Merricksdad's Black Hills Tileset (First Look)

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

Not having made anything 3D I can only express this as an angle in degrees. My take on it is that anything over 45 degrees would look odd unless there is some way to trigger a climb/crawl animation.

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

IMO, over a certain steepness it just looks really odd.  But every once in a while it's good to ignore that.  For instance, I had a big rock that was really steep on 3 sides but a little gentler on the 4th (left side on this) and made that walkable up to the top, which I didn't consider too much of a stretch.

 

Anyway, let's say you wanted to have really steep walkable areas.  You could maybe help the illusion "work" a little better by using the Stone Bridge (22) surface material or making a custom one in surfacemat.2da/footstepsounds.2da.  So instead of puddles when you walk over a surface, some little emitter chunks (chunk, bounce but no splat) that roll down the walkmesh.  Looks like this.   It does not look great but maybe it can be made to look better.  I whited out the texture to more easily spot the chunks.

 

Oh, I very much like this idea '> I don't think most of my faces are that steep, so it might look just fine with some more chunks. Not sure. Something to try though.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I measured the slopes at our campsite in Keystone, SD and found that the highest non-grass slope I could find and still climb while just walking/running up the surface was just over 45 degrees, so I think TR is onto something there. However, 45 in-game appears less steep than stuff in reality because of the OC camera angles. Perhaps an allowance of another 15 degrees is beneficial. If I can find my drawings again, I should be able to pinpoint the optimum walking slope for the realistic lower sections.

 

 

Today I spent some time on the alternate solar rays. For each direction where I had just one, I now use 4, each offset by 5x5cm from the target position of the previous. This is not a perfect fix, but did close in almost all the long slices on basic tiles.

 

I then figured most of the rest of the slices must be caused by faces negative to the solar normal, so I wrote a program to separate those. Unfortunately, that had ZERO effect on the visual output when they were simply separated from other faces which might interfere with that specific mesh. I may need to attempt face normal reversal on those faces to cast a shadow from them. The problem is that any face one solar normal cannot"see" should be seen by the other 3 solar normal directions when the tile is rotated. This means I need to leave both a positive and negative normal version of that face to cast all 4 potential shadows from the sun. That sounds a bit much to me. Cracking the faces down for solar negative faces already increased the fragmentation substantially, and I am not big fan of that.

 

I may first try opening up the variation on the solar normal directions. That may further close in the gaps, but not all.

 

Again, I tested to make sure this was not a math crash, which you can easily tell by walking through the unshadowed area. If you can see your shadow, it is just lack of shadow. If it cancels your shadow, there is a divide by zero error forcing paint failure of shadows in that spot. All the unshadowed spots still have nothing more than dual face pass through causing the issue.

 

Another thing I noticed about the shadow engine is that it often starts drawing shadows offset from the plane casting the shadow, as if beveled. This sometimes leaves shadow faces floating in mid air so many centimeters above the face intended to be shadowed. In one of the previous outputs, I noticed three of these shadow faces made a cave with the actual faces to be shadowed. It looked really strange. While I have had some success with putting a vertical wall on the inside edges of the tile (inside the earth), this success only attempts to hide those floating shadow polygons, but does not put them back where they need to be. This seems to be some kind of error in the shadow rendering loop in the engine, and is shared by the toolset. Adjusting the position of that shadow casting object has the effect of adjusting the location of the shadow, but is not entirely corrective. It is just weird.

 

I've got about another hour to wait for this export set. It already looks better than the previous, so I think I will release this one for viewing tonight, as long as the larger portion are not mangled.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_CaveGnome]

               

<cut>

 

I also wanted to ask you guys:

 

How important is it that your players cannot climb certain heights? And if it is important, what slope do you consider too high to NWN-walk-climb? It looks odd to climb any surface at the same speed you walk IMO, but I am kind of used to it from MMOs. With the contours of these tiles, I would only personally disallow movement over an elevation change of 3 at this point. My original intent was to disallow anything over 2, but viewing it in the game makes me change my mind a bit. What do you think? The reason I ask is that if I leave it fully open, I can continue slacking on the pathnode settings in the SET file. If I set the walkmesh material to blocking movement between any types of elevation, I need to start work back up on the pathnode autodetect maxscript, and that is just one more thing on the pile. Not that it is extremely hard, but it does take some time to adjust to these tiles.

