Custom Content Challenge: June 2014: Artifacts and Relics

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

That little glass top table, the clawed altar, and this new pillar all can equip offhand items. They are made specifically for orbs, but many of my gems are placed like an orb so they fit. Others will not, nor will most other offhand items.

 

 

I need to fix the base on this one because something is wrong with the TNO texture I used. Simply not displaying as it looks in gmax. This one contains the Orb of Dragonkind (Silver).

 

 

Edit:

 

There, that is better. For some reason that texture automatically flips top to bottom when exporting. Can't figure it out, so I simply cloned the texture and duplicated it top to bottom.

 

 

Not sure how to go about making it equipable, but I am thinking along the lines of invisible container in the same location, and then when you put something in it, the item just clones over to the pillar and then equips. Whatever inventory[1] is in the container will get equipped. Anybody got a better idea, both simple and useful?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

going through and manually optimizing each and every gem so it sits just right and fits within a 20cm cube. The thin gems, like button cuts, are getting rotated [0,35,13] so they show more fire when on display, and also can be modified to slip into the hand grip easier once I clone them off to the other baseitem type. Having to write a lot of scripts to do some of the hard work, like finding bounding box sizes in GMax. That should NEVER have been this difficult and memory consuming to calculate.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               

MD that reminded me the crystall skull scene from SG1:

and there was one gem stand in the end of the 10th series but Im unable to find an image, maybe you remember '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I do need to get a good skull model. I should go grab a royalty free one and run with it.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Mecheon]

               

Crystal Demilich

               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               

Hey MerricksDad - once again you have done a great service by making those models.

The crystal altars look awesome

 

How exactly are they working.

Are they creatures that equip the crystals, or are they actually placeable?

 

Because my PW uses cep, updating it to have additional placeables has been a difficult task, but seeing the quality of these models makes me want to undertake the task.

I might configure my PW Updater app, to install some models inside my players CEP hacks, and update their placeables.2da

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Hey MerricksDad - once again you have done a great service by making those models.

The crystal altars look awesome

 

How exactly are they working.

Are they creatures that equip the crystals, or are they actually placeable?

 

Because my PW uses cep, updating it to have additional placeables has been a difficult task, but seeing the quality of these models makes me want to undertake the task.

I might configure my PW Updater app, to install some models inside my players CEP hacks, and update their placeables.2da

The containers are all creature models, without animations (yet) and they equip an offhand item, which then draws upside down and offset from where the hand node is on a human. They are stationary and I have given them duplicates of Kinarr Greycloak's Armor Stand scripts.

 

There is nothing in the NWN community that should be difficult to hak pack on top of CEP. In fact, I am doing what I can to make it as simple as possible. This kit will have two appearance lines, which somebody in the CEP community can easily merge to CEP, or an individual can put outside of cep range. All the GFF format files for blueprints can easily be modified (in batch) to point to the new appearance index. If all that fails, once this is released, I can just walk you through the process or do the work for you, using my still-in-the-works scripts for managing NWN resources. Practice makes perfect, and you should get really good at doing it yourself, but scripts make it easier for sure.


So far this kit has:

• less than 20 new textures, of which some have TXI files.


• two appearance.2da lines


• two baseitem.2da lines


• kinarr's armor stand scripts, of which I think I use 5-6, and will need to modify once I get a method to equip the placeable finished


• over 120+ gem and hand-held trinket models, which I suspect over half people will not actually use.


• an equal quantity of appearance portraits for each shape


• one item blueprint for each new item shape (which you can redo as you wish, instead of importing after modifying everything to fit your needs)


• one creature blueprint for each item stand (again, which redoing would be easier)


• no creature portraits for these yet, but I should really make some for use with both the creature and an invisible placeable.


• no talk table, as I have craftily pointed names toward something in 1.69's TLK file that is representative enough, such as "Runestone 1" (or 2), and the word "Pedestal" for the creature-placeable hybrids.


• So far I am pointing to 3 textures in the TN* set of area models packaged with 1.69 and have only modified one to fit my needs.

in any case, it should not be too hard to merge with anything.

               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               

I wonder if its possible to make an animation for the alter to do some sort of special effect under certain circumstances

 

1. Normal - no effect, no gem

2. Normal - no effect, with gem

3. Special Effect - Lightning or some particle glow, with Gem

 

Not coming from a custom content background im just guessing at this point, but are you able to override the animations for your creature for the various different animations available in nwn.

 

Eg: Override the pray animation, so it displays a Fire Effect?

And maybe override the Spasm animation so it displays a holy glow?

 

Just trying to envision ways that your creation could be given the maximum amount of customization as possible,

but I differ to your experience.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

with custom VFX, you can make them do anything. In the scenario you first suggested, you might want the Altar to equip the item as you play a custom FNF animation on it. I've given the placeable-creature basic nodes for VFX placement. Those nodes are centered on the approximate location of the orb object (slightly offset from the LHAND node). You can apply any VFX you can apply to a creature to these creature-placeable hybrids.

