Can someone explain the popularity of NWNCQ's textures? (technically)

[Legacy_jackkel dragon]

               

Tarot Redhand wrote...
things that had been placed on the ground just disappeared.

I knew I was forgetting something. This is part of why I keep CQ as an override (as counter-intuitive as that sounds): when I'm building in the toolset, I see when certain items or placeables are devoured by the earth due to the geomety of CQ and can move them to more visible locations. This has little to no effect on people who don't use CQ as an override, yet allows those who do to avoid having important objects magically disappear.

Of course, it'd be nice if the walkable/placeable item ground level matched the geometry, and I'm really glad that most tilesets make sure that's the case...
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               I'm just talking about the textures.  I had forgotteon how much other stuff NWNCQ changes, too.

A couple of people brought up NWShader and the textures.  Here's the thing, from what I saw it looked like NWNCQ had fake (not a pejorative) bloom and fake bumpmapping applied to the textures.  Like you can do in Photoshop or GIMP, although I'm not saying it was necessarily a simple process.  Anyway, those things appeared to be completely separate from what NWShader actually did, which was actual bloom and actual bump-mapping.

But they're two totally different things.

To my knowledge, NWNCQ never contained any of the secondary image files (like actual normal maps) to cause any kind of special behavior with NWShader nor were the hardcoded images derived from NWShader.  When you used the two of them together, what you wound up having appeared to be heavily processed original textures in an environment which blurred your ability to tell as easily that they were baked-in effects.  Sort of a high-tech equivalent of rubbing Vaseline around the edges of a camera's lense to give a photo a "vintage" look.  As at least one person pointed out, if you zoomed in (or, in my case, looked at the textures directly) the illusion was in danger of being broken.

I'm more interested in whether, with the reception of the textures being so positive, there's something to that whole process that potentially trumps detailed textures in the perception of a large number of end users.  It may not even be a perceptual thing: IIRC, NWN agressively filters textures unless explicitly told not to do so or told to do so within a certain range, at least for TGA's.  It could be high detail textures get eaten up pretty quick at most ranges by that filtering...yet higher-contrast textures like the ones in NWNCQ actually survive the downsampling process with more visual integrity.

I have no idea if that's the case.  It's just a hypothesis and I'm half making it up to give an example of what I'm hoping to find out.

It's like "high detail" vs "light and shadow" or something like that.  I just don't have the lexicon for it, which is why I was hoping someone who did might be able to clarify what it was.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 27 février 2013 - 12:29 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_cervantes35]

               The textures are just to cartoonish for me and I'll not get into the techinical problems as they seem to have been well covered by others.

Besides technical reasons are why alot of my tileset stuff sits on my hard drive and not on the vault as I won't release material with alot of technical flaws.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               Ah... well OTR ... in my case the answer is simple then: color palette, and color saturation.

NWNCQ is bright and magical versus the gritty fantasy implied by relatively desaturated textures in tilesets like Wildwoods and TNO.


edit - i want to add that I think for many, the saturated colors were and are a breath of fresh air, even though for others it isn't their cup of tea. I like the bright colors as it was the same angle I was working on when I was working on art assets. And I must add that as much as I have criticized Chico's efforts with textures, my own efforts are no more successful than his. I say this to make it clear that I appreciate how difficult it is to pull off saturated colors in a convincing manner.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par henesua, 27 février 2013 - 12:39 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

henesua wrote...
Ah... well OTR ... in my case the answer is simple then: color palette, and color saturation.

I'll grant you that it definitely changes the impact for a viewer, but I think there might be more to it than that.  Here is one of the examples I'm talking about:

Here is what I think is the highest-res version of tdr01_e_fn01 that ships with NWN:



Here is the version that comes with full version of NWNCQ:



I agree about saturation for foliage and stuff like that.  But what about these, for instance?  They're not all that different, color-wise and the differences in color I believe are an unintentional artifact of the filtering process used to give many if not all of the NWNCQ textures their unique look. 

Are people looking at that second one (in-game, specifically) and seeing it as a "superior" texture?  If so, why?

@Pstemarie, T0r0, ShaDoOoW  - I didn't even think about the nature of it being an override.  Good point.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 27 février 2013 - 01:11 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_henesua]

               Hmm... well as I have said before, many of Chico's tilesets do nothing for me. And that would be one of them. So, I can't say what others might find good about that particular texture.

My opinion of that texture is that it is poor work. It looks like the same texture scaled up in photoshop and run through a few filters.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_AndarianTD]

               A couple of quick thoughts, as a builder who did update his mods to use NWNCQ.

1) I also had some reservations about NWNCQ's textures. But textures aren't everything. What I liked about NWNCQ was the greater geometric complexity of the scenes that I could build with it. Things like rooves for indoor areas and denser vegetation in outdoor areas made a big difference to me in being able to make areas that were more visually interesting.

2) As much as I like artistically beautiful CC, the functionality of a tileset is just as important to me. No disrespect intended, but as an adventure module developer, I'm not trying to make "pretty 3D paintings." I'm building areas that (hopefully) serve as an effective setting for an adventure, and that help me tell a story visually as well as with words.

