649 réponses à ce sujet

[MerricksDad]

I very much enjoy those, but my scale change was going only 50% smaller than what NWN already has in OC. When all put together, my modules only use an overland map system like that in baldurs gate. Nothing as fancy as actual mountains and 3d town minis. Although, you might make me change that in a year or so. Not this time around. Trying to stay on target. Half a year is already gone.

[MerricksDad]

Fresh back from vacation.

 

Parsing trip pictures -- 100% complete

Planning new texture placement -- 100% complete

Planning new height transition -- 100% complete

Separating regions into individual tilesets -- 100% complete

 

 

 

Pictures coming up starting hopefully next Wednesday for the tileset.

 

So what I am doing is separating the tileset into a few regional subsets with eventual mixers. Here's the new plan so far:

 

High Plains

this is your basic grass, very similar to OC rural. It will be a tall grass or prairie setting, with a very short height transition. It will also have a river system with a very small river width, but it can cut hills of various heights with tile groups to simulate bends through softer rock layers. I'm going to stick with a near-grayscale tanish color for ground, similar to that found on the road in OC rural, but with less color. Trees will consist of scrub oak and box elder, almost entirely, with the occasional buffalo berry or something sage in color to break up the monotony. In addition to the base grass color/height/mass, the area will be filled with various wildflowers and specific grasses. High plains will feature two pond types: clean and alkali. Both will be walk-in depth. Cut height transitions, as well as alkali pools, will show badlands clay rocks as their base.

 

Badlands

This will connect easily with High Plains, but I also intend to connect it to Limestone Cliffs. Again, the color will be near-grayscale tanish, but will have more variation in deeper cuts. Transitions will be 1:3 grade with a half-height crosser with interesting claw-like ramps. No base grass will exist for this tileset, but the tiles will have specific grasses and flowers on-tile, with the option to add tileset-specific additional plants, such as prickly pear, or world-specific stuff-things. Trees will consist of ash, cottonwood, and scrub oak. Badlands will feature no water type, but will contain a river crosser without height transitions, so that you can portray the bottom drainage level of your region. This sub-set will feature only a few shallow cave entrances. Many placeable boulders, rubble piles, and spires, will be available.

 

Limestone Cliffs

This will connect to both the High Plains and the Badlands sets. Height transitions will come in a few varieties via corner-type, and can change color via crossers. This set will contain many cave entrance variants, including sinkholes for top-down access. The base color will be a yellow tone dirt, but can change to red, gray, or blackened with age/acid. This will contain a sickly base grass which is short, as well as on-tile rim grass and patches of specific vegetation. Placeables will include various sage and scrub plants which can grow directly from the height transition cracks. Trees will consist of poplar, birch, and ponderosa pine, with the occasional spruce. Limestone cliffs will feature a deep water area, as well as rapid rivers. Shallows will be portrayed by passing the river through the water area, rather than making large walkable water tiles. This sub-set will have many waterfalls. I'd like to feature a stacked limestone wall crosser, as well as many placeables for those torn-down limestone bits, such as rock piles, gigantic boulders, and natural stacks of top-heavy stone.

 

Granitelands

This will connect down to the Limestone Cliffs tileset via a violent transition through schist and gneiss. Granite masses will come in a few different flavors, including: weathered smooth, weathered spire, cut and mined, and metamorphic outcrops. Height transitions will be approximately 1:3 with a half-height transition already on tile variants, but not accessible via a crosser. Non-walkable transitions will be minimum 1:1 with metamorphic outcrops, or steeper with spires and mined regions. All of those mentioned will be worked into the set via groups, and may not be mixable except in certain groups. Walkable ground which is not in the weathered smooth region will consist of mica rich gray powder with splotches of crushed schist and granite. Tileset-specific placeables will allow you to more granitize the tile floor, or change it fully to crushed granite, especially for use near mined areas. Granitelands will have water transitions of two types: very soft, and instantly deep. You can then portray both walk-in water regions, as well as frightening plunges. This subset will have patches of on-tile grass of many varities, and flat regions will have a basic grass with flowers and weeds. On-tile vegetation will offer a selection of pine, spruce, or birch, all accessible via crossers. Less steep tiles will also feature scrub oak and sage-colored shrubs. River crossers will be thin, shallow, and rapid at almost all points. Waterfalls will be represented only with placeable sprinklings or ribbons. This sub-set will feature many types of mine entrances, as well as mineral rich wall-like features.

