I started this journey over 10 years ago. Back when I was first working on my recreation of the bioware infinity engine. I had named it the "dragon engine" and it was able to take in topo map coordinates, and render (without the help of a true 3D engine) Sims2 style height tiles. My original Dark's Gate campaign was created from maps of the black hills region around Keystone, SD.
Nothing about what you said was impossible, because I know for a fact it has already been done. It is (and was) very simple to convert everything I had made for the Dark's Gate module (mark 1) over to the tileset I created in 2008, using GFF editor, and custom programs to modify height coordinates in the area file. All I had to do was set the grid scaling, look into the topo map data (which was downloadable from USGS sites before google earth was popular), and read a series of numbers from the raw data in intervals related to the scale I picked. For the dragon engine, I once rendered a map in infinity engine miles (to the character unit scale), but unfortunately my custom render method took 2 days to render just the ground plane (pixel by pixel rather than polygon shapes).
Today we could easily take that same data, or perhaps the data I played with for the canyons on Mars, and create actual NWN maps from portions of that. And with these scripts I am working on now, with a processor stronger than mine, which could do the whole thing from import to NWN file export in a single pass, the whole thing could be automated:
- Import USGS data
- define scale
- detect largest z transition over a single tile
- detect proper height transition value
- dynamically create a tileset (without plants/rocks) to represent the base ground
- select a region from the USGS data
- create an area file from the selected region
- open and finish populating by hand
No it would not be that hard. I had already fully scripted about 10 of the hard coded walkpath nodes into my 2008 gmax scripts. It would be slightly harder to code for all of them (I think), but if I can get this far, it is not impossible to go the rest of the way. I have however come across certain transitions, especially ledge-like areas, where none of the NWN walkpath nodes will work, and I have had to fudge tile groups, lying about the actual pathing. This makes multi tile diagonal maps very hard to create for players who point and click once to move. For those moving constantly to a point in front of the mouse pointer, it works just fine.
