235 réponses à ce sujet

[Tarot Redhand]

I would put them near a rift to the positive-quasi-elemental plane of steam myself. Steam explosions can be really nasty. BTW, I saw a picture of that starfish fungus but thought that even for NwN it was a bit over the top.

 

TR

[MerricksDad]

Working on some arch bridges today

 

[MerricksDad]

Almost completely done with all walkmeshes for existing tiles. Hopefully some time next week I can get the naked tiles out public.

 

 

I found a few issues with super simple walkmeshes:

1. If there are only two faces on the corner of the walkmesh, and a 45 degree line separates them, and there is any kind of pinch point, even if it is only two character spaces wide, the character will normally not walk through the space to travel to the next tile. He'll try, but will stop as soon as he reaches that walkmesh poly boundary.
2. If the super simple walkmesh is tossed together in such a way that a walkmesh poly on one tile does not match up with a large poly on another adjacent walkmesh, the character will stop at the tile boundary. For instance, if there are two large triangles, generally the same shape, but one is offset by 20-40cm on the Y axis, even though there is no crack between the tiles on the X axis, the character will stop when he bumps up against the skewed polygon, and come to a stop.

I think this means I need to go refine my walkmesh again. Thankfully they are super simple this time around.

 

That being said, I was thinking to clone over the granitelands tiles for natural cave height changes. I'd have to reduce them in size to fit the transition height, but I checked a few texture combinations for replacement of the mountain stone and the rubble ground, and it comes out looking automatically smoothed. Those tiles still have the tile boundary smoothing issues, but I figured out how to fix that. It just takes some work, since I haven't scripted it out yet.

 

In my last night of not being a working student, I'm taking the next 8 hours to download max2016 3-yr limited student edition. It should be interesting.

 

Tomorrow, I'll need to finalize tidying up the house, and make sure my family has some foods for tuesday while I am gone for 6 hours, but it should leave me enough time to finish the basic tiles' walkmeshes.

[MerricksDad]

Three tries later, max 2016 still won't install. I may have to call them.

 

My son is also home sick today. Perhaps I will make some green booger models, instead of finishing primary tile walkmeshes.

[MerricksDad]

Still no luck on that program. Giving up for now on it.

 

But Jebus is this homework a lot of work. I put about 9 hours into it already and finished on one class worth of stuff for the week.

 

Three credit class my ass.

[MerricksDad]

By saturday I might have a day to work on something. I want to do a few colors of coral mushrooms, or clavuloids. There are also some mushrooms shapes I have been trying to make, unsuccessfully, that are just rods with a thicker club on the end. Not sure why something that simple is harder to make. Maybe it is just the texture making my unhappy with the shape, or possibly it could be the lighting. I'll figure it out.

[CaveGnome]

I found a few issues with super simple walkmeshes:

• If there are only two faces on the corner of the walkmesh, and a 45 degree line separates them, and there is any kind of pinch point, even if it is only two character spaces wide, the character will normally not walk through the space to travel to the next tile. He'll try, but will stop as soon as he reaches that walkmesh poly boundary.
• If the super simple walkmesh is tossed together in such a way that a walkmesh poly on one tile does not match up with a large poly on another adjacent walkmesh, the character will stop at the tile boundary. For instance, if there are two large triangles, generally the same shape, but one is offset by 20-40cm on the Y axis, even though there is no crack between the tiles on the X axis, the character will stop when he bumps up against the skewed polygon, and come to a stop.

I think this means I need to go refine my walkmesh again. Thankfully they are super simple this time around.

Having similar problems... After an "optimize walkmesh to death" crisis, I discovered path finding and automated walking (when you click a far point with obstacles to navigate and the PC take the shortest way to reach it) acted weird or stopped working, resulting in a standstill PC in some cases. What's more, you could always guide your PC to cross the "dead path" sections if you clicked not to far in straight line from the toon. My previous understanding was that path finding was only defined by the set file, and walkmesh file purpose defined surface material and geometric shape with exact continuity between tiles but obviously I missed something.

An utility to assemble contiguous individual tile wmesh on one big walkmesh to test and debug the whole thing could help a lot, but halas, I don't know of such a thing. I am working walkmeshes tile by tile to this day.

By the way, wish you a lot of success in your new student life.

[MerricksDad]

I was able to fix the entirety of the walkmesh issues by increasing the tile to tile width beyond the size of what a character's combat box size is. It seems the character size for determining if you can quickly walk past something is much larger than it's actual size, both in terms of model bounds, and what it claims to take up in the 2da files. Pathfinding seems to use CREPERSPACE rather than the smaller number PERSPACE, and does not rely at all on the SIZECATEGORY entry. I suggest making sure that any open edge (tile boundary edges) which a character can travel past, are at least the CREPERSPACE value (in meters) long. Removing ones that were shorter, or otherwise combining two edges to make one longer than CREPERSPACE, cleared up the issue entirely. I was able to leave some of the tiles with 45 degree splits up the middle without causing any further issues.

 

Edit: Just to clarify a bit... If your character is 2m wide and you have 1m wide edge on one tile which a character can walk over, then he cannot fit through. If you combine that 1m edge with another 1m edge on an adjacent tile, he still cannot walk through, because it doesn't matter the whole size of the opening, but rather the opening on the individual tile. Pathfinding told him to cross at the short spot, but when he got there, the calculation told him it is too small.