3) NWNCQ is (for the most part) a drop-in improvement to the base game's tilesets, which are now many years old. It's an easy way to facelift a module originally developed using the Bioware default tilesets, as opposed to re-building them from scratch.

Here are a few screenshots from my work using NWNCQ. In these areas, and in my opinion, it enabled me to significantly improve their appearance over what I could create using the default Bioware tilesets, and/or to create features that I needed for my setting that I couldn't easily duplicate without it.

An NWNCQ Makeover for Sanctum 1?
Sanctum 1-2 Version 3.4 Now Available!
Some New (NWNCQ) Screenshots

EDIT: Here are some "before and after" comparison shots that I did for the AME review of NWNCQ to illustrate the value I see in it. That said, I also strongly agree that NWNCQ has non-trivial flaws, and in some cases very annoying ones (for example, some inappropriate texture overrides, and some missing edge and roof tiles that have to be worked around).




               
               

               

                     Modifié par AndarianTD, 27 février 2013 - 05:19 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_cmwise]

               I see what you mean AndarianTD,  the real difference between what I create and what you have here is the roof. I may spend hours on one area alone, usually much more. But I end up with the same kinds of details by using hundreds of placeables. I enjoy that artistic process. So I am not too much for the plug and play tilesets..mainly because the detail is the creators and not mine. Roofs on the other hand look great but as a player I (at first) hated them. Managing camera angles was and sometimes still is a pain.

Not everyone has the time or patience to place a couple hundred placeables or wants to for that matter. But I do see building areas, using the wonderful tools that others have provided as "art".

Consistency across tilesets is another matter and a serious one too. Even using LOW's tilesets gets tricky, but is rewarding if you have the patience to work out the details.

I dont criticize anyone's work, cause its all something I cant do and appreciate everyone's efforts. But obviously, each builder has their own ideas of what is helpful/useful for what they are creating.

I dont use NWNCQ nor have I tried the override. I have used just about everyone's tilesets some with a certain amount of satisfaction and others with total frustration. It's an old game and people are making it do things the developers never really could forsee.

Keep up the good works and don't think for a minute that there aren't some of us out here using your creations for our own. Thanks!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Master Jax]

               This has been talked about a lot since it came out, and yes, some of us have been sort of dismissed or bashed for offering a different approach or suggestion. The NWNCQ thing is mainly about taste, rather than functional or technical matters, same as NWNShader, and those two seem to go hand in hand. If you like that, no amount of functional or technical talk is going to change it, and viceversa. The only true difference I can make regarding this is how involved you are in personally modding the game. Those who are merely gamers, who know little about customizing models and textures, will probably benefit from a comprising, plug-and-play system like Chico's. However, those who are a little more involved with the game will always prefer other options. Curiously enough, most builders I know prefer the opposite of his approach. Just take a look at the people commenting here. There are big names around.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_painofdungeoneternal]

               Often usage is directly related to how things are worded, described, and promoted, if it's too complex to get across in a simple sentence to the listener, it's probably not going to be that popular regardless of how good it is. This package is just something most users can easily understand, and quite often actually already are assuming there is something like this based on prior experience.

A texture pack is actually common in many games, thus a new player wanting to make the game look better, knows these are simple to install, relatively safe to use, and make their expensive monitor seem worth while. Note this is being said by someone who went and got an HD TV, paid for HD channels, and is still wondering why I did it - can't even tell it's HD unless I flip channels back and forth.

I've talked to numerous players new to the game, and to me it's frustrating trying to get them to even take a look at custom content - it isn't until i twist their arm do they realize that what I am describing actually is something completely new and not related to anything they've seen before, they really seem to want to pigeon hole things. ( and even if it actually directly solves the issue they are complaining about to begin with )

NWN ( 1 and 2 ) just have a different dynamic to begin with. Most players just don't get why all the mods aren't aimed at the OC like it is in Dragon Age, a game that can make complete worlds is just outside what they have ever seen before.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WebShaman]

               Nissa has the gist of it here - the NWNCQ overrides from Chico is NOT really for builders.  It is for Players.

It is something that I have attempted to talk to you all for awhile now - as builders, obviously you see things and know things that players do not.  You can routinely manipulate 2das and solve hak conflicts, yadda yadda yadda without real effort.

Players mostly cannot.

Thus, providing them with an easy to use graphical improvement (over the basic Bioware standards) is something that most Players go gaga for.  The PRC realized this when creating the PRC and included the injector as well as the Java Character Creator (modified, of course, from the original CODI Character Creator of yore '> ).

Most Builders (IMHO) create for other builders.  They automatically assume that certain abilities and understandings are already present.  And although there are graphical improvements included as overrides that are better than NWNCQ for specific environments, they often conflict with other equally good ones for other environments, etc.

