Merricksdad's Black Hills Tileset (First Look)

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Years ago, I was trying to build a custom auto-pathing system for the Dragon Engine, but I couldn't get it to work the way I wanted. I read up on all kinds of pathing devices trying to figure out which one Infinity was using, and how. I've forgot most of it, but seeing your pictures makes me want to revisit some of that.

 

You said "as it enters each tile", so can I take that as confirmation that adding proper path nodes will let me force a unit to walk around a mountain using a single click, even if it technically can walk over by holding down the clicker as a steering device? Or do I still need to try this out and see what it actually thinks.

 

You know what, I think that book I mentioned earlier has some pathing stuff in it. I need to find a copy again.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

You said "as it enters each tile", so can I take that as confirmation that adding proper path nodes will let me force a unit to walk around a mountain using a single click, even if it technically can walk over by holding down the clicker as a steering device? Or do I still need to try this out and see what it actually thinks.

 

Nah, you're definitely going to have to test that.  I have worked with other pathnodes before but I do not know how much true influence (weight) they have.  My experience (admittedly subjective and limited) with them gave me the impression that they won't overrule walkable paths in favor of the pathnode, but that the pathnode and walkmesh, when on the same page, work together to do an excellent job completely getting a player/NPC from point A to point B.

 

By the way, while Stan Melax originally designed many parts of the game's pathing, it was Mark Brockington who fully matured it.  And he wrote a nice, fat whitepaper all about pathfinding in NWN:

Pawn Captures Wyvern: How Computer Chess Can Improve Your Pathfinding

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Got up this morning to find that all of the overnight exports are mangled. Not sure why, but something in the exporting went bad when some other program stole memory or something. I blame anti-virus.

 

Anyway, the main mesh is all flickery, it drags like mad, and a new shadow issue seems to have been introduced in the shallow water areas. There is now a big + symbol in the middle of every shallow water tile. Looks really weird.

 

I did find that the 1500 under tile waste was sufficient to get rid of all the other large junk, and yes it does make it really annoying in the toolset to work with. At least placeables automatically find the ground at the mouse pointer...except where there are walkmesh errors not taken care of.

 

Tiny bit more work today and then export again.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Starting to look like the world of Svartalfheim from Thor:The Dark World

 

 

Modifications:

• walkmesh quality shadows (more holes, less time to compile/export while working on other things)


• split visible mesh into 2 parts: up-facing faces, and the rest. Up-facing faces textured to floor selection. Rest textured to dark granite.


• scripted in water planes, 50cm below base ground, for all tiles with deep or shallow water (it seems a bit bright, and is not transparent at this time)


• reduced smoothing on floor and granite to 10 threshold, down from 15, this makes it more angular, but flattens tile-edge faces a bit.

Bugs:

• For some reason selecting tiles with water and tiles with shallows and then combining the arrays unselected tiles with both water and shallows, so they didn't get processed with water planes. Strange.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Drewskie]

               

this would be the perfect tileset for mini-volcanoes

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Uploaded current version to vault in new entry for granitelands tileset here.

 

If you decide to play with it now, be sure to read about why I separated it into chunks. See the example module for how I put the haks together with the mod.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

DLed it.  Unfortunatally, when I try it out, I get to the Choose Available Character screen, and after selecting a character, the Play button stays greyed out--it's not clickable.  I've never seen that happen before.  Other modules that I have still run fine.  So, what's the super secret members only handshake that I need to learn to try this out?  Do I need to sacrifice something?  Offer something to a goddess? 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

No idea. Never heard of that before. Unless I set a module thing to only allow valid characters and you are trying to use one which has been modified outside a standard module. You can always build your own module real quick and put the 4 haks in it, while I check mine.

 

Nevermind, that isn't keyed to the module, but the server when you start it up. So I still don't know

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

Made a new module, imported your areas and everything works fine.

 

Oh...and it's effing brilliant.  I've been wanted to get my paws on this one for a long time.  <happy dance>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I'll have to build a new module then. Something might be wrong with it.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

I'm seeing a seam around tile tmd07_0423 in area03.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Many of the tiles have a temporary seam because the vertex locations are not equal. In some places the script's automatic optimize call removed a vert between two others because the edge line was the same angle. I need to write a script to put those inter-line verts back. In the meantime, you will actually see A LOT of those if you go looking. I would go so far as to say 50% of the tiles share that same seam issue.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

So one thing I was going to ask about the tileset was if you guys thought I should include 3 optional tiles for every possible combo? Right now, you are seeing a tileset with only one tile per corner combo. I am used to making at least 3, if not more for diagonals. Current diagonals only have two high sections and the middle section matches the low corners. Normally I make an option with two high corners with a bridge in between blocking the low corners.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_3RavensMore]

               

Are you really asking us if we'd like more tiles?  '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Ha, I had planned to do some hand-made tiles of course, but I mean basic variety tiles. I was running through stuff for about an hour last night and I think I may just do 2x variety in stead of 3x. I need to go back and wrangle all these scripts into one file now to do that. And maybe I can correct that issue with the seams at the same time.