17 réponses à ce sujet

[MayCaesar]

Hi everyone, 

 

I am learning to make interiors from exterior areas using Building Constructing Kit placeables as walls, floors, roofs, etc. I am having three major problems I haven't found how to solve.

 

1. I cannot for the life of me understand how to make the floors properly walkable. For example, I put a small floor element on the ground and placed PC on it:

 

 

The only way I managed to make the character walk on this element without moving his feet below the surface was by setting properties Walkable and Dynamic Collisions to False and Static to True. However, there are three problems with this solution:

a) When I click on the floor for the character to move, the clicking "ripple" is lost beneath the surface (apparently it is drawn on the terrain).

I cannot walk off the floor (might be a problem if I decide, say, to use a set of these floor panels to make an improvised ladder). 

c) The character's feet "levitate" a little bit above the surface.

 

2. When I build a complete interior (say, a house), the area map is messed up: it is just a green quadrant without anything on it, while I would prefer to see the map of the interior area instead.

 

3. Related problem: if I move the camera fast while playing, I sometimes can briefly see the area beyond the walls. Upon the map load up, there is also a flash of visible surrounding area.

 

---

 

To put it shortly, I have no clue how to make proper interior areas purely out of placeables. Does anyone have any tips, maybe any links to the guides that might be helpful? 

 

Thanks.

[Psionic-Entity]

1. You need to bake areas to create a walkmesh. The standard way of creating custom walkable areas out of placeables is to make them all environmental objects or walkable, then to use walkmesh helpers and walkmesh cutters to build the walkmesh you want to have. In the picture you'd convert that floor to environmental and create a walkmesh helper that matches its height.

 

2. Do you have an example? Area maps are made by taking a snapshot of the area itself. If you wanted to black out certain parts of terrain you can use the color function.

 

3. If this happens on load you won't be able to fix it.

 

As a general piece of advice I'd recommend starting with tile-based interiors and using placeables to augment them. If you want to get more complex there are invisible tiles and roof-only tiles you can use to expand the scope.

[MayCaesar]

1. You need to bake areas to create a walkmesh. The standard way of creating custom walkable areas out of placeables is to make them all environmental objects or walkable, then to use walkmesh helpers and walkmesh cutters to build the walkmesh you want to have. In the picture you'd convert that floor to environmental and create a walkmesh helper that matches its height.

 

2. Do you have an example? Area maps are made by taking a snapshot of the area itself. If you wanted to black out certain parts of terrain you can use the color function.

 

3. If this happens on load you won't be able to fix it.

 

As a general piece of advice I'd recommend starting with tile-based interiors and using placeables to augment them. If you want to get more complex there are invisible tiles and roof-only tiles you can use to expand the scope.

 

1. I see... So using walkmesh helper is inevitable. Oh well, off for some learning!

 

2. I don't have an example right now as I removed the area I was experimenting in, but basically it was just one green square with nothing shown on it, even though I was starting in the middle of the house and never left its walls.

 

I will try the invisible tile workaround too.

[MayCaesar]

Okay, I think I got the hang of using walkmesh helper: I was able to make the character climb up a platform. Unfortunately, the clicking "ripples" are still under the surface, and I do not know how I could fix it. It is a bit weird; I would expect the ripples to be on the mesh surface, not on the terrain level:

 

 

I will try to reproduce the mentioned indoors map problem tomorrow and upload a screenshot.

[kamal_]

Bck floors and stairs do have walkmeshes, but iirc the walkmesh wasnt set at the right heights and someone fixed it somewhere.

[Tchos]

It's not just the walkmesh that was set at the wrong height, it was the whole floor piece.  Normally to fix it, you'd just sink it down into the ground, not squash its height or put a walkmesh helper on it. 

 

Mokah fixed the height, but BCK floors are poor in general.  The stock floor placeables are better (aren't floating up off the surface from the start), and retexturable. 

 

The lack of a walking circle is due to a setting for the floors in the 2DA being set to false instead of true for the BCK placeables.

 

Better than using the BCK floors is to import floor textures for the terrain tool and just paint the terrain as a floor.

[rjshae]

The lack of a walking circle is due to a setting for the floors in the 2DA being set to false instead of true for the BCK placeables.

 

Yes, the 'Projected Textures' effect is what allows the cursor circle to appear on a surface. You can try setting the 'InterfacePT' cell to '1' on the model's row in your custom placeables.2da file. Possibly the 'Projected Textures' bit also needs to be set in the material's properties of the model, but doing that is a little more difficult. I usually have to open it up in blender and mod the part.

[Tchos]

I don't think you need to edit the model. I've changed only the 2da for some of the pieces in the past, and it fixed the missing circle.

[AaronH]

I create teaching videos for the people in my team and luckily I created this one

It's how to make caves as an interior, but in an exterior.

With the exterior tool brushs etc, such as height etc, it allows you to create more diverse caves, rather than the basic boxed tiles.

Edit* My voice sounds weird af because it was night time when the video was requested lol

 

[MayCaesar]

Thank you very much for your answers guys! I learned a lot today, didn't go to sleep at all learning all these intrications. The teaching video was especially useful: I learned how one can quickly darken the entire area so it doesn't appear on the map and player's camera.