Take many of the best tilesets, for example.  They look great!  They wow, ooh, and ahh the audience.  But most Players cannot really use them.  They have no idea how to open up a Mod, recreate a place with a new tileset, delete or rename the old one, and then tie up any "loose ends" like 2da incompatibilities or hak conflicts in order to enjoy the "new look".

When I think about all the modifications I use for NWN, and just how much work I have to put into making it happen, it boggles the mind.  I once had to re-install NWN due to a HDD crash.  It took literally weeks to get it back to where it was before!  D/Ling all the changes that I have to have now, then putting them together to get them to work...it is a nightmare, really.  If it was not for the override version of the ingame appearance changer, OMBs OHS system (really easy to "drop in" as an override), etc, I am not really sure if I would have the enthusiasm to re-install everything again, should my HDD crash in the future (which it will, eventually).  Chico's system is just easy to use - it is not the "best graphical" improvement out there.  Since something is easy to use, it spreads fast among Players (Hey, have you tried X yet?  It really improves the game!  Take a look at this!).

If there was a thing like a Community Override Project or somesuch, that took the best content (graphically speaking) and modified things without any work, I rather suspect that the NWN Community (Playerwise) would go bonkers with it.  Include the new, cool characterizations, VFXs, etc, and perhaps an injector (for obviously I doubt that merely an override will work here) that basically solves things for Players, and one will soon see the best graphical content everywhere.

Much like the DA compiler - it takes packages that improve the game, graphically, and makes them compatible with one another, for the most part.

I know that Brian Chung was working on something like this for NWN - some sort of "ultimate 2das" or somesuch.  I wonder whatever became of that project?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               I just wanted to say that while I critizied Chico's work, I respect what he has done. It was a lot of work to add roofs to so many tilesets.
I can't help it but say bad things about his textures because I really think a lot of them look awful which is mainly because of the pseudo-bumpmaps. The two pictures OTR posted show very well what I mean.
However this doesn't mean that I don't like everything he's done.
And though Chico doesn't seem to be around any more, he was a good member of the community when he was still active. He wouldn't just download stuff from the vault but also always vote and leave a comment. And that is more than most people do.
Feedback is very important to CC creators.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy__six]

               Never underestimate the power of different.

As far as textures go, NWN's base content is on the whole pretty good. The colour pallette is often rather dull (something which NWNCQ does address), and some of them are a bit vague on details (which... lets not go into what NWNCQ does on this point). But on the whole, pretty good. So why are overrides so popular? 'Cos they change things up and give you a different style to play with. That style can be grimmer, like my undead (which aren't massively more detailed than the base undead). Or it can be... whatever NWNCQ is meant to do.

I probably don't need to explain at this point that I don't like the look of NWNCQ. But my point of reference for judging the art is custom tilesets. Considering how many servers have traditionally used custom tilesets extensively, most players' is the base game. And even just by being different, NWNCQ alleviates the inevitable visual boredom you get when looking at the same content for over a decade. Add to that a more vibrant colour scheme, and the finer details don't matter so much. Nobody expects NWN to look like Crysis 3.

Similarly, I suspect much of the reason my Wildlands tileset was well liked was its' very different approach to the textures. 'Cos in isolation I don't think it's particularly appealing.

Plus, as mentioned, Chico seemed rather a nice guy.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par _six, 27 février 2013 - 05:45 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_painofdungeoneternal]

               

WebShaman wrote...

If there was a thing like a Community Override Project or somesuch, that took the best content (graphically speaking) and modified things without any work, I rather suspect that the NWN Community (Playerwise) would go bonkers with it.  Include the new, cool characterizations, VFXs, etc, and perhaps an injector (for obviously I doubt that merely an override will work here) that basically solves things for Players, and one will soon see the best graphical content everywhere.

Much like the DA compiler - it takes packages that improve the game, graphically, and makes them compatible with one another, for the most part.

What you are describing, it hits the nail on the head. It is the core problem in NWN, and worse in NWN2, which makes things outside the scope of the casual gamer who does not want to know how the magic works, he just wants to hop in and use it. ( That is the problem I am trying to solve with Never Launcher )
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Frith5]

               OTR, I believe part of the reason for popularity is actually suspension of disbelief. Yeah, that's right. See, with more detailed (higher res) textures, we move closer and closer to an 'uncanny valley' syndrome. When you're driving down the road, how much of the grain do you notice in those light poles? How many courses of mortar can you count on your walk through town? Now, I am red/green color blind, so please excuse me, but I can see how the less detailed image of the  two you posted above could actually be considered MORE realistic. More, because the viewer's mind doesn't have to try to justify as much. We can't see individual bricks and joints, so our minds don't try to ignore that they aren't real, but are only lines (and even less that that, actually). Sometimes less IS more.
Just a theory. I love the great new work being done by the community. But truthfully it is best appreciated standing still and staring, like a visitor to a museum might do. Works of fine art (and I mean that as a great thing).

I also want to add my voice to those who are pointing out all the work Chico did, and made a gift of to everyone, with no restrictions. That is attractive, too. '>

JFK