Grids of 8x8 Areas created out of one 32x32 Area

[Legacy_henesua]

                Has anyone else done this?

Regions in Arnheim are composed of smallish areas arranged in a grid, cartesian plane style, and stitched together with edge to edge transitions (improved Seamless Area Transitions). In the past I built each area separately, but its a lot of work getting the edges to match one another.

So recently I built one very large area in the Adermoer as an experiment. Got all the settings to my liking. Got all the tiles the way I wanted. And then made several copies and cropped the 8x8 section that I needed for each "sub" area. It works pretty well. Once the "sub" areas are created, I start laying out all the waypoints, triggers, placeables, sounds, spawn points etc... in them.

In fact I can't see much downside to this, as it enables more diversity in the edge tiles, especially when you consider how raise/lower and crossers work on adjacent tiles. So... does anyone else see a downside to working this way? Are there any pitfalls that I have not anticipated?

32x32 area - Falkswoud


8x8 area - Falkswoud 16 of these would fit in one 32x32 area

               
               

               

                     Modifié par henesua, 10 novembre 2012 - 04:05 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Fester Pot]

               You can use the mouse to highlight an 8x8 grid and COPY it right out of your 32x32 area.

Create a new area that is 9x9 using the same tileset, then PASTE in your COPY and remove the excess width and height. Reload the 32x32 area and repeat until you've copied all to individual 8x8 areas.

Sometimes it will work with the same dimensions, but I've found that when dealing with raised terrain, it's better to create a larger working surface before pasting, thus the reason for 9x9. Also, you can rotate the COPY like a placeable before plopping it down, using SHIFT-MOUSE CLICK. This is good if the area won't PASTE in as you copied it. Then you can just rotate the area as a whole to get it to point in the proper northerly direction. There are times I've had to do this to get an area to COPY.

This might be easier than creating individual copies of a 32x32 area and cropping it, due to load times in the toolset - at least on my system - it takes far too long for this old patient fellow.

FP!
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Fester Pot, 10 novembre 2012 - 06:17 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_kalbaern]

               When building large wooded expanses, towns that are composed of multiple maps, large mazes and other things ... I quite often build in a 30x30 or even 32x32 map first, then copy and divide my template map several times to produce my normal 8x8 to 10x10 versions. I've also made large maps that I'd not only copy and resize later, but when making contiguous maps beyond 32x32, I sometimes delete columns or rows from one end of my template map and extend it in the oppposite direction.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               thanks for the advice. it sounds like I stumbled upon a common technique. this means i'll probably not mess anything up doing this.
               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               If you merged this with nwnx_areas plugin, you could make it a truely never ending forest, or at least never ending up until a certain range.

eg
Each transition when used, would programatically create the next area.
A database entry could tell it how many areas x vs y are to exist.

Eg:
Area0 = Entrance to forest

Area0 you can go South, or East (this is the top most left square on a grid)
South exit triggers the creation of another area, so does the East Exit.
Each one would increment the X vs Y grid reference on the area being generated.
When the X +1 vs Y+1 boundary is no longer within the maximum allowed confines - you could say that the forest is now at its edge.

As far as forests go - thats actually a pretty forest.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Baaleos, 10 novembre 2012 - 06:23 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_henesua]

               Thanks for the kind words, Baaleos, but I can not take credit from the beauty. That is Wildwoods by Six. It is as you noted a beautiful tileset.

And yes, I would love to be using NWNX for a variety of reasons, BUT don't have an intel based server.

BUT I could do the something similar as you suggest via script (to an extent). See Rolo's work on Regional mods. You might like what you find.
               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               Im running my server on an AMD cloud based server.
Im pretty sure that the nwnx restrictions that we had in the early days are alot more flexible.
I think they even got rid of the x64 issue.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <covering his...>

Actually, Rolo is *very* closely following B's Hub, as he thinks it'll slide right into place in the RegMod system ;-)

On the tileset, I adore Wildwood.

On the build big and slice, I like the technique.

Hadn't thought of it before for standard tilesets as I tend to just build from scratch.
But I plan to do something pretty similar to OTR's Megaton for certain single-purpose tilesets (Needlespire and Castle Black (a floating castle ala' Steven Brust) coming to mind).

(As it is, It's a real pain making the easter egg for this month's challenge, btw. It really should be done with a custom version of Medieval City :-P And that really isn't as off-topic as it sounds, but you'll have to wait ;-)

<...burning ears>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Frimbleglim]

               heh, I had wondered what that huge area in the module was for.  Now I know.