 

I find this is about the same for much larger creatures, like dragons and demons. They simply stop walking a lot, even if the overall opening is obviously large enough to walk through.

 

As mentioned, a way to get past the issue on existing tilesets is to simply slow walk them over the threshold. This usually works, but can be maddening, as the character may decide on a path that goes a mile around what you are trying to have him walk, sudden turn on you, and walk away.

[MerricksDad]

off to a rocky start today. Here shown is the same set of rocks I showed before, but I've reduced the poly count for use with NWN. Previously, the largest rock was 2514 tri. These rocks will go together to form larger wall-covering sections which are generally rectangular, columnar, or pyramidal. I'll leave the "back" on the feature, so that it can be rotated to provide visual options. Pictured rocks vary in width from 1-2 meters, and are textured to match the grain scale of the tileset walls. Expect composite placeables to be up to 5m wide, as well as up to 10m tall, but normally only 5m tall.

 

[MerricksDad]

It also just occurred to me that since I am studying rocks again, I should occasionally take my camera down to the lab and get some more texture pictures

[MerricksDad]

12 ground-based speleothems. All the longer ones could simply be overturned and exported as ceiling-based versions.

 

 

The bases fade to black at the last moment so that they will blend seamlessly with the floor using transparency.

 

To match this subset, I'll be making some birdnest bowls, both on the ground, and on slightly raised pillars, complete with cave marbles and eggs.

 

After that, I'll do some speleothems where two or more cones converge into one base, as well as columns.

[MerricksDad]

And nothing goes better with hallways than a big cave in. Shown here is an example of a 3m pile of rocks, built from the previous rocks shown above. Below them is a selection of 0.5 to 1m rocks which are part of a single placeable, as is the corridor blocker.

 

[MerricksDad]

I may do some giant roots. One of the things that was mentioned as being under the Host Tower were the roots that led down into the deep earth, seeking magical energy directly from Mt Hotenow and the underdark. There might be other magically modified trees that do this.

 

Also, I'd like to create a super slimy section of tunnels and caverns, especially in slimy gold and russet. I'll use this to portray the Auramycos and it's spawn.

[MerricksDad]

First few larger structures not simply pillars.

 

 

The multi-level pools with two pillars is fairly safe 734 tri.

 

The first nest has a combination of planar mesh texture, and actual hemisphere pearls.

[MerricksDad]

This strange pillar stone is only 10m tall, and due to texturing issues, does not use the transparent bottom. The mound on the right is fully equipped with large 3D bats.

 

[MerricksDad]

Just found this. What a great place for a spell battle.

 

[MerricksDad]

Here's some clusters made from modifying the hexagonal crystal forms.

[Tonden_Ockay]

Very nice there must be a lot of little gnomes at work

[MerricksDad]

It's an Archgnome

[MerricksDad]

These are the shape of the longer hexagonal crystals I was going for. I'd like more variety though.

 

[MerricksDad]

Back in SCL, I have been checking out the cave pillars and other various rock structures. They're really odd looking, but not detrimental to the tileset they used. The texture used gives it somewhere between that hand-painted cartoony look of WoW, and a better textured world of Skyrim. I like it, but I don't think it will fit my needs with this set. Nor does the carved looking stone have any purpose for me. It's like somebody cut stone with a lightsaber, sharpening the stone like an art pencil. Unless beholders are making stone spears, it kinda makes me thing some dude just roams the Underdark tossing laser beams around like a subterranean Edward Scissorhands.

 

But, looking into some of the drow architecture in the drow caves set, I do really like the 8-grooved pillars and wall buttressing. Comparing that to those found in DDO and NWO, they're all quite similar, and I really like them all, even to the point where I want to clone every inch into NWN. I can think of a few other images I have seen that would greatly add to the theme, if only worked a little bit, so I really feel this entire drow-themed sub-region of my tileset coming forward and wanting to be made.

[Tarot Redhand]

Just a thought for further inspiration, have you looked at the cave interiors in Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas? Some of those look interesting to me.

 

TR

[MerricksDad]

I have not, but it did occur to me that I really should. Perhaps today is the day

 

Edit:

Ah! Yes very nice. I like the one with water features in some of the screen shots.

[MerricksDad]

Going to have to work on this tomorrow. I can't focus on anything now that I put my mind on more orthographic drawings. I should have just worked on that homework like on Sunday.

 

I did get color clones made for all the quartz shaped crystals, after first trimming down the poly count and getting rid of verts within 22cm. No major visual change occurred, which is what I was afraid might ruin them. All fine now.

 

I'm calling mushrooms and crystals done for now, and will instead return to my to-do lists from previous pages. Might as well copy them forward to here:

• Repair and finalize pit/rock and pit/rock/pit-crosser combos
• Finalize rock crosser
• Finalize terrain height transition
• Cut and finalize group height transition "rooms"
• Add corner corridor with height transition
• Finish +2 corridor height transition
• Secondary "room" terrain as special corridor
• Cut and finalize all other "rooms"
• Great Chasm terrain
• Hanging bridges for great chasm
• Animate Dark Lake terrain
• Clone Pit/Pit Crosser to Watery Pit/Watery Pit Crosser
• Animate Watery Pit

[YeoldeFog]

How about a pre-release of the rocks, crystals and mushrooms?!