 

 

In special cases, it is handy to be able to climb to very high heights and steep angles even if it feels odd (imagine a rocky low gravity planet or magic boots...  ) . IMHO, no need to limit what you can climb. Module builders can use invisible walls or custom triggers to forbid way if needed. Slowing the PC speed by script action could improve the "hard" climbing effect.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

In special cases, it is handy to be able to climb to very high heights and steep angles even if it feels odd (imagine a rocky low gravity planet or magic boots...  ) . IMHO, no need to limit what you can climb. Module builders can use invisible walls or custom triggers to forbid way if needed. Slowing the PC speed by script action could improve the "hard" climbing effect.

 

That is very true CG. I'm thinking to leave it as is now, just by your comment alone. In one of the two final releases, it will have some walkmesh blockage where larger boulders and stuff jut out, also larger trees. In the other, no walkmesh blockage will be available on the tile, and neither will any tile decoration exist, leaving it entirely up to the builder what goes where.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_meaglyn]

               

I'd do it the other way, myself. Special cases should be the ones that have special work done to make them happen. Why make more work for the 95% of cases. I.e. all the time builders have to spend placing invisible walls for those non special cases.  If there are times the PC needs to get up those really steep ones use the climbing animations and scripts.  My 2 cents anyway...  

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_CaveGnome]

               

I'd do it the other way, myself. Special cases should be the ones that have special work done to make them happen. Why make more work for the 95% of cases. I.e. all the time builders have to spend placing invisible walls for those non special cases.  If there are times the PC needs to get up those really steep ones use the climbing animations and scripts.  My 2 cents anyway...

You have a point.  Things should be done for the benefit of the max of users. Personally, I prefer to choose my limits myself, even if this comes with more work in the end, but that's just me. What will be useful is more input in this subject, if possible from other module makers. Perhaps I misunderstood what MD proposed. Isn't the "height limited" option at risk of blocking the "translation up", part of the climbing animations if we where to activate it at the eventual fixed height limit ?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Leaving the walkmesh open allows ALL possibilities going forward. Closing any of it negates that forever forward without file modification. Leaving it open lets mod makers put down those blocking decorations (visible or not). Closing it does not allow placeables to open it again for climbing (animated or not).

 

Leaving the walkmesh open allows very fast path-finding directly from point to point, but may cause units to move over the quickest path first, even if that looks ridiculous, unless blocked by module placeables. Closing it requires that path-nodes be specified for every tile in the SET file or path-finding will fail more often than not, and your character will sometimes just stand there, or double back for no reason, often refusing to go the correct way over some weird way.

 

 

Edit:

 

A third possibility exists, and that is to specify a path node in the SET file for easiest  realistic pathing from point to point, but leaving the walkmesh open so you can wander where you want, realistically or otherwise.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

well that one hour left turned into 3 or more. Hopefully that was worth it. Lets find out...

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Killmonger]

               

"If you see a fork in the road, Take it"      <Yogi Berra

" I will, if it is a silver one"                         <path node behavior

 

 

 

<Breathless as to the evolution of this thread, MD...>

 

If I fully understand the limitations of Nwn1,

The game engine would marshal it's resources along the existing nodes as per standard script and the Pc could wander at will. (?)

 

I vote for option 3 !!

'>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

Just to add to what I said earlier. The 45 degrees I was talking about earlier is for going up the slope. Coming down on the other hand I would up the slope to, say, 60 or 70 degrees. I am basing this on personal experience of descending a steep scree slope on the Isle of Skye some years ago.

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

One would hope. It must be tried to find out I think, unless another has experience with that.

 

If I set the pathnodes to what they should be, given 3 and 4 transition changes at once should be blocked off from lower levels, it should cause the engine to move tile to tile via pathnodes, so NPCs and one-click PCs should appear to pick a more reasonable path than up-and-over any given mountain.

