The 32x32 max size allowed via toolset is defined by Bioware. It IS possible to create areas larger than this, but there are no GUI utilities to help you build it. You have to manually add the tiles to an .ERF file then import the .ERF into the module. Once that is done, you can NOT edit it in the toolset, at least not that specific area.
Not worth it anyway... Test it yourself. Build a 32x32 area, set your start location in far left, upper corner and place a placeable of some type in far right, lower corner of the area. Hit F9 and see how long it takes you to "Run" to find that placeable... takes forever.
As others have mentioned, the larger the area, the bigger the lag gets, add NPC's, creatures, placeables etc, to make the area come alive, and you will be waiting for quite a while for the area to even load. If it loads at all.
16x16 is the practical limit, most especially for a Persistent World environment. On a single PC, you might be able to tolerate a longer load time for a given area, but in any situation where you have the nwnserver involved, folks will tend to just exit the game, instead of waiting for such a long load time. It can even cause a server to crash.
Tiles are 10x10 meters, and that is absolutely required size. As Zwerkules mentions, that is the size of the walkmesh (wok) of a tile, which defines what areas are walkable/passable in a given tile. This is an engine requirement and there is no way around it.
As to "Themes" within a given tileset, sure, most of the later tilesets that have been created by the community, and even the sets in 1.69 have a large variation in the number of "terrains" that are available. Any given tileset can have as many terrains as you want, but as has also been mentioned, the tileset count goes way up.
The engine requires a given number of tiles to define a given terrain. So, flat grass, requires one tile. Most builders/designers want a few variations of that though, so most tilesets have more than one. Now, when you "raise" a tile, cliffs, or just the typical 5 meter raise of a Bioware set, you not only have to have that flat tile, but all the corner variations as well. Flat on one corner, raised on the other 3, flat on two corners and raised on the other two, flat on 3 corners, raised on the 4th. There is no tile for raised on all 4 as the engine takes the flat tile and raises the whole thing up.
As you add terrain types, say water, you not only duplicate the original tiles but you have to make tiles that merge the two terrains together. Flat grass on one corner, water on one corner, etc. Now add raised terrain to the grass, and you have to add water that is below a cliff edge, water that joins on a corner of a cliff edge etc...
Want a road? Roads. Streams, Walls, Fences, etc are all crossers. They take a min of 5 tiles to define for a SINGLE terrain, say grass. You have to have the wall ending halfway across the tile, straight. We call that the "i" (lower case eye) tile, then you have to have a Straight wall that crosses the entire tile, Typically called an "I" (upper case eye) so that you can tell the difference... then you need corners, so a "T" for 3 corners, an "X" for all 4, etc.
Now if you add water terrains, you need a variation of the walls that coincide with the different combinations of water/grass tiles, so the numbers of tiles required just keeps going up.
You can have at least 4000 tiles in a given set. That is a HUGE tileset though, and is NOT typical. Most sets are lower than 800 tiles, in fact, most are lower than 500. The larges tileset that Bioware ever released, the Castle Exterior, Rural (Called TNO by older fans) is 1260 some tiles. That is a HUGE set by most standards. However, when you start building with it, you might not see the reasons behind why it is sooo large. It has 7 different terrains, and at least 9 different crossers to allow all the terrains, walls, streams, roads to connect.
When you create an area with it, you don't have to know what tiles are being used, but those tiles DO have to exist. So, you paint an area with grass, add a road, then decide that you want a stream to cross under the road... You are talking about having to have an area that is at least 2x2, likely 3x3 to even get that started. Plain grass, Plain grass with road, and plain grass with a road that has a stream going under it. The road has to have ends, so that is 3 tiles, the stream has to have ends, that is 3 more, minus the variant that allows the road to cross over so that is 5 tiles just for a single bridge over a small stream on a short path/road.
Features/Groups are basically unlimited. Groups are more than one tile that paints at the same time... groups CAN re-use tiles that are used by other groups, provided that the first tile in the group list is not the same. So, say one corner has to always be different but the other 3 corners can be the same or use the same tiles as other groups do. You don't have to worry much about that though, as most tileset creators do NOT re-use tiles across multiple groups, it is much easier to manage when every group is defined by it's own tiles.
Groups seldom use the same tiles as a given terrain... they WILL require that a given terrain be present, IE grass to paint a farm down, or cobble to paint a merchant in a city etc.. But the actual tiles in the group are separate from that terrain. So they add to total tile count.
As to having textures change... there are two ways to accomplish that. One is to duplicate a given tile, and rename it, then re-texture it. This doubles the tile count. The other option is to have a separate hak with different textures, by the same names, available, and load/unload that hak. This can NOT be done while in game though, and can't be done where you have two different areas with the same tileset using both textures, IE, one area using one, the other using the different texture. What you are doing is "overriding" the textures in use. A PW server can accomplish this by having two different versions of a hak available, and shutting down the server temporarily, changing the hak order or what haks are required, and then restarting the server... the player would have to have both versions of the haks available on his system, but only ONE would be loaded at any given time.
Neither of those two options are ideal. Typically, a builder would just have two different tilesets available and build each area separately.
Modifié par Bannor Bloodfist, 25 juillet 2011 - 09:33 .