 

Setting InterfacePT to 1 for BCK floors did the trick, and the clicking appears to work as intended. Projected Textures effect seems to turn on automatically when InterfacePT is set up. Or maybe it was on from the start.

I see now why using textures is better than assembling floors from placeables. In addition to the lack of tinting, one of the problems is that it takes eternity to stitch all the floor panels together, so there are no gaps between them and they are evenly distributed. Calculating X and Y positions is daunting. Plus, should the floor have to be inclined for some reason, BCK placeables won't allow achieving it. 

I do not know much about extraction of textures from models as of now, and I don't see too many custom wooden floor textures, so for now I will probably be using BCK floors. But I will get to learning texture export eventually.

 

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A couple of things I didn't manage to do properly.

 

1) The map and the minimap are still a mess. I know I can darken the surrounding area so it doesn't appear on the map, but what does appear on it looks bad. This is the map:

 

 

As you can see, it shows the roof instead of the interior of the building. The roof really isn't something a player wants to see on the map, but, unfortunately, I cannot seem to be able to make it disappear in any way.

The minimap looks even worse:

 

 

The building size here is so small, it is barely seen at all. It is almost as small as the PC pointer. 

 

2) No matter what I do, I can see through the roof when zooming out significantly. It doesn't normally happen with the walls, so apparently some walls' properties differ from those of the roof - but I haven't found the difference yet.

 

 

I will try to fix these problems and let you know how it goes.

[Tchos]

Calculating the position of floor placeables to put them together properly is easier when the placeables are a standardised size based on the tile dimensions (9m x 9m) like the floors I created for that purpose, but it remains that using the terrain is better once you have some textures. The stock wooden board terrain texture I saw is bad because the boards never end, making them cut from the world's tallest trees.

The BCK placeables are designed for both indoor and outdoor use, making them most appropriate to neither. When it's an outdoor placeable, you don't want the roof to fade, showing nothing inside.

Better than fading, in my opinion, for interior work on roofs is to remove the outer polygons so that they'll always be transparent when viewed from above, will appear properly on the map, and yet set them to placeables instead of environmental objects so that they'll "trap" the camera and not allow zooming out beyond the walls. Others may prefer the camera to be able to zoom out, but then you may also want to remove the outer polygons for the walls as well, to create a "4th wall" effect as on a stage.

The building is small on your map because your area is much larger than the focal building. Adjust the area dimensions in the area properties (click the area name in the palette and look at the properties palette). You can only adjust the size in terms of "supertiles" and you need to keep it a little larger than the actual area because there has to be a "viewable area" around the walkable area that isn't walkable. The walkable area is indicated by a coloured border when you activate that viewing option.

[-Semper-]

i know that there are some advantages when using exteriors to fake interiors, like when building organic underground areas. but why do you try to build the rooms of the house in an exterior? the engine ain't really tailored for that, and there's no real steaming happening. imo it's too big of a hazzle and comes with its own load of problems, like the roof you encountered or the limited amount of placeables in one area. better to create detailed exteriors and separate indoor areas.

[PJ156]

Yes, the 'Projected Textures' effect is what allows the cursor circle to appear on a surface. You can try setting the 'InterfacePT' cell to '1' on the model's row in your custom placeables.2da file. Possibly the 'Projected Textures' bit also needs to be set in the material's properties of the model, but doing that is a little more difficult. I usually have to open it up in blender and mod the part.

 

I will fix this in the cornucopia 2da for update 7.

 

PJ

[PJ156]

I use this method for shops in some area to prevent the pc from making a transition to access a particular seller but these only have one roof section generally so the fade out is not an issue. The shop interiors are small but it prevents shopping trips becoming as tedious as they are in real life.

 

Aside from that I am with Semper. You can only do one story in this way and the fading is going to cause you grief as you are finding.

 

Perhaps MokahTGS with jump in here. She did a whole inn from BCK and it looked good. However she was not trying to give a "live" transition across areas. Only to give a double height room.

 

PJ

[AaronH]

Use the black colour brush on the outskirts, it'll make the mini map completely black (like how I did in the video above), it's pure black on both the map and mini map.

[kamal_]

Adding new textures for use on exteriors is relatively painless. I made a bunch as a pack, and I'm sure you could look at it and figure out how to add ones you want. This way you can texture with whatever you want your floor textures to be, which will save you from having to use BCK for floors (at least one the ground level floor).

http://neverwinterva...texture-project

[kamal_]

Also, here's Mokah's post on exteriors as interiors, showing the custom inn/tavern she made for example.

 

http://forum.bioware...interior-trick/

[Tchos]

Semper: As PJ mentioned, Mokah's inn is an excellent reason to do it this way, though technically that could have been done with an interior combined with Crystal Violet's invisible room tile.  At some point I'd like to demonstrate the advantages of this technique for building non-organic pen & paper style structures whose changes of elevation and large vistas would be an excellent use of exteriors as interiors.  I don't think my kuo-toa temple counts, since it indeed included cavernous areas in addition to the structure.