11 réponses à ce sujet

[Sunjammer]

As part of my "state of the nation" investigations into the various
aspects of the Dragon Age Modding community I'm trying to understand what are the greatest challenges faced by Level Designers and Area Builders and what we might do to overcome them?  Additionally what could be done to speed up the process?

Several of the worse culprits have been identified so I'll quickly summarise them here so we can move on :

• Water planes: Having to post levels from the Single Player module; no water planes in interiors.
• Light mapping: Black triangles/splodges; broken shadows; unlit placeables; lack of normals in light maps; light maps not being rendered outside the playable area (high LOD) boundary.
• Light probes: One texture per level.
• Export Manager/Process: Light mapper hanging, trees failing to post.

So what other obstacles are preventing or slowing you when trying to create levels and areas?

Please note that I'm only talking about levels and areas in this thread. I'll be looking at more general toolset/building issues in a day or two.

Modifié par Sunjammer, 26 février 2010 - 06:22 .

[indio]

YATT - We *need* something that replicates the process. Anyone that tells me to just do it by hand is perhaps unfamiliar with the power of using a photoshopped heightmap to construct sculpted exteriors.

Cutomisable Model Palettes - Let me re-organise the model palette with folder names that make sense. As it stands, finding the right model for the job (yes, even with the screenshot display in the wiki) makes building far more tedious than it needs to be.

Plateau Brush - let me define the numeric height and have the brush paint at that value. Having to raise or lower a spot is, again, tiresome.

Height Lock - I need to lock the height of models, all the time, but can't. Let me lock the height of a model so I can then drag it around and perfect its placement instead of having it fall through the ground, have me guess if it's right, then raise it up only to find it's off line again.

I don't understand why the BW level designers didn't demand these basic tools. If I'm to spend hours a day designing levels, these tools are simply essential. At risk of sounding desperate, their absence is sufficient for me to quite readily choose something else to do besides design levels, which has been the case for a while.

Modifié par indio, 26 février 2010 - 01:55 .

[TimelordDC]

The height lock is sorely needed since stuff just jumps around where and when they want.
Model palettes are also a complete mess. That was a ridiculous idea to begin with and the very need for a separate description and image preview page makes that point.

The lightmapper should also be made to work with the recent stable version of Python (2.6) since reliance on older versions typically breaks other things people do (a relevant example in the DA world would be Blender, for example, which requires 2.6)

They should also allow us to customize the mouse controls in the level editor. Using the middle mouse is such a bad option since it inadvertently scrolls around.

Modifié par TimelordDC, 26 février 2010 - 02:26 .

[Sunjammer]

On reflection the thread name was a little cryptic so I hope you'll forgive me for changing it.

Below I've included a list of suggestions (predominently by JasonNH) that I recently (yesterday) submitted to BioWare:

1. More immediate feedback on lighting. For instance, you can't see the effects of baked ambient or static lights when adjusting their colour or intensity until after the lengthy light mapping process. Static point lights do give you immediate visual feedback. If the former types of light could behave more like the latter it would save a LOT of time with lighting.

2. Consistency in menus/toolbars: the mini-map generation relegated to the context (right-click) menu when all other posts/export functions appear on the toolbar.  On the face of it, Generate Water Collisions is not included in the Export Manager dialog.

3. More short-cuts or quick keys. There should be easy ways to toggle the grid (at its current opacity setting) on and off; to enable snap to surface; to enable snap to grid; and to enable snap rotation without changing the current tool that is being used.

4. A browser/preview pane for props and placeables.

5. The ability to specify a vegetation's draw distance at the time of painting rather than after the fact.

6. The ability to change the size of an area after it has been created.

7. Better grouping ability with vegetation. I would like to be able to create a group, highlight it, and then when I paint down new vegetation it would go under that group. Right now, it always goes under the default name of the vegetation and you have to manually move it later.

8. Add a snap-to/continue feature to building terrain collision so you can more easily/precisely pick up where you left off. Add a remove all/clear terrain collision for those times where the map has change so much it's easier to start over!

