Merricksdad's Black Hills Tileset (First Look)

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

The surround tile has the same option of taking on decal texures as does the rest of the tileset. The thing with the distant objects is that all the variation you need on a texture should already be there via the texture you use. If you want the distant object, say if it isn't that distant, to have the same tone and color as less distant objects, you simply use the same texture as close objects. I mean for like stone mountains, trees, grass, etc. The engine does the rest for you. If you want physical variation, make actual physical variation. Just don't add all the shadow to your object at a distance.

 

The way I am building my tilesets, the majority of detail is physical variation anyway, not texture, as in the old sets. I've become more and more skilled at making tile models with physical shapes which do not break the engine, and of making shadows which fit the need, but don't overserve the game experience to the point of crashing.

 

So if you are able to actually go near the surround tiles, you should be in a place where, say with my mountain tilesets, you will be at a wall you cannot climb. Basically you will be looking at a collection of 3d faces that create a good bit of detail, and it will otherwise be no different than being up against your rock cliff in your own tileset.

 

I can elaborate more, but for now I need to fetch my child from the bus.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_s e n]

               

Got it, I was thinking you were using just flat panorama textures and no model shaping, now sounds even better, given its a lot of work but should be worth the time spent!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

ok, so when I do the karst caverns set, my goal is to have a lot of bridging areas or tunnels with unwalkable offshoots which you can see down. At the back ends of those tunnels, I want to have billboards of other features to reduce the quantity of actual modeling required way outside the walkable area. I think the same thing can be done with a lot of the off map stuff with the surround tile type. Same as I did with the tree wall in my redwoods set that I showed two pages back.

 

The redwoods one was pretty low quality textures, but even then I tried my best to make sure that the plane you saw, at whatever distance you saw it, was the same texture and scale of texture that I used on the actual trees. To do that, I actually modeled the trees you would see in the distance, textured them, screen shot from gmax to preserve the texture as is, and then created the billboard with that tree image on it. But in the redwoods set, I restricted movement toward the billboard with lots of thick vegetation, of which you only get to see part of on my old models. The rest is lost to a dead hard drive.

 

In that same fashion, I might be able to restrict movement toward the surround plane I use above the mountain terrain by using boulders and scree slopes, which would not only add more detailed texture to the area, but also take away from my need to supply on-texture artifacts which represent texture.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Exporting the 582 files for the blanks set right now... for the 3rd time.

 

I have this interesting set of scripts which determines the elevations of the corner verts on all tiles, and a group of scripts that create walkmeshes and aurorabases just by selecting ALL the tile sections in a scene and running the script. What my script failed to take into account was that GMAX shows me a position accurate only down to 5 or 6 decimal places. Unknown to me was that I had apparently rolled the mouse wheel while editing 200 or more tiles, and my mouse wheel setting is so low that it only moved deep fractions of a centimeter. My scripts were not set up to round to the nearest integer, and so it made a very large mess. I didn't discover this until my other script, which puts all the tiles in a directory into a SET file, told me I had nearly 200 tiles for four corners at base ground zero. WHAT?!

 

Anyway, I think I got it now. Just waiting on nwmax to export them all at once. The "(not responding)" message seems to stay up for 10 minutes or so before the nwmax icon goes red for another 5-10 minutes.

 

So what this set has so far, other than a lack of texture, are the following height changes.

 

water at -3m

base ground

height changes of +1 +2 and +3, at 3m each

smooth crossers for every instance where maximum height change between two corners is 3m.

up to 3 varieties of some tiles, especially diagonal tiles where ramps might be best placed in the center of a tile.

 

I still have not yet finished walls or streams, but at this point, that should be another issue of automation. Before it was an issue of making sure I didn't miss something... which I had. About 6 combination groups with no base level. Not sure how I missed that.

 

The walkmesh is entirely open for now, and all dirt. So you can walk anywhere, up any height slope. And I am using Sen's spreadsheet to get the heights to interchange correctly in the toolset by just using the +/- tool.

 

If all checks out, I will pack and release the 582 tiles and SET file so far, possibly tonight. That should at least show how it works.

 

I've z-axis painted the tiles with a 5 color gradient for better specific tile locating in my GMAX file. But I left the uvw map in that order when I exported them. If you keep the texture I pack them with, instead of white, they'll show blue where water is supposed to go, and raise up through green, fall gold, gray, and to bright gray. These colors do not correctly transfer from tile to tile over border edges. It is just to show height changes on a specific tile.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

ok wow, word of warning: do not place tile entries below the groups section in the SET file. Set File beta 0.85 does NOT read the file as an INI file and will hang.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Well, Sen, your data for forcing placement is spot on. Unfortunately, the data for correct height is off, but only because my tiles are rotated in relation to your same tiles. Also, I haven't determined which lines in your list are duplicated yet, but at least one is an alias of a previous line, just at a rotation of probably 90 degrees. I'll get that info for you later.

 

So for anybody using Sen's data, something about the logic in the tileset takes into consideration one corner having importance over another. I suspect that is the top left corner, because it is first listed in most places you see the tile entry. I'll see if I can figure out what the exact logic is once I get my tiles set up and compare my data to Sen's. In the meantime, if you want your tiles to work perfectly with Sen's data, make your tiles in the same exact rotational alias as Sen's tiles.

 

What I mean by that is that if you have a tile with corners

 

12

03

 

then it has these potential aliases

 

23    30    01

10    21    32

 

I found this because I normally have the lowest corners in the tile follow a strict order of

 

lowest      low

high  highest

 

except in the case where they HAVE to be in another order, such as diagonals. In any case the top left of my tiles are ALWAYS the lowest point.

 

My apologies. The data is spot on in both ways. And I was so far in correct. I just found a digit incorrect in my own code while implementing your data. I will retry and see if that fixes the model position issue.

 

I found this out by creating an alias column on your spreadsheet, and there was no possibility that your data was wrong for the first part.

 

Edit:

 

After checking that your data works or not, I find that it only works on those tiles which are oriented the same direction. As expected, something about the corners, probably one being primary, or calculated differently when placed, changes what numbers are needed. Instead of working out the details on about 20 tiles with up to 15 variants each, I'm writing a small script to reorient all my tiles which don't match one of your tile orientations. Mine only goes to level 3, and my 4th level is down into water. So far, I only have lake water at level 0, so I had my script assume water was 0 when referencing your chart. That seemed to work perfectly.

 

As of right now, I can raise to level 1, but not level 2. Raising to level 2 raises an area, but then I can back-track and carve out to level 2, but cannot have a flat section of level 2. I can do the same with level 3. Again, no flat sections of level 3 can exist.

 

Also, I am not sure what is going on, but in the toolset, I have about 6 tiles which will not display. When I hover over their location, the filename has a period at the end. When I check the file, there is no extra period. Neither is there a period in the tile name in gmax, or in the reference to that tile in the SET file. Has anybody seen this error before in the toolset? My filenames are exactly 16 characters long, which I understand is the max file name reference size in all NWN content.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Applying the rotational changes didn't seem to fix anything either, so I guess I'll start doing it by hand.

 

Here's what it looks like so far. You can see three levels of height and various transitions between those levels.

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_YeoldeFog]

               

It looks like Jelly and seems to be very bouncy! '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

@sen

 

Found the error. In the spreadsheet, the entry for tile 0200 is incorrect. It should be a height and corner adjustment of 0. You can verify that by checking the related tile in your SET file and the actual tile file in your override kit. That seems to be the only error anywhere, because it works perfectly now, and it is accurate to say that tile rotation in relation to your spreadsheet has absolutely NO effect on your data at all.

 

@YeoldeFog

 

I think I shall populate it with Jello Jigglers and Death Blancmange

 

 

Anyway, packing the blank set for viewing right now. And all this without a coffee yet. Time to have a coffee cake muffin and a double shot, so I can start my day.

 

Just FYI, the package has a smooth crosser, but the smooth variants are currently not labeled with the smooth crosser, so they show up as just variants to the matching corner heights. I'll fix em later once I perfect a script to detect their variants.

 

Each tile model comes with an internal dummy called tileData. Under that, 3 more dummies exist: corners, crossers, and offset. These three things represent the script-detected corner heights (not modified for Sen's data), if the edge region is a smooth crosser, and the offset provided by sen's data which was applied to the tile. Anybody who wants to access the files at a later time with data scanning programs, like mine, can detect more details about the tile model this way, and make adjustments accordingly.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_s e n]

               

@sen

 

Found the error. In the spreadsheet, the entry for tile 0200 is incorrect. It should be a height and corner adjustment of 0. You can verify that by checking the related tile in your SET file and the actual tile file in your override kit. That seems to be the only error anywhere, because it works perfectly now, and it is accurate to say that tile rotation in relation to your spreadsheet has absolutely NO effect on your data at all.

