9 réponses à ce sujet

[Tonden_Ockay]

Can you turn the grass graphic off to a tile or can that only be don in GMax?

 

I like having grass in the rural tileset turned on but I would like to not have it on around the house/building tiles.

[Bannor Bloodfist]

Can you turn the grass graphic off to a tile or can that only be don in GMax?

 

I like having grass in the rural tileset turned on but I would like to not have it on around the house/building tiles.

Grass is actually grown dynamically by the engine.  You can set the "age" of an area older or younger to set how high it starts but beyond that you have to either a) adjust the settings at the top of the .set file to set maximum height to whatever you want or turn all "grass" faces on the walkmesh to some other surface type like dirt.  Be warned though, that the surface type also enables the sound effect of whatever a step will sound like and on dirt will cause a puff of dust to appear around the feet of the character as it walks... with grass, no puff of dirt, with metal, you get that metal ringing sound or pounding sound as if a hammer hit metal etc...

 

So, basically you are pretty limited in actuality.  The engine assumes that grass will grow taller the older an area is IN GAME TIME, as if if you start the game on Friday on September 1st, and go back to same area on Friday November 1st, the grass will be pretty tall.  I don't know the actual math that is used but it is something that has frustrated people from the very beginning.... some folks like the tall grass, and have a tough time getting it to show up while others would prefer that the grass always appear to be mowed down and have a tough time preventing it from growing.

 

I know there are some folks that know how to adjust things a bit via scripting but I do NOT know how to accomplish that.  I actually prefer slightly taller grass as it makes things look more realistic for my purposes. 

[MerricksDad]

perhaps for your mod, you can set the grass walkmesh to something else which is commonly unused, and then change the sound types in the respective file to grass sounds

[T0r0]

 Holy crap,,, I don't think I ever noticed that aging effect....

[Tonden_Ockay]

What I'm looking at doing would be to have the grass tall all through out the rural area however where I build a fort, village, or town the grass would look short and taken care of around the houses and buildings.

 

So sense I never really plan on walking on metal in my module then I could change the area to mental then change and the sound to sound like grass and then the textures of that tile to look like grass?

 

Here is a quick example of what I would like to do.

 

 

I was thinking I could make a custom texture for that tile that would have the grass and dirt path. I just don't want the grass in the dirt path.\

 

 

Edit: I really just don't like it that there is a road leading to town and or runs through town but you have to walk through grass from the road to the building while in town.

[the_isolator]

This is an interesting question. I just had a quick play around with the surfacemat.2da and it seems that it is possible to create a new surface material that has the sound effects for grass but without the visual effect. I simply edited the 2da and created a new material (by using one of the temp slots) and copied the grass line. All you need to do then is change the ID on the walkmesh to reference to new material and it should work. I don't know if this is a perfect solution as I have no idea what the 'Temp' slots do. I'm guessing they are unused, but I could be wrong. 

 

I didn't check, but it might in theory also be possible to have an additional surface material that includes the grass visual but not the sound effect. This could be handy if you want a few small patches of grass on a particular surface (perhaps in a mountain or drylands esque tileset). Someone else might know more about this, I admit I don't entirely know how the grass effect works (I think the texture is defined by a line in the set file). It seems that simply naming the new material  'Grass' isn't enough to do anything. 

 

I imagine for what you have in mind, you are going to need to alter the specific individual faces of the walkmesh (or most likely create new ones). This will need to be done in whatever modelling program you use (i.e. gmax).

[MerricksDad]

It sounds like what you really need to do is edit the model and change the texture and walkmesh around the buildings. Maybe change the base ground around the building to something more mudded and compacted, and then use placeables to represent specific weeds. Or in the case of tended grass, specifically make a tended grass ground texture. That's how I'd do it. But a shortcut through the walk types 2das would be a temporary fix I might try.

[TheOneBlackRider]

Yes, to get rid of the grass growing, you need to edit the according faces of the walkmesh (in the model). They are set to "grass" = ID 3, so they render grass.

 

Ther is a WOK/Walkmesh editor somehere (WOK Reader 8.1), but that is supposed to be buggy and may not work with "newer" models (as it was mentioned somewhere in here: https://forum.biowar...ture-walkmesh/)

 

I personally found, that setting these faces to "Leaves" = ID 14 is a working compromise. It doesn't sound like grass, but there are similarities and it still sounds like a natural floor.

 

The finding of the_isolator is an intresting approach, too! Need to test that some day.

And I also didn't know of the "growing grass" as described by Bannor.

 

Learned some more! Thanks people!

[Bannor Bloodfist]

It sounds like what you really need to do is edit the model and change the texture and walkmesh around the buildings. Maybe change the base ground around the building to something more mudded and compacted, and then use placeables to represent specific weeds. Or in the case of tended grass, specifically make a tended grass ground texture. That's how I'd do it. But a shortcut through the walk types 2das would be a temporary fix I might try.

You would STILL end up having to manually edit the individual faces that you want the new face type to be assigned to. 

 

I remember that there are some limitations on total number of facetypes, but that number is likely why the 2da is padded out to the point that it already is, so using one of the temp entries should be fine.  Going beyond likely won't help much.  Your other ideas make much more sense, just change the face type to something other than grass and paint whatever texture you want on top... no issues, other than possible sound effects getting in the way. 

[Bannor Bloodfist]

 Holy crap,,, I don't think I ever noticed that aging effect....

 

 

Yeah, well it is GAME time related, not real time, and it takes at least a week for it to even start to appear different.  Most folks don't spend that much time in a given area nor do they leave and come back to said grassy area all that often, so it is easily missed that the grass actually grows.  Somewhere in the area properties there is a time setting you can adjust and there are also the settings for grass in the .SET that can control starting height, maximum height and I think how fast is actually grows but don't hold me to that last bit. I am not positive you can adjust the time scale for the growth via the .SET file options.

 

I was shocked the first time I actually realized it myself, and then more or less forgot about it as it is such a rare occurrence that it doesn't make a lot of sense to worry about it... at least until I started working on fixing issues with grass tiles later in my game dev stages. 

 

NWN is STILL about the most powerful game engine out there.  The power that is available to the builder is phenomenal.  Which is why no other game company wants to even get close to that ability with the end user being able to mod it like we can with NWN.  It means that they can't sell as many upgrades to a game or new games etc... we would be too busy creating instead of playing and purchasing.

 

What is really sad is that we were not able to convince Bioware to release source... oh well.  Would have been great if we could have fixed some of the remaining nasty bugs and maybe enhanced the vid section to allow more textures per face to get the levels of detail that you can get with the newer game engines.

 

Still, all in all, WE, the COMMUNITY has already vastly expanded the options for such an old game, and there are still a few of us around that continue to add NEW stuff all the time.  This last closing of these forums though, is going to cause the MOST pain, likely more than all the others combined.  I have seen a few posts were OTHER games are being ported to other Forums, but I am not seeing NWN mentioned much, which I guess just points to the facts that the community here is smaller than even I thought it was and I have been a realist (almost pessimist) most of my life.