sky is to be stormy). And my dungeons have a generic dark envmap with occasional light sources up the center which are dim. The reflections on the metal and shiny skin is much much better than shimmery metal.

 

I also use custom envmaps. I took the envmaps that OTR showed a few years ago. Those circle ones that are applied without cubemapping. Then I rescale them from 256 up to 384, increase the image size to 512, creating a black border, remove anything outside the center circle and make that black, and then resize to 256. This gives a nice realistic shine, which you can use to make realistic glass, plastic, or smooth metal with a more accurate reflection of the area.

 

What I'd like to do is create a set of envmaps you can apply to tilesets, or via script, which match regions within the tileset. It seems like with scripting you an only do 99 or 100 envmaps, unless I read that wrong. Otherwise you can do one per tileset. But think about swapping envmaps when you enter a tile that is bright. Say it has a pool of water in it, you could reflect that pool onto the shiny bits, instead of using a generic metal for everything.

[MerricksDad]

And I need a new 3-button mouse before I can do anymore. This one is dead and I use that third button for side-stepping or adjusting camera angle. If it isn't one thing, it's another.

[3RavensMore]

Wow, I must have actually acquired a bit of knowledge here and there--I almost understood what you were talking about.    Glad you back! 

[YeoldeFog]

Wow, I must have actually acquired a bit of knowledge here and there--I almost understood what you were talking about.    Glad you back! 

 

Yeah, a 3-button mouse can be very complicated... I mean, it's not like it's a 2-button mouse! And don't let me start with "Camera Angle" Pheew! 

 

 

[3RavensMore]

Yeah, a 3-button mouse can be very complicated... I mean, it's not like it's a 2-button mouse! And don't let me start with "Camera Angle" Pheew! 

 

 

 

Ewww...I'm get ya for that my pretty.  You and your little dog too!

[rjshae]

And I need a new 3-button mouse before I can do anymore. This one is dead and I use that third button for side-stepping or adjusting camera angle. If it isn't one thing, it's another.

 

Only three buttons...?

 

[MerricksDad]

My high school AG class had a mouse/pen/super pad combo. The pad had a bunch of controls drawn on it, and it responded to the pen. You could use the mouse and pen in unison if needed. We had programs for landscaping, as well as viewing the biology of plants. It was really quite something. Ever since then, I have wanted a good pen/pad system for drawing or other manipulation. But I can't find one I can afford.

[3RavensMore]

My high school AG class had a mouse/pen/super pad combo. The pad had a bunch of controls drawn on it, and it responded to the pen. You could use the mouse and pen in unison if needed. We had programs for landscaping, as well as viewing the biology of plants. It was really quite something. Ever since then, I have wanted a good pen/pad system for drawing or other manipulation. But I can't find one I can afford.

 

Nice.  My HS didn't even have a computer.  Seriously, it was pre-PC.  Yes, we did everything with stone knives and bear skins.

[Tarot Redhand]

Ah, back in the day  . To be honest in my case, it wasn't the lack of tools so much as the Neanderthals that ran the place...

 

TR

[MerricksDad]

You two are terrible. How did you ever come out of your caves to play video games? It must have been so refreshing from all the having to boil lard and chew tendon.

[Tarot Redhand]

But making glue was the fun part of the day...

 

TR

[MerricksDad]

Finally got my mouse, now I need to figure where I left off. This could take another day

[Draygoth28]

Any updates or screenshots of progress?

[MerricksDad]

A month later, and no progress at all, except secret stuff. I have been keeping myself busy making more plant textures for winter release, as well as prepping for that SD vacation. By the way, that is coming up on the 11th of this month, and I will be gone, and loving it, for three weekends worth. When I get back, there will be textures textures textures, and I will find it very very hard not to finish this project this year.

 

In the meantime, Ive put a tiny amount of work into some of my miniatures models, and have tinkered around with moving the mountain tileset to other forms.

