51 replies to this topic

[kamal_]

The "Tileset Construction Kit" is a project to allow you to mix and match to handle cases where no existing tile does what you need by providing placeable tile walls, pillars, and a "blank" tileset that contains tiles with the open floor tile geometry of all existing tilesets (but no ceilings). This will allow you to use cave natural pit tiles with castle walls to build a "tile" that you couldn't get otherwise (since the castle tileset does not include natural pit flooring. The placeable walls will allow you to make room shapes you could not otherwise make such as triangular rooms with a door in each wall.

 

The base tileset, which includes every open floor from the stock tilesets (including community made tiles extending the stock tilesets), I hope to extend this to include all the open floor tiles from all the community made tilesets as well. The tileset is fully retexturable, with up to three texture options per tile for the floor (the tiles were altered to allow roof textures on some floor parts) The tileset is shown retextured here for visibility:

 

 

 

In addition, the tiles themselves will be available as placeables, because why not? You might want to retexture them to fit your needs, but the base model will already exist, so you can use them as needed. You can always place them -0.01 below the ground to take advantage of tiles that rise into the air, without the tile square itself being visible. All open floor tilesets will exist as placeables:

 

 

 

Here is a use case of using a placeable made from a tile, I took a castle tileset circular stairs down and placed it in a forest to make a mysterious area for a player to explore:

 

[kamal_]

Further plans:

 

Some tiles have great features as part of them that would make for interesting placeables when separated from the tile, such as a giant ribcage in the sea cave tileset.

 

Extend the base tileset to include the open floor tiles from all community tilesets.

 

Take requests to break out pieces of tiles into placeables.

[rjshae]

I'm curious: how do the wall placeables do at blocking light sources? Do they work any better than normal tileset walls?

[kamal_]

I'm curious: how do the wall placeables do at blocking light sources? Do they work any better than normal tileset walls?

 

Short answer: No.

Longer Answer: It looks like they can be made to, though they don't display ingame and I'm not sure why:

 

Even longer answer: If we figure out why, not only could the placeable walls but the tiles themselves could be set to cast shadows.

[rjshae]

I took a look at the TL_SI_WWXX_01 tile, which is just the first '1_Wall' tile variaant in the Standard Interior tileset. The wall component has the 'No Cast Shadows' texture bit set (i.e. texture flags = 0x40), which means it does not cast shadows. (I suspect they did that for performance reasons.) Turning off that bit should enable shadows.

[kamal_]

I took a look at the TL_SI_WWXX_01 tile, which is just the first '1_Wall' tile variaant in the Standard Interior tileset. The wall component has the 'No Cast Shadows' texture bit set (i.e. texture flags = 0x40), which means it does not cast shadows. (I suspect they did that for performance reasons.) Turning off that bit should enable shadows.

Not seeing that but, when I set the wall's object properties to be the same as the shadow casting chair (original properties of both shown below), it casts shadow but only in the toolset.

 

 

vs

 

 

tazpn's documentation describes no_cast_shadows with a value of 64 (ox40 in binary...).

 

As I said, when I set the wall's properties to be the same as the chair, the wall casts shadow in toolset but not ingame, while the chair casts in both.

[rjshae]

I wonder if shadows are handled differently for large placeables? Maybe scale down the wall and see if the shadow show up.

[kamal_]

I wonder if shadows are handled differently for large placeables? Maybe scale down the wall and see if the shadow show up.

I de-embiggenated them, but no luck. It's definitely a model part property, as I also tried importing the chair into the wall placeable and made a unified "chair+wall" to test. In "chair+wall", the chair cast shadow and the wall didn't.

 

 

Could make a library for ants though...

[kamal_]

Further plans:

 

Extend the base tileset to include the open floor tiles from all community tilesets.

 

Checks that off the list:

The tileset construction kit has three tile types, flat, "natural", and "manmade" (which obviously includes any sort of creature). Flat is the flat tiles of varying heights, not worth a picture.