 

Clicking within the same tile should instantly default to localized pathfinding without pathnodes, but any click outside the tile should try pathnodes first, right?

 

It may still cut some corners which might seem unreasonable for humanoid travel, but for the majority, I think it will try straight lines through tiles it picked in the pathnode detection algorithm. I don't know if it prefers to walk from tile center to tile center, cutting corners as it goes, or if it prefers to walk tile edge to tile edge. I know it most often tries to calculate the shortest walkmesh face path from one point to another, but I don't know how it interprets tile edges.

 

Worst case scenario is actually pretty bad, because it will first get pathnodes, and then whittle the walkmesh faces down to the shortest route anyway, resulting in a straightline path as if no path nodes other than A were specified. That might register as undue strain on the engine. I don't know.

 

AHA! this batch is finally exported. Going to tinker and see if more shadow holes went away.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Just to add to what I said earlier. The 45 degrees I was talking about earlier is for going up the slope. Coming down on the other hand I would up the slope to, say, 60 or 70 degrees. I am basing this on personal experience of descending a steep scree slope on the Isle of Skye some years ago.

 

TR

My geology teacher showed us his scar from butt sliding down an icy slope in Silverton Colorado. That stuff is all white carbonates and white jagged hydrothermal quartz with poisonous metal salts. I cannot imagine the lasting pain such a thing would have caused.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Well, instant disappointment... but then, a spark of realization. I'm an idiot, and would have spent forever on these other large groups of faces. I offset my tiles by 1000 because I thought I was going in increments of 200, making a maximum height per tile of 800. Nope, 300x4 = 1200, so all I have to do is increase the base height of all tiles again. No problem... except I need to export again... blah. All it was is shadow from the tile behind being truncated. Derp.

 

So I guess I will try a little more variation in the solar ray tracing, and then export again. I may undo the solar down-face detection, seeing as it did absolutely nothing for the models but bloat like a summer fair italian sausage with onions and green peppers.

 

 

 

Edit:

 

Increasing solar ray "blur" distance from 5cm to 20cm. This will split more mesh, but not by much, and not anything like the division by solar direction did.

 

So now we're back to splitting by 6 directions as I did originally (instead of 6 per 4 primary solar normals, eek) and then just testing for double pass through via 16 solar normals offset from the original 4, giving quadruple coverage in the center but offering up to 20cm of mathematical mistakes to get fixed around the outside of the shadow square. This should take just under an hour to process and 15 minutes to export.

 

I also increased the under tile waste space from 1000cm to 1500cm. The tallest tile spans from +4 height at 1200 down to deep water at -300, so that should work perfectly. If I find that there is a single cm of wrong-ness in the shadows, I will increase to 2000cm waste space to fix it. I really don't like the waste space, because as was pointing out in the forums OTR linked the other day, it makes it harder to draw maps in the toolset. Not excruciatingly so, but still, very annoying. But also as was stated, there is no known way around the shadow depth limitations in relation to the tile floor level. Just don't expect this mountain set to have a true chasm terrain type anytime soon. I'll be faking it with unreachable areas made with already existing tiles.

 

Next time I do an export, I need to remember to reapply the nonexistent shadow texture to the whole range of shadow meshes before export. Their Tvert count to face count is ridiculous.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

@MerricksDad - Clicking within a tile will use walkmesh navigation.  Clicking x-tiles away will use pathnodes and then walkmesh as it enters each tile.

 

"I don't know if it prefers to walk from tile center to tile center, cutting corners as it goes, or if it prefers to walk tile edge to tile edge."

 

It'll totally do both, depending on what it wants to do.    I just spent a little too much time doing edge to edge walking on this basic pathnode "A" repeating tile with random-ish obscuring squares and it's not 100% but I noticed when I went from one little culvert to another, it was much more likely to not have a problem traversing along edges smoothly if I was heading east/west and was more prone to taking the "long way around" if I went north/south.  Truly odd. 

 

i really don't know if this is "a thing", though.  It could maybe not be a thing.  But it kinda looked like a thing.  Even if it is a thing, I can't imagine what kind of thing it is.  But it's there, being somewhat thingy.