 

I plan to give at least one pillar a moving part by having the LHAND node rotate in place as part of the wait animation. Since these are very simple models, but can accept any of the animation sequences for an F-type creature model, you can do just about anything with them, including appear/disappear animation.

 

So in your example of replacing animations, what you'd do is just give it an animation for your needs, and at the point you play that animation, also apply your custom effect to the creature object.

 

I have not created any item-applied VFX for these item types, and I don't really intend to. But there is nothing keeping you from doing that, especially if you make use of NWNCX to give you more visual effect options.

 

What I intend to do is simply have multiple items with different on-model effects, and the main reason being that the color of the glass/gem and the internal visuals in the crystal need to change (for my uses anyway) in more ways than can be done with item-applied effects.

 

If instead you'd like a loaded model, you could give the item model a huge set of emitters and toggle them all on and off by animation key. This should also let you change, or add to, the self illumination color most of these items use. But the usefulness of that method would be limited to the lengths of looping animations and the internal purposes of FNF animations, such as emote keys.

 

Edit: ok you guys gotta stop spelling Altar as Alter, you are making me question the English language '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Just as an idea, of which I am not going to act on, you could make the lhand slot parented to a head_g node and then in appearance.2da give the hybrid placeable a head rotation value of 360. Then, you could make an orb similar to the Eye of Sauron, and have it follow you everywhere when you are near. The same could be done with one of OTR's tutorials on using eye textured env maps applied to a specific texture on an orb, in which case, it would follow the camera, probably at any distance.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

So I am having problems making the onConversation event open the invisible inventory object. I probably don't understand the details of the onConversation event, and it has been a long damn time since I coded conversations. Do I actually need a conversation object, and if so, do I call the onConversation event/script from the conversation in the actions tab, or is it supposed to hook by itself?

 

What I want to do is when a player clicks to "speak" to the object (the default action on these placeables), then the onConversation script fires, forcing the player to open the inventory object.

 

 

Edit:

 

NM, I am just going to have the player click directly on a placeable called Gem Slot. I just gotta make it within a clickable range in relation to the creature. I think I will then turn off the targetable aspect of the creature. This should fix everything.

 

 

More Edit:

 

Ok, scripts are done. What I have is a point 0.5 meters above the gem slot you can click on that says "Gem Slot". This is separate from the creature clickable of "Gem Pillar", etc. All you need to do is place the creature hybrid and it automatically spawns and fills the gem slot container object. Any time you change the item in the container, it copies over and attempts to apply it to the lhand slot in the creature hybrid.

 

 

On death, the pillar destroys the container to prevent duplication of items. This probably needs more work to make it accurate with pick pocket and stuff. I'll let others perfect it. For now, I have just set the pillars to immortal to prevent death.

 

I haven't tried it yet, but since these are creature models, it should be fine to apply visual effects to the model, such as face glows, light emission, or location based FNF/DUR effects. Ghost/Ethereal should be interesting too. I'd like to see what it does to the gear displayed.

 

Also, what I might suggest doing, is to apply something small and glowing, like an indicator on console games, to the position of the "gem slot" placeable. That way, players will see that it has something useful above it, and that clicking on the actual statue is not the way to reach that goal.


 

 

 

 

So if I get around to making something like the statue with two gems for eyes ... which I probably won't given that I leave for a camping vacation in a few days ... I would probably make it have two "gem slot" placeables, one for each eye, and set the inventory placement for the gem to main or offhand. Then on the model I would make one eye the right hand and one the left.

 

Of course the only issue with that is that all my gems and orbs are aligned to fit the left hand using Kurairyu's Visible hands. The gems baseitem is IN the hand, and the orb baseitem is floating at or near fingertip distance. But if somebody wants to mod my stuff, it is completely free and open!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_The Amethyst Dragon]

               

MerricksDad: Just gotta say that I am quite impressed with your entire gems/crystals + placeables/creatures (both on their own and in combination).

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Can somebody remind me how to properly change environment maps on item models? I'm doing it TXI files and it isn't doing anything. Here is my text:

• envmaptexture env_stargem

It points to a file named env_stargem.tga which looks like so:

 

 

What I am trying to do is make star rubies, sapphires, or diopside. I'm using a partially transparent texture for the gem surface instead of my usual modification of the entire model via alpha/opacity values.

 

You know what... I just got to thinking about the gem outer surface having a self illumination value. That tends to screw up TXI. I should check that....

 

 

 

Edit: well that wasn't it. Still showing the default env map

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Pstemarie]

               

Since I'm doing all kinds of crystal related stuff for my Baba Yaga mod, what about if I do some crystal skulls?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Since I'm doing all kinds of crystal related stuff for my Baba Yaga mod, what about if I do some crystal skulls?

 

You should, because I can't get this 6k poly skull down to a reasonable quantity without messing it up. If you do, you might as well redo my "orb of golden death" because it looks like crap.