9. The ability to specify a specific height with the plateau tool.

10. Add an additional 0m (zero meter) setting for SpeedTree Rendering Distance in the pull down menu so all trees can be quickly hidden.

11. Better orientation of grass on terrain. Even the "Orient on Terrain Surface" setting doesn't do a very good job of getting grass to lay flat on flat ground, let alone anything with a little curve to it.

12. Add an ability to swap existing painted textures on a chunk by chunk basis: this could be done either as a chunk command (i.e. by selecting the chunk and swapping out one of the textures) or by "Replace Texture" brush (which only paints the new texture where old texture exists so it will not affect the other textures on that chunk).

13. Add the ability to cut/copy/paste and rotate chunks of terrain.

14. Add lightmaps to placeable objects which are missing lightmaps.

15. Colour/tint brush that would allow adding a colour/tint to a vertex thereby avoiding the need to sacrifice textures and in fact extending the life of the current textures.

Also as stated on the wiki the LVL file is a rebadged ERF file. The LVL file contains a header.gff file and a *.pdfc file which is also a (rebadged) GFF file: unfortunately there is no information on these in the wiki (that I could see). Therefore if the community had the file structure/format information for the header.gff and .pdfc files we might be able to create tools akin to the TerraCoppa plugin we had for NWN2. These would allow us to generate/manipulate levels outside of the toolset.

[JasonNH]

Another wonderful addition would be if selecting vegetation worked similarly to props, where you could "cycle through" all of the vegetation that overlaps the same given spot when continuously clicking. Right now, when you have a big tree with some smaller trees, bushes, or grass nearby, it is very tedious to selectively disable selection locks and/or locate the item you want in the vegetation list.



Big thanks to Sunjammer for pushing this along and in advance to Bioware for considering these issues.

[Bibdy]

You can get a height lock by disabling 'Snap Z to Surface' or something in the options when you click the little red-white horse-shoe magnet icon at the top left, and then using the XYZ movement tool thingie to travel the item in the XY plane (red/green).

At work at the moment, so the description is a little...vague.

Modifié par Bibdy, 27 février 2010 - 01:11 .

[indio]

Most excellent!

[Sunjammer]

The lack of playable area, collision and walk grid information in the Area Editor can be a little frustrating. This issue normally rears its ugly head any time I'm placing an area transition and or the module start point. However, depending on level design, I can also end up with other interactive placeables in inaccessible places. We can get round it by adding visual cues in the level for designer who is to populate the area but being able to view the level's walk grid in the area editor, for example, would elimiate this issue altogether.

wyvern14 has just pointed out that we can of course see this simply by enabling the  View > Environment > Pathfinding Points menu option.

Modifié par Sunjammer, 27 février 2010 - 06:21 .

[wyvern14]

Most excellent suggestions! Keep up the great work!


Agreed with Timelord - trying to find the right prop is tiresome and complicated for nothing.

Lightmap generation for exterior levels can take forever, even with a quad core. An option to run big processes like this in a background mode could allow modders to go on working on other stuff and lose less time. Right now, I have to time those actions when I need to cook, do laundry, take a shower, etc, else I'm stuck waiting.

Grass placement - placement very flaky, have to reposition manually most of the time.

Modifié par wyvern14, 27 février 2010 - 06:20 .

[indio]

http://social.biowar...4/index/1134839

This script (I set it to 0.1) reduces the time taken to complete the lightmap routine by a huge amount (if set to 0.1 it takes 1/10th the usual time). Best testing prop that exists to date. Highly recommended.

Modifié par indio, 27 février 2010 - 09:10 .

[wyvern14]

<3<3<3<3

[BioSpirit]

One of the most critical problems that I have encountered in level creation:

- Vegetation is not visible beyond 20m. Visibility distance setting, in a toolbar, has no effect.

There is a good list of lightmapper problems in Sunjammer's post and here are few others:
- Light doens't pass through spider webs.
- Light doens't pass from chunk to chunk.
- Light intensity setting not working properly.

Modifié par BioSpirit, 02 mars 2010 - 04:29 .