148 réponses à ce sujet

[rjshae]

Q. Do you think it's worthwhile adding custom loadscreens? The drawback is that they are 3 Mb each and only on the screen for a few seconds, effectively adding a lot of bulk to the download for little improvement. But I know I get a little tired of seeing the same old standard loadscreens all the time.

[Tchos]

They don't have to be 3MB.  They can be JPEGs with their extensions changed to DDS, and the game will still display them.

 

I didn't consider custom load screens to be worth the trouble for my own work, and don't generally care about them in others' work, except in MotB, where they were paired with load tips that were actually narration that delivered a little taste of what was going on and what we were about to see.

[rjshae]

Yes, I think that will work out nicely. Thank you.

[PJ156]

I use one screen for each module. The stock ones bear no relevance to my content so they appear incongruous. Having one screen per module means the player knows something different is happening and the screen image is relevant to that. It also ties the module areas together.

 

Regardless of size you will end up with very much fewer screens than with one per area. Workload and space wise it is more effective I think.

 

PJ

[rjshae]

Yes, I probably won't do a whole slew of shots; just enough to give it a unique flavor and mark the highlights.

[kamal_]

As someone who does custom loadscreen for each area, I find it to be relatively time-consuming but notparticularly difficult as the pictures can be mass altered for any particular filtering/looks you want, and mass converted to .jpg and then have their extensions changes to tga so nwn2 will display them.

I view it as giving the player an early scouting of the area, or setting a mood. The loadtips can also be synched to an area or just a package of generic lore (Path of Evil inclhded loadtips that were generic Faerun lore).

To me, it's a "polish" thing, with a good payback on user impression vs time required. If I wasn't going to do all custom I would do the limited custom pj describes or have all areas use the generic "nwn eye" logo loadscreen.

[rjshae]

Quick update: comparison between the new texture (left) and the original NWN texture (middle and right, with the dragon at the right being in the NWN idle position).

 

Have you had any progress on the green dragon? Just curious.

[4760]

Yes, but they're not ready for release yet: damage and parry animations still need to be made. I worked on the octopus animations instead to avoid doing something not good enough because of boredom, but I intend to start working on the dragons again next week.

[rjshae]

Have you been tempted to do a Tiamat model? I'd imagine that would be a ton of work to model and animate though.

 

[kamal_]

Have you been tempted to do a Tiamat model? I'd imagine that would be a ton of work to model and animate though.

 

 

The hydra we have already has five heads, snap the dragon body onto it.

[4760]

But if I'm not mistaken, the hydra is a five headed snake, so the animations won't fit. I didn't have any intention of doing Tiamat, but when the NWN dragons are ported to NWN2, it shouldn't be too difficult to achieve.

[rjshae]

But if I'm not mistaken, the hydra is a five headed snake, so the animations won't fit. I didn't have any intention of doing Tiamat, but when the NWN dragons are ported to NWN2, it shouldn't be too difficult to achieve.

 

Cool then. It could be useful for somebody doing a high level module.

[rjshae]

I'm going to use Callister's very nice Dungeon tileset for Undermountain, because that's always how I've imagined it to look. However, I will need to expand on the set a bit to match some of the features.

 

Here, for example, is a recessed floor that I'm planning to partly fill with water (rather than the lava pit that was used in the original). Maybe I should have some sharks swimming about on the bottom?

 

To the left is the raised causeway where the glowing pillar barrier will be located.

 

 

It's going to be pretty dark. Hope that's okay.

[kamal_]

I'm going to use Callister's very nice Dungeon tileset for Undermountain, because that's always how I've imagined it to look. However, I will need to expand on the set a bit to match some of the features. Here is a recessed floor that I'm planning to partly fill with water (rather than the lava pit that was used in the original.) Maybe I should have some sharks swimming about? To the left is the bridge where the glowing pillars will be located.

 
It's a pet peeve of mine right now because I was just looking through prefabs on the vault, but when showing people stuff a well lit area makes it easier on us old folk with poor eyes.   

 

Screenshots that are too dark to see what's going on clearly are not very helpful.
This was not a helpful screenshot of someone's prefab:
 

 
helpful, what the area looks like is clear:

[Tchos]

No matter for me!  Even if I don't just open up the module to add lights, I've created scripts that will create various types of lights at any targeted location I choose while I'm playing.