 

"natural" (just realized that that one tile has a mining rig built into it and should get moved to "manmade")

 

 

manmade (I had already moved a few tiles to the "natural" category, so there a few blank spots in the second pic that will remain blank tiles unless I get something to fill in those spots):

 

 

[rjshae]

It works okay for me:

[kamal_]

It works okay for me:

 

Could you send me that placeable so I can compare and see where I've got it wrong.

[kamal_]

I've finished extracting various bits and bobs I found interesting from the tilesets. The next step is getting them ingame so I can look for problems.

[kamal_]

The first batch of placeables. Note that I have not yet checked the walkmesh of the extracted bridges/stairs and there might be some vertexes I accidentally removed and will need to fix, and the henge is currently missing a texture on top.

 

 

 

Various platforms from the Deep Halls tileset plus the much needed why didn't Obsidian include one 90 degree bend mine track (and a track head). Theoretically, these are walkable (they are in the tileset).

 

[kamal_]

Crumbled wall pillars from Dark Ruins, and in the back bridges made out of webs...  (there's two visibly missing textures I will have to fix)

 

 

Build your Grand Citadel outside, and place statues of a certain Spider Queen (with and without spider legs) in your drow areas. Also, spikes, in a circle and individual. (Lolth and spikes from the Drow Underfell tileset).

 

[kamal_]

The illithid elder brain has decided to move outside and get some sun. I need to do some editing of the arena at left still.

 

 

There's at least two missing texture bits in this one, but you get the idea. The various sealife comes from Icewind Dale.

 

[kamal_]

What's different about those pipes at the bottom? They have a walkmesh inside.

 

 

 

 

The finest in Modron construction, they like mesh flooring apparently.

 

[Tchos]

The various sealife comes from Icewind Dale.
 

Where did the circular portal frame and the large pointed arch stone façade come from?

[kamal_]

Where did the circular portal frame and the large pointed arch stone façade come from?

The triangular thing with a hole in it is from Icewind Dale (part of a metatile). The large pointed arch stone facade is from RWS Pocket Citadel.

[Tchos]

Lots of good stuff here.

[kamal_]

Lots of good stuff here.

I'm still learning gmax but if you see something of interest in a tile somewhere, it can generally be extracted to a separate placeable (limitations may apply based on my great noob-ness at gmax). I went through all the tilesets and looked for stuff I felt was visually interesting and that I might want to theoretically use outside of it's tileset.

[kamal_]

Now that things are in the toolset, I have to go about creating blueprints and fixing various model errors. Not sure how long the error fixing will take.

[Tchos]

I'm still learning gmax but if you see something of interest in a tile somewhere, it can generally be extracted to a separate placeable (limitations may apply based on my great noob-ness at gmax). I went through all the tilesets and looked for stuff I felt was visually interesting and that I might want to theoretically use outside of it's tileset.

 

Indeed, I've done the same myself.  Mostly with windows and doorframes, but most or all of the doorframes I extracted were also extracted simultaneously by Bob, and he posted his.

[rjshae]

It would be especially helpful if all of the placeables you are creating out of tile parts are centered at the origin. Otherwise rotation becomes awkward.

 

Indeed, I've done the same myself.  Mostly with windows and doorframes, but most or all of the doorframes I extracted were also extracted simultaneously by Bob, and he posted his.

 

I only extracted a couple of door frames, I think.

[Sabranic]

I love all the pits - I could put those to immediate and awesome use.  I am a graphics designer/web developer by trade, but i've never really gone far into 3D art.  Awesome work.

[kamal_]

I love all the pits - I could put those to immediate and awesome use.  I am a graphics designer/web developer by trade, but i've never really gone far into 3D art.  Awesome work.

 

I'm just an organizer, not a maker of tiles, other people made those. It sounds like you are not aware of my compiling all the tilesets into one project though: http://neverwinterva...tileset-project