 

Granitelands will not be as tall overall as previous views of this tileset have been. It simply doesn't need to be for most uses. I may still make some groups with some really high reachable areas which do not fit within the 4-5 tileset corner types.

Each region MAY feature a few basic skyboxes, but I'd like to make it so the OC skyboxes, as well as many of the community skyboxes, will function well with the tileset. The way this will work best is with a proper edge-tile to hide skybox ground coloration where present.

Each region will also have a high "surround" tile type, which you use as the edge, and also to avoid that edge-darkening built-in feature of the engine which I hate so much. This lets you replace the built in edge-tile system, as well as change its location on the map. It also lets you encapsulate the area more fully without using standard tile types. For instance, the Granitelands will feature two surround types: steep drop, and impassible cliff wall. This lets you represent both being up on top of a high granite mass, or being in a valley surrounded by weathered granite. The only way I can imagine to encapsulate the other sets is with walls, so they will also feature impassible cliff types, but will also feature normal edge-tiles of plains grass, which I am not fond of. In all the variations of this surround type, you will get much greater variation than with standard built-in edge-tile systems, as well as have some small amount of walkable space on some of those tiles which does not fade to darkness.

Already mentioned above, the transitions between regions will come later. I don't want to waste time playing world-builder in such a way that all this stuff has to instantly fit together. I know areas can only be so big, so there is no point in making the whole area represent 200 miles of land. As with the Infinity engine, the spaces between will be imagined... for now.

As I said before vacation, I would like to put this out in full scale first, so you can all use it without having to shift to my mini character system. After that, it will be easy to build my mini battle system from parts of this tileset. Very easy. But man, I cannot wait to build some of the places I have been for the last week for my minis system.

[MerricksDad]

I forgot to mention I also want to do something similar to how Torchlight 2 makes lots of visible-but-not-reachable areas. If you don't know what I mean, this is especially visible in the dungeon/crypt and tower tilesets from TL2. Here's a picture of one of the undead crypts from TL2 which shows an area which looks like it is reachable, but not. These are very common in those two types of areas.

 

http://www.geforce.c...creenshot-3.jpg

[Tarot Redhand]

Any plans for indigenous creatures (e.g. prairie dogs, coyotes etc.) for these sometime in the future?

 

TR

[MerricksDad]

I'm putting all work on creature models aside until I get the tileset version 1 released. Then I want to focus on that drow-themed adventure more for my minis.

 

In a previous tileset I did years ago, there was a tile with a burrow, but it was more like a wood chuck hole than anything else. I've been looking at some graphics from a few facebook games which use a 3d model as a floor and mostly sprites for effects. One of those effects actually creates a raised section on the ground only a few feet from the surface and then makes an indentation, which is then textured with what looks like a good burrow entrance. I've been thinking along those lines for my worm models, as well as for some impact graphics I have been working on for the minis. When they are played quickly with an earthen spash of debris, they look pretty good for pop-up creatures, and the mound can be left behind and partially filled in with another model after the creature death. After a time, both could fade away. Something to think about.

[MerricksDad]

Hey, before I have to spend hours working on this again, does anybody know the location of the grass model for the internal grass placement feature? If I can get that out, I can grab the danglymesh numbers off it and not have to poke around to find the matching numbers for other grasses I plan to insert into the tilesets.

 

Also, just finished the first half of the High Plains tileset, sans special vegetation. It almost made me want to return directly to south dakota. But I have work to do.

 

Since the set is so small, I'm going to try and place the badlands set right inside the high plains set. Otherwise, the base set count for the high plains is only 62 tiles before special group features.

[MerricksDad]

Here's the first look at the contours for High Plains. There is a visible cutting stream but the stream is filled with grass walkmesh at the moment. I've also got a lot of fraction issues I need to clean up near edges, otherwise all these white lines will stay visible.

