ShaDoOoW wrote...
Well, from my understanding of game engine, player is still forced to load all tileset datas when he enter an area no matter if those airships and elven houses are used in that location or not. I guess its not so noticeable just in forest, but we have noticed this with old city exterior combo we used (think it was CCS?) and also with new castle/rural, which Im now trying use as few as possible.
Your information is wrong. The engine reads/loads only what is in the current area, It reads the hak until it find a particular tile, and loads it, then searches for the next one. Each tile that is used in a specific area is loaded into cache ram so that if it is used again in the same area, the engine doesn't have to go searching again. However, the engine does NOT store the entire hak when it reads, only the files it is actually using in the area.
I have a better computer, but I remember those days where loading an area (CCS/worm's tilesets) took almost minute. Even with better computer loading times are still noticeable higher than default tilesets. And since NWNCQ came out, default tilesets become much better choice than before.
Here you are comparing apples and oranges, and there really is no comparison. Most of the newer tilesets created by the community, have either a) increased / improved grafics (read textures)
nwncq is an override resource, so you are actually loading the same tile but loading it individually from the override folder instead of searching for it inside of a hak. I am not exactly sure how the engine would handle that. It would theoretically be able to search through a hak faster, since it is a single read, where if it has to search the HD for each file then load it would theoretically take longer. However, on that specific issue, I have not data to support either case.
I do know that Worms tilesets have issues, and most specifically the CCS is VERY laggy, primarily due to the way the tileset was created.
Anyway, things that cause lag when opening an area are varied:
1) Size of area, anything over 16x16 is begging for trouble, many PW owners will keep things even smaller.
2) Total number of placeables in that area.
3) Fog distance as defined by the area creator.
4) Total polygon count of the area, Here you have to be really careful. TNO is a huge drain on resources, well worth it, but it is very highly detailed. Any tileset created by copying the TNO tiles will take even longer to load than the same area created with the original.
5) Animation on any tiles, these include day/night animations and anything related to say "falling leaves" etc. Animated grass, bushes that move when you touch them, etc. Any animation increases the lag.
6) Total number of creatures/npc's.
7) Any special scripts. Most particularly heartbeat scripts.
There are other things that can cause lag, but those 7 are likely the biggest. Now add a horse to your area, and you lose a minute in processing just to get one horse.
Also please let me say that the "lower" raise terrain feature is useless for me if there is not "ridge" feature. I know the lower raise terrain for a long time, it has its issues (though it may be bugs in particular tilesets) and its not looking god to me. However when building in TNO, I found the ridge crosser and it amazed me because I could make a "hill" where is archer that will shoot all the time. The standard bioware high raise terrain looks better for me, but if I put archer here, he won't see below into lower levels and player is safe there. And AFAIK no forest tileset out there have the ridge feature. But anyway thats a extra for me, I am quite satisfied with the current hak from Jackal_GB though I maybe start from a scratch with a more feature forest hak and try to remove those things I don't like.
Umm... you have to "Raise" TNO before you can paint a "Ridge". The ridge crosser is the opposite of the "hills" crosser in other tilesets. DLA just reversed the way they are implemented. They decided to go with smooth hill instead of the normal cliff type raise edge on a raised tile. Then gave you the "ridge" to get back that raised ege look. TNO is also using a much lower raise, DLA chose to "raise" the terrain by 2 meters instead of the normal 5 meters used in Bioware Rural and other exterior sets.
Anyway, a raised tile is always necessary to get a raised edge type look. In TNO, they just smoothed the normal raise, thinking that folks wanted hills more than they wanted ridges, and so they made the ridge the "crosser" instead of the hill.
A tile has 4 corners. Typicaly you can view it in quarters. To get a raised "tile" you actually have to build half of it high, half of it low. So, you have corner A, upper left, Corner B upper right, Corner C lower left, and Corner D lower right. If you want to have raised terrain, for a basic straight edge, you would raise both corner A and B.
A crosser connects between those corners never actually touching the corners themselves. So, for the raised tile, with corners A and B raised, you would paint the "ridge" crosser across the edges between A+B and C+D.
And I really consider to add NWNCQ hak version into my module so if I would do that, I would probably want to update the rural trees in forest to new NWNCQ look (because they are a new copied tiles with retextured floor).
I guess I won't start porting any terrain in nearest future, but I would like to someday. So I understand the strict explanation how to recognize which tiles are "raised" and which are "crossers". Can you tell me more about actual porting? Its possible to use a current tile from rural without making a copy? That would probably not very useable in this case since I must retexture floor (which is possible only via new tile right?) but it could be useable somewhere.
Hmmm... Terrains and crossers can be a bit confusing if you think too hard about it. But terrains are just that, grass, sand, etc. Crossers can be anything like roads, streams, bridges, and in this general discussion, what we are calling "ridge" from the TNO set. Crossers never connect at corners, only in the middle of tile edges.
By definition in the set, they are handled by the crosser section of each individual tile. As each tile has the option to have a crosser connect to it, if it is defined to have one.
You really have to read a .set file, and likely look at a tile in a modeling program like gmax to get a better handle on that.
As for actually merging terrains/crossers into a new set, use Jlen's
Set Editor B85. It can do most of the work for you in finding the different terrains/crossers and copying them into a net .set for you. Be warned though, that this tool has NOT been updated to work with 1.67-1.69 content, and can corrupt pathnode information for tiles that have the newer path nodes. It has other bugs related to it being way out of date as well but for simple copying of terrains or crossers over, it does pretty good job if you set up the filters on the import tiles/groups page of the program.
Terrains tiles are typically named xxxx_a01_01, xxxxx_b*.* , C, D, E, etc some sets go a bit higher in those letter groups depending on how many terrains actually exist.
Crossers typiclly start in the G range of letters, H, I, J, K are the 5 most common.
These are NOT hard and fast rules, but those are the most common letter groups used for terrains and crossers. Features, groups etc, can be varied, and really depends on the whim of the tileset creator. Most of the sets I havfe seen use L through X. The Z letter group is reserved for edge tiles, the tiles seen at the edge of an area that you can not walk on, the ones that fade out into the distance.