 

@YeoldeFog

 

I think I shall populate it with Jello Jigglers and Death Blancmange

 

 

Anyway, packing the blank set for viewing right now. And all this without a coffee yet. Time to have a coffee cake muffin and a double shot, so I can start my day.

 

Just FYI, the package has a smooth crosser, but the smooth variants are currently not labeled with the smooth crosser, so they show up as just variants to the matching corner heights. I'll fix em later once I perfect a script to detect their variants.

 

Each tile model comes with an internal dummy called tileData. Under that, 3 more dummies exist: corners, crossers, and offset. These three things represent the script-detected corner heights (not modified for Sen's data), if the edge region is a smooth crosser, and the offset provided by sen's data which was applied to the tile. Anybody who wants to access the files at a later time with data scanning programs, like mine, can detect more details about the tile model this way, and make adjustments accordingly.

I should correct the spreadsheet then If I have access to my vault account, dunno '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I'm packing the updated spreadsheet with my first release of this thing. Also, I think there may be another, but to find it, I need to make a script to test for me. 0200 was easy, because it was the most logical place for the issue I was having. This other one is one or two spots out from the raise/lower tool center, so I don't know which tile it is trying to show me is wrong. Will update when I find it.

 

The little script I made to detect the smooth crossers worked pretty good, and helps me find that other hole. It only happens when I try to make a high place, a medium place, and a span in between. So it has to be down in the 2-3 range somewhere, I think. If I drop down to the original 50 or so tiles, I should be able to locate it fairly simple, since I am not using the full set up to 4 elevations.

 

Edit:

 

Found all instances of other errors to be either my doing, or in my interpretation of my water as level 0. I then found one subset of regions which cannot be smoothed. Other than that, this is really slick in the toolset. Gotta go get my kid off the bus now. Be back to finish and upload.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_s e n]

               

it gives you red?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

It did, which should be an indicator of a missing tile, but the tile wasn't actually missing. Something in the -1 setting on all my 0120-type tiles needed to be reversed, and then I noticed the same issue on anything where a water corner was substituted in a 0-place on that tile type.

 

I'm up to like 590 tiles now '> 3 levels + ground level water, all with smooth modifiers that can be applied, and up to 2 additional variants of any given tile.

 

The cool part is that I kept the modifier stack list intact from the granitelands set, so I should be able to just release this blanks set, then apply some granite lands magic to ALL the tiles, pop in some water planes, and have a great 90% done prototype for granitelands to release maybe next week.

 

This may not seem fun to any of you, but I think it is very entertaining, especially to put together stuff other people came up with recently or so long ago.

 

 

Above is the proof shot I made for myself so I know for a fact 3 levels worth of non-softened tiles is done and that I don't need to mess with them anymore.

 

I cannot seem to make one for the water combo. Water breaks at or near a tile with ww20, forcing the 2 to change to a 1, causing other issues from that point forward.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Well, bad news. You won't be getting this tonight. When those tiles fail to load into the toolset, they create a white hole. Any time the white hole gets made, the data for the cols and rows in the map file get corrupted, ruining the area on next load. All tiles adjacent to the messed up tile row are also scrambled.

 

I'll work on it tomorrow and see if I can figure it out. Something about it is causing the filenames to be 17 characters in the toolset. Not all, but many. Every tile that does not load gets a random character after it. I may have to see if the toolset has problems with 16 character names, or if the models themselves have issues. Usually it is the same models failing to load, but sometimes they do load. It's weird. There is no error prompt.

 

Also, I am unfamiliar with the details of MDA's tileset editor 5, but it cannot recognize my gog nwn install, faults on entry, and faults any time I try to click a tile entry, often crashing on the spot. So I am stuck editing everything manually. '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_The Mad Poet]

               

I just want to say any of you guys who choose the obvious self-harm of making these tilesets have my undying adulation. Seriously. This is a hell of a lot of work and just to make one or two extra tiles has been a chore I've dropped. I just reskin these monsters. Thanks for all your hard works.