 

[3RavensMore]

High plains...or the Sand Hills.  It's always a treat to see something I know well IRL come to life in NWN.

[MerricksDad]

Stuck on spending some time trying to get my nwmax ExportAll() function to actually export. Damn thing anyway. I had modified it so I could have it ignore all sanity check difficulties, then it no longer exported. It does everything but actually export. So I reinstalled nwmax, kinda lost all my modifications temporarily, and now it still won't actually export anything. Individual export still works, and the ExportAll called from the nwmax panel button works, but I cannot call ExportAll from anywhere else and have it export. Confusing. Oh well.

 

I've upgraded the texture to something which looks more like grass at a distance to get rid of the grass-less look past the fade away line. I've also given the walkmesh the proper water regions. The grasses go down into the water slightly, and I haven't a-node-ed the water yet, so it doesn't yet splash properly. I also need to update the alkali pool water texture. Still looking for that built-in grass flex value so I can clone it out to my other grasses. Also working on a good river bed texture to use and not getting one to match the lighting properly. Only a matter of time.

 

Thinking to make the badlands a chasm type in the high plains. The buffalo gap grasslands were actually on top of the badlands area, not the other way around. Only a rare few areas out there were higher than the surrounding plains level, so I might make a shorter and sharper badlands UP too. When combined they will make the higher badlands formations. I'd like to do a white river color down below, and a ogalalla formation on top. I probably wont go so far as to include the lower yellow and red level in this set at this time, but if I do, it will be a deeper chasm variety for use inside chasm areas, and won't be available at base level. I will probably duplicate the upper steam crosser for use down in the badlands chasm, and retexture it for use with the white dirt. The river is extremely simple now, but at some point in the future I'd like to retool it to be more varied and/or have more tileset variants. Right now it is almost like an irrigation ditch, which isn't what I was going for.

[MerricksDad]

Stream and erosion cuts have been constructed and initial badlands layer texture has been added. Deeper badlands cuts will be lighter and have less flat surfaces.

 

[The Mad Poet]

It looks fantastic. Do you plan on adding more than just this wonderful terrain? Buildings, tents, etc etc...

[MerricksDad]

Well actually, if I keep it just the terrain, other people can get in on making those things, or converting certain tiles from say rural or forest over to the same textures as this. I don't want to get into making a huge variety of buildings I might never use, and that the majority of users will never use, especially if they can just as easily make their own conversions from rural or forest.

For instance, I have heard that Spain has some badlands regions, and I would bet that at one time the locals put up some stone buildings in the area, or the Romans even put up non-local-made buildings. So you might consider taking some of the spectacular building designs from something like TNO city and porting them to the badlands, and even paint them to make them fit in with the rock texture.

 

I tend to keep 3 stone henge, a few dolmen, some grave stones, worn roads, some world-specific bridges, and some teleport circles around and move them from tileset to tileset, so you might end up with those in the first release, but probably not. I'm actually thinking to stop that process and just make them creature placeables anyway (ever since I did those gem-holding creature placeable tables a few months back).

 

Overall, I think that stuff makes great expansion content, especially if many of the additions are similarly themed across a few tilesets.

 

Basically the only thing these tilesets will release with initially will be the terrain, with more flowers, rocks, and vegetation, and a kit of placeable additional vegetation and matching rocks for thickening up the tile variation. I have no intentions to make bridges or roads for these regions at this time. I do have a few placeables in mind for the badlands, like dragon bones and just lots of randomly placed bone piles of recently slain creatures.

Once I get a basic granite tileset produced, I do intend to fill it with mining variations. Human mines like those from the 1800's, as well as more advanced mine-dwellings like Dwarves would make, will be the goal.

 

[MerricksDad]

Last bit for today. Got the river bed and dry rubble area texture figured out.

 

 

Now I just need to wrap the texture edges and clean up some shadow and seam messes. This thing is starting to look like a golf course. All we need is some buffalo chips and a stick and we're good to go.