One form is half scale, where the PC is assumed to be 3 feet tall instead of 6. Each tile, or tile group, is then created for a specific purpose, much like a battle arena mixed with oldschool dungeons on the nintendo or SNES, where those tiles only associate with each other on a side. Think also about how DND minis worked, or with the various game tiles you can buy for PNP games. This would be specifically for my mini models, and would be most used with a more isometric or top down view. It would be much harder to simply create NWN style tiles for this, but I'll get a lot more use out of tile group looking tiles. Given that the current tile size is 10 meters, that would change the scale to 20 meters, or about 60 feet (which you could tinker with to equal 50 feet if you really wanted to fudge the internal math). How much stuff goes in 60 feet? A lot. Each tile would be fantastic (at a distance), and tile groups would be for VERY specific needs. It may also clear up some clutter issues I've had in the past at tile borders. As you can guess, I use my mini-models for high combat settings against lots of on-screen units. You might find it more useful for epic battles with very little story line, but using a lot of game-based skill. Another benefit to this scale is that the base textures are going to be less stretched out, and new textures don't require as much work. The original camera angles and zoom extents will allow this map scale to create a great high detail game for those who want a lot more exploration and old school fighting with larger spell sizes and ranges. It also allows you to make more use of mostly-flat tiles, but at the same time give the appearance of something less flat.

The other form is double scale, where the PC is assumed to be 12 feet tall. Each tile is then right-sized to create a more dungeon siege looking set. In the original dungeon siege, approximately 2 tiles wide filled the same space as one tile in NWN (some would say it was actually 3). This allowed for a better appearing height transition between 8 heights, and would greatly reduce the effort of making fitting tiles for complex tilesets in NWN. Double scale also allows you to display twice the content on a character, given the original camera angles, and gives you more freedom to actually make use of larger textures. Skins will also conform better to a bone shape at that scale without much tinkering in GMAX.

So why have I been thinking about all that? Because NWN has always annoyed me as being the only game to have tiles approximately that size. It inherently reduces functionality and playability and demands a lot more artistic ability and forethought to build a tileset at that scale. I find it strange that 2x or 1/2x would have been so easy, yet they failed to realize that. Other games use tiles which are larger than the viewable area from the character's camera, or tiles which are smaller so that a greater detail of variety can be made without a lot of human interaction in the toolset. I want both of those, and have for years.

Now... I've already worked with both of these before, and highly prefer the smaller character, so I've already been putting a lot of work (until recently) into the smaller characters. In doing that, I do know that NWN does need a lot of base file changes to make use of that scale. For instance, scale in game script code assumes meters, so everything has to be recalculated. As do move speed 2da's, sight ranges, bounding boxes for combat, etc. This isn't hard, and I plan to release a kit to make it easy to work with 1/2 scale tiles. And no, all current material won't fit, so this gives me the perfect opportunity to build a new kitting system for NWN so you can download kits of miniature bits for your dungeons and what not. Call it a new start for NWN for some people. Others will absolutely hate it, I know that. What you will see is a game which is set up so that your normal view on your character works out to about 2-3 inches of screen on a laptop, and best played from a near-isometric view, rather than eye level, or first person.

If you'd like a brief idea of what I'm releasing, I'm posting it elsewhere later.

Another thing I have been tinkering with is a non-square tileset layout. It is difficult, and not intuitive in the toolset, but those of you who have converted huge areas out of other games will understand the complexity you can display better without tiles. This little bit may never become a reality for other people to use, as the tileset revolves around tile groups with only three tiles, in an L shape. My brain is at least strange.

July 11th to about the 27th, and then I'll probably have no choice but to work on this tileset, in full scale first.

[Tarot Redhand]

Just a thought, but if you are messing with scales... How about making some miniature placeables to add to the ones TheGeorge converted from NwN2 years ago. They would have uses other than just mapping for example for flying over.

 

TR

[MerricksDad]

I've got a bucket of placeables in the works already. Two kinds: I have common placeables which replace many of the NWN OC stuff, increasing texture quality, and then I have placeables which modify the landscape slightly which fit directly with the tileset, as seen in TorchLight2 map editor. But I think, at the moment, and since I am releasing the minis stuff for a very specific story module, I won't be doing a lot of random use placeables at the start. I certainly have big dreams though.

 

Are you talking about these ones?

[Tarot Redhand]

Those are just about all there is at the moment. Any new ones might encourage more people to download this package.

 

TR