Custom Model Set Idea

[Legacy_The Amethyst Dragon]

               For all those model makers out there that might be more talented than I (that'd be an aweful lot of people), I've got an idea that you might enjoy making/collaborating on.

Placeable Interiors

There are lots of different interior tilesets and placeables for decorationg those interiors, but what about placeable models that can be placed down in different configurations within a generic flat tileset?  There could be a variety of rooms and spaces that could then be used in almost any combination.

You could combine features of various tilesets in one area.  You could make curved, angled, or even non-solid walls.  You could even make buildings that are the same scale as their exteriors.  Want a dungeon chamber hidden in the corner of a typical house...it could be possible.

To look right, you'd need a few things (just off the top of my head):
1. a generic flat tileset, with either a non-visible floor (preferable) or the walkplane set just above the floor so that the placeable floors would appear at the right spot under player's feet.
2. transition placables for joining different themes, such as going from a natural stone tunnel to a worked stone tunnel or to a wood-lined interior, or from a low ceiling to a higher ceiling
3. a standardized set of measurements for things like doorways
4. ceilings so that the areas actually feel like they're inside
5. the generic tileset should have at least one place you can put a door so that actual doors can be manually moved into proper positions
6. a model naming convention so that multiple people could more easily contribute individual placeables

You could also make partial interior parts that could be combined to make different sizes/shapes of similarly-themed interiors.

Some Idea Pros: 
- ability to combine different types of interior spaces in one area
- ability to place interior features without sticking with a grid layout
- ability to add to an area as new placeables are developed without fear of messing up existing work (such as can happen with tileset updates)
- no messing with walkmeshes

Some Idea Cons:
- basically limited to a single plane of movement for compatibility...placeables don't have their own walkmesh, so up and down movement wouldn't work
- placeables would all have to be manually chosen and placed...no automatic lining up of spaces like with tilesets
- initial small variety of spaces...most versatility would require more models to start with, which take time to make
- parts of the map couldn't really be hidden, since placeables don't affect how much of the minimap is revealed like actual walls do

Discuss!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_lordofworms]

               Interesting and well thought out idea. I had thought of something similar in everyone pooling together to make a single 'room' group for a flat tileset. that way you the artist could design that room anyway they wished.

the idea of placeables is very very good though. I think for inside rooms and such it could be fantastic. I would probably use a completely invisible floor/plane for the tileset base. rather than anytype of color

that way you could simulate deep pits , cracks in floors,etc easily.

I know of scripts that can bounce a player back just like a placeable pwk so that could be easy enough.



for caverns and caves..hmmm...i really hate 'flat' walking for anytype out outdoor nature terrain...it just makes the game actually 'feel' dated when I see total flatness across miles of supposed 'rugged' terrain.

not to knock your idea on that at all...that is just my personal opinion and wouldnt keep me downloading/using it should it ever be made available.



and are you talking complete 'rooms' or just 'a bunch of stuff to 'make' a room, like corners and edges and the like. similar to nwn2 version of toolset interiors...but without the 'snap' to grid feature?



I think the single room idea would be the best way to go , but I would still be able to use the pieces version as well since one can use the orientation tooset to set exact coordinates if need be.



               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Bannor Bloodfist]

               A couple of fairly major issues you need to consider:



1)  You can NOT paint a walkable placeable on top of a non-walkable surface... so, all of your flat tiles MUST be walkable.  Which means that your placeables would have to line up exactly, to block folks from walking on nothing.



2)  You should NEVER put a placeable across a tile's edge.  This causes major issues, up to and including crashing to desktop.  So folks that messed up the placement of your walls etc, would run into some major issues, and most folks wouldn't be able to figure out why the darned area crashes all the time.



3) Placeables do affect walkable space, but only to block what is walkable.  



4) Using placeables.as your divisions between areas etc, walls, counters, etc, completely screws up path-noding.  Ever wonder why your henchman can't follow you around in a cluttered room or why they get stuck in odd places? (Heck, this even happens in outdoor tilesets where the author failed to properly pick the correct path node for each individual tile.) For this idea to work at all, you must force usage of the "+" walk-mesh pathnode.  This means that the entire area of the tile is walkable and that you can enter/leave the tile on the centers of each side.



5) Your walkable spot is the surface of the tiles walk-mesh, in your idea that would be a flat surface, which is fine.  Putting a placeable above it, say a floor covering of any type, is going to make it appear that your PC and NPC's are walking through it, not on top of it.  There really is not much you can do about that one.   It can be made to appear less jarring, but it still is happening.



NWN Aurora is an OLD engine, it is severely limited in what can and can't be accomplished.  Granted, the artists out in the community have pushed the visual envelope a huge amount, but there are still basic things that can not be done.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_The Amethyst Dragon]

               I was thinking this could work only for interiors (and smaller ones at that).  Once you get to exteriors, when you get too far from a placeable, the game simply stops rendering it and it vanishes from sight.

For most of the spaces, I was thinking each placeable would be for one complete room.  It would be a massive pain to try to line up multiple walls, floors, corners, ceilings, etc. for each room if each had to be built from scratch.  The ones that might be parts of rooms would only work in conjuction with other models that lined up near-perfectly to start with.

It's true that placeables don't have a real walkmesh.  Each model would have to have a .pwk file that allowed walking only on the floor spaces and blocks it for walls, counters, non-useable furniture, etc.

I can see how pathfinding would be hampered in such an area...especially if someone get's too fancy with the layout.

An invisible flat tileset would be ideal for this concept.  With no visible floor to it, the placeable rooms' floors can be set at a z value of 0.0, since there wouldn't be an visual clipping.  You'd still be able to use rug placeables at a z of 0.01 or 0.02 like you can now.

Even if this were limited to "civilized" interiors with basically level floors, it could provide a way to have nice smaller areas that don't appear to be 20 meters x 20 meters.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldMansBeard]

               There's an additional drawback of using lots of placeables - it increases the processor load related to the way the engine maintains perception lists and eventually you will start to get unacceptable lag. Although you might not realise it, every creature in the area is constantly being checked against every other creature for line-of-sight perception and that means checking every face of every placeable on the way to see if it blocks sight. The processor load is tolerable if the placeables are sparse and the poly count low; the game engine was only designed to work optimally for that situation.



A better way to get the flexibility you want, is to create your custom area in GMax/3dsMax, by all means using a kit of pre-constructed placeable elements if you like, then slice it into custom tiles and parcel them up into a custom tileset hak. That way, you can get the walkmesh right. You still have the pathnoding problem, as Bannor has rightly pointed out, and there's no way around that because the set of available pathnode patterns is hard coded in the engine. So a reasonable approach is to design your grid of pathnodes on paper first, lay it down as bitmaps in GMax/3dsMax and then lay down your placeable meshes to conform to what you see.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_AndarianTD]

               

Bannor Bloodfist wrote...

2)  You should NEVER put a placeable across a tile's edge.  This causes major issues, up to and including crashing to desktop.  So folks that messed up the placement of your walls etc, would run into some major issues, and most folks wouldn't be able to figure out why the darned area crashes all the time.

I'm surprised to read this. I do it all the time and have never had any problems with it. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying?