Mecheon wrote...
Was that based on the Bioware tropical?
... How horrible is that stuff to get working? My own tileset forays tend to end quite badly, but heck knows if its something I can clunk through notepad I'll have a lot better luck
No, the CTP Tropical was a merge of several tilesets and addons for tilesets long before Bioware released a Tropical tileset. However, when Bioware DID release their set, we did grab a few groups and such, a few terrain tiles to merge in with ours for variety sake etc.
The issue is the merging of the various terrains and crossers. Everyone wants everything to be inter-connectable and that requires a huge amount of work to generate tiles that will merge the various terrains first, then get(s) duplicated again for every single crosser you have in the given set (with a few exceptions).
To give a slightly better explanation, a single terrain, say grass, needs at minimum about 9 tiles to get it working. Now add raise/lower and you have to generate a bunch more, I can't remember the multiplier number but it is there.
Now, add a second terrain.... sand... to get it to paint next to grass you have to generate a tile for every possible combination of flat AND raised/lower tlles... if you have crossers, you just multiplied again.
Now add Water, after all what good is a beach without water? Now you have to generate tiles that will merge Water with Sand, Water with Grass, and Water with Sand And Grass on a single tile (this also means Water with Grass and Sand - left to right on a single tile...) Again, add crossers (fences, roads, paths whatever) and you multiply again...
Now add Trees (what type of tree by the way? Tropical Style like Palms or Rural / normal trees and you end up with BOTH) then all the previous mentioned multiplications again.
A single tile has four sides AND 4 corners, you have to generate a tile for all of those positions that will allow you to paint them down in Toolset. They also may or may not have up to 4 different crossers conecting via the sides and one for full left/right or top/bottom and depending on other terrain types that connect.... the list grows exponentially.
NONE of that is hard to do, but ALL of it takes time, the more tiiles in a set, the more time it takes to generate/create them. That is why tilesets take sooo much time to release, and why most NEWER tilesets have much fewer terrains to have to deal with. TNO or Bioware Rural/Castle from 1.69 has over 1200 tiles, I forget the exact number, and it was STILL missing tiles for certain possible locations in a given area, IE there may not be a tile created that allows you to connect between certain types of things. Not just crosser issues, but also terrain issues.
At one point, there was going to be an update to nwmax, to be relased by Thrikeen, but when he was let go from Bioware, he stopped all development of said update. That upgrade to NWMax would have had a true helper system to generate all the tiles necessary (as blank tiles) to get two terrains and/or crossers added into a set. No one else has ever attempted such a thing. It is sorely needed, heck, just generating the empty filenamed.mdl files that would then have to be edited, would have been a HUGE savings in time, and reduction in missing tiles.
Velmar's TSC (Tile Set Creator) was the best helper I have ever seen beyond the original nwmax, to aid a tileset creator with filling in all the necessary details for a given tile or tileset. Unfortunately, it no longer runs at all in 3dsmax past version 9.
Michael Darkangle is likely the only person left in the community that might be convinced to try to fix those issues or to actually generate the tool(s) that Thrikeen wished to add, but he already has more than enough work to keep him busy. It is so sad that we lost folks like Danmar, Velmar, Joco (nwmax originator), Thrikeen etc... few folks have the inclination to learn a scripting system that changes every time 3dsmax updates, which is every year now.
Modifié par Bannor Bloodfist, 15 janvier 2014 - 01:28 .