[Tarot Redhand]

Being in the UK I have to ask is "buffalo chips" a euphemism for what comes out of a buffalo's rear end?

 

TR

[The Mad Poet]

Actually... yes! Sort of. Cow chips. I've heard they have competitions on who can throw it the farthest in some places.

[MerricksDad]

If you've seen an actual buffalo chip, when it dries it looks like a foot-across checkerboard piece. If sculpted correctly, it would make a great disc golf accessory... when used with the proper glove. And as always, somebody has photographed their dumb child holding crap for us to amuse ourselves with:

 

 

Oh, I almost forgot, you can pick up buffalo chip Frisbees at the Sylvan Lake gift shop!

[The Mad Poet]

I can almost beat you. Florida sells beach sand in a bottle to tourists. You may have literally kicked the **** out of beach sand though.

[MerricksDad]

Never purchased beach sand, but I do have a collection. Here in michigan, we have a black stripe you can find many places along lake michigan. It seems iron rich, so I picked up bunch of it. We've also got white, and common brown beach sand. I hear you can get green olivine sand on Oahu somewhere. They've actually got some for sale in Keystone SD made from some olivine junk they found tons of in Arkansas. It forms in this dark basalt looking shell. I have had a chunk for years and didn't know where it came from, but now I see my piece matches exactly those from the Arkansas stash.

 

https://sp.yimg.com/...0Q&pid=15.1&P=0

 

I almost picked up some of the blasting sand from Ingersol Mine when I was up there. Its just white blasting sand, but it has small amounts of other minerals throughout. Mostly white feldspar, silver mica, and black tourmaline. But still it would have been cool if I had a bottle to grab some.

 

I did grab a bag of garnet rich sand from the campground. Full of little red garnets up to 2 mm, mixed with ash and mica powder.

[The Mad Poet]

You have a lot of sand knowledge. The only thing I know in Florida sand is seagull droppings and tourist shame. Those tourists leave that all over the beach.

[Jedijax]

I like the terrain and color texture on your last image. I know it's more Medieval Rural than your Black Hills, but still. I hadn't noticed you were so small and feminine, though. Must be you're shaved in this one.

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[YeoldeFog]

Buffalo Chip bingo! You square a field and bet on a square. If the Buffalo sh*t in your square you win! Someone need to script this! .)

...oh, it looks great Dad!

[Tarot Redhand]

There is a place on the Isle of Wight called Alum Bay with multi-coloured cliffs that produce multi-coloured sands that has been sold to tourists in variously shaped glass containers since at least Victorian times.

 

TR

[MerricksDad]

Interesting place. Looks like even the oldest layers of that formation are younger than the south dakota layers from top to bottom in the badlands. I think I read that the Brule top layer is only like 22myo or some such. The tip of the Isle of Wight is like 35myo. I bet that isle has some interesting fossils. The badlands of SD are full of pig-dogs and camel-things.

 

Well my boy had his ear surgery today, so it is another laid back day for me. I might work on badlands formations, or I might just work on compiling some grass textures and wildflowers for placement. Still haven't heard if anybody has the exact details on that grass flex value I was looking for. Maybe I have time to study that today.

 

While driving into the surgery center, I was watching fog, and might have a new method for displaying fog which moves as you pass through it. We'll see.

[MerricksDad]

Here's the kind of stuff I intend to add to the tiles and deliver as placeables.

 

 

This Echinacea took me about 30 minutes, and can be broken down into three flowers. Since they grow about the same no matter how you raise them, I can just scale these three up or down and then cap the size of the flower head to the one on the top. Should make some good feels for the area. I've got resources ready to do about 10 species of flower for the plains and hills. I think I will just add a very simple shadow block since I decided to go fully poly with these.

 

 

And here's a few varieties you can do with the same texture file.

[Tarot Redhand]

As you seem interested in fossils here's 3 links. Firstly the isle of wight. Next the world heritage Jurassic Coast most of which is in the county of dorset and lies just west of the IoW. BTW if you want old rocks try the Lizard in cornwall. Some of the rocks found there are around 500 million years old.

 

But enough of that. Any chance of purple prairie clover?

 

TR