[rjshae]

Well my PC got clobbered over the weekend by a summer storm, so I lost a folder due to corruption of the disk. *ouch* My darn UPS is glitchy. Fortunately it was just a couple of day's work so I can recover quickly enough. But some of my apps were also corrupted as well, including my anti-virus/firewall s/w, Firefox, and the NWN campaign module; all stuff I happened to have open at the time.

 

Anyway, I'm working on the final above ground area, which is the University district of Waterdeep. It's a fair amount of labor just for a cut scene, but at least I only need to decorate the parts that will be visible with the cutscene cameras. I'm finding I need to make around a half dozen additional parts out of the castle walls set, so I'm extracting components and filling in the gaps with Blender. Finally, I'll also need a small ballista model; I know there's a simple one on top of one of the Wizard towers, and I already extracted that some time back. Just got to find it again....

 

Work also continues on the Dungeon tileset. I'm thinking it could, in theory, be converted over to using merged texture files, much as is the case with the standard tilesets. But it would be a lot of work because there are a large number of tiles and they use many separate texture files. I might save that as a project for another day, just so I can try it with a different texture (like sandstone or metal). It's a really nice-looking tileset.

 

In the meantime I'm still whittling down the walkmeshes; trying to get them to 80-90 walkable faces. At present, many of them are a little too close to the limit of 127. The walkmeshes have some very slender faces towards the corners, which are adding to the total but don't provide much value. I'm extracting those and also removing two columns and two rows of faces away from the edges, then smoothing out the result. It seems to be working out fairly well, but it's tedious labor. I've also got about a dozen of the lowered floor tiles built, with more planned.

[kamal_]

Work also continues on the Dungeon tileset. I'm thinking it could, in theory, be converted over to using merged texture files, much as is the case with the standard tilesets. But it would be a lot of work

Yes. Yes it is. Not hard, but quite time consuming.

[GCoyote]

rjshae - If the UPS isn't giving you time to save it probably just needs a new SLA battery. I've gotten the batteries online for $10-20. Just make sure the new battery has the same connectors and it's a five minute job.

[Tchos]

Coincidentally, my UPS needs a new battery as well.  I just recently disconnected it and plugged directly into the wall because it's gotten so unreliable it had started randomly cutting the power out without warning, causing some work loss.

[rjshae]

Here's a little experiment in Blender to see what a seamless secret door might look like. The top render has the door in place; in the bottom view the door is hidden. The door would just be a placeable (or maybe a visual effect) concealing the actual door. I had to slope the doorway ceiling and sides a bit to allow better visibility.

 

[rjshae]

Refined it  little--I think this look will work better. The cover placeable is at right.

 

 

Note that this is just a template model that I plan to insert into copies of the various wall tiles to make new tile variants. That's why most of the parts are missing.

[PJ156]

A set of placeable walls with and without doors would be very welcome. I re textured the estate walls to give a complete set of those but right now we only have the RWS ship walls to work with to create more interesting subdivisions.

 

Is this what you are planning?

 

PJ

[rjshae]

A set of placeable walls with and without doors would be very welcome. I re textured the estate walls to give a complete set of those but right now we only have the RWS ship walls to work with to create more interesting subdivisions.

 

Is this what you are planning?

 

PJ

 

No, it's something for the campaign I'm working on. The NWN version of the secret door was pretty cheesy, just a stone door in a frame that would  jump the party to the other side of the wall. I want something in this dungeon tileset that would function like a "real" secret door.

[Calister68]

Then if you don't use the usual door system, how do you intend to hide the areas located behind the secret door ?

Trinity has a very nice secret door, if I remember well.

[rjshae]

Then if you don't use the usual door system, how do you intend to hide the areas located behind the secret door ?

Trinity has a very nice secret door, if I remember well.

 

I still plan to use doors, although I may apply a camouflage reskin visual effect. What'll happen is I'll use the stone placeable to cover the door. When a trigger detects that a character has spotted a secret door, the placeable will fade away revealing a niche in the wall with the closed stone door.

 

I may also add a create/destroy cycle to lower the placeable into the floor, but I want to test it first to see if it is worth the extra effort. I guess I could also have it open or destroy the door.