Merricksdad's Black Hills Tileset (First Look)

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               

Quick question, hoping somebody knows off the top of their head: Can a door straddle a tile boundary without causing walkmesh issues, and without trigger complications? If so, can you give an example of a tileset which does this without flaw.
 
The reason I ask is that the SCL tileset seems to have a door hole at EVERY side of every tile, and their single-tile rooms equate to 2x2 rooms in NWN. To clone these, I either have to change their scale up to 3x3 so that the hallway is centered as in SCL, or shift a doorway right or left a tile, OR... make doorways in the centers of tile boundaries, and then make corridor tilegroups instead of corridor crossers which stand apart from the rest.

If it is in an exterior tileset and the door is just for a door transition into a building, there's no problem with it. For interior tilesets you could get problems with visibility because doors are expected to be in the middle of a tile, but if it's just a tile group that doesn't connect to any corridors or such, there'll be no problem with doors at tile edges.
In general if it is a door that is only used for transitions in or out of a building you'll have no problems with doors that cross tile edges. I have many of those in the Medieval City, like the huge door of the crane tower building.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I was afraid of that. I need the door to cross at least one edge, if not 4, and also restrict visibility. I don't think I can do that with NWN doors, without also incorporating 3 more placeables to block movement and visibility, removing them when the door is opened. Perhaps there is another way to do doors at such a location.


With my half scale miniatures setting, these tiles would work perfectly in nwn, because the door position would be exactly in the center of at tile edge, making it a perfect place for a corridor tile door. Unfortunately, transferred from game to game without a scale change puts the center of ALL the doors directly at the corner of 4 tiles. That just won't work.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

So I decided to go ahead and build some prototypes after upscaling the SCL basic rooms from NWN scale 2x2 to 3x3. This puts the room exit exactly where I need it to clone their rooms, and also opens up additional room variety based on rooms from their other tilesets. So far, I can see about 300 easy to make rooms, based on about 25 base room varieties, some of which have interchangeable corners, belts across the middle, or just simply the doorways.

 

This should be a really fun project today. I'm going to just get some basic gray-texture prototypes out and work on actual textures later.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_s e n]

               

i remember i did some interior door test and yes the issue is visibility: you can't have a tile portion blackened while the other becomes visible. its all or nothing...

what you can do is to disable the on hover aura from doors (not sure about the tab controlled aura) and that with black plcs to block visiblily and movement may be a compromise

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

So what do you guys like more: fewer tiles with more placeables? or more tiles with less to worry about?

 

I started working on a few tiles which are basically the same, and came to the realization that they only need to have the same walkmesh, and then leave a few spots on the tiles unformed, like with a gaping hole in the mesh. Then offer 4 varieties of stuffs to put in them. Maybe two main varieties, and a few sub varieties. For instance, there is a 3x3 group where the room is generally circular, but has a walkpath through the main group body in an S-shape. In SCL, the group has a variant where the unwalkable stuff is rock going toward the ceiling. Another variant has pits in the same place. Two other variants swap out right or left sided pits for rock. If I make just one base kit, leaving the region where pits or rocks could be entirely open and unformed, the user can then set a placeable in the center tile which fills in the gaps perfectly using the center tile center location, and then I can offer 4 placeable versions to cap the holes. Additional placeables can make it even more unique quite easily. I personally think that is a great way to go.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Here's the group I mean:

 

 

A purple man (not David Tennant) is included to show scale (75x75x200 cm, otherwise approximately 6 ft tall human).


What I'm going to do is open up the middle tile on all four sides to access a corridor tile connection, or go directly to the next tile group. Placeables will be available to block the pathing out those ports, as well as block visibility. This way I can also simulate secret doors with placeables which can automatically change when secret doors are detected. I'd like to offer the following closures:

 

• No closure, no modification, exactly matches adjacent tiles


• Open corridor, matches corridor mesh opening, which is smaller than no closure at all


• Collapsed natural tunnel, matches the opening for no closure, and gives the player a bit of view off into the distance (cannot be combined with adjacent tile)


• Collapsed corridor, matches corridor opening, can be combined with adjacent corridor tile


• Secret door type 1, slides out of the way by rolling left or right depending on placement direction


• Secret door type 2, falls into a pit under the threshold.


• Secret door type 3, walkable even when closed, due to illusory nature

 

This door idea brings me to minimap images. I wanted to do two minimap types. The first one would be an old time drawn map which generally represents the tile or tile group in a very basic way. The second map would be a TL2 style mini clone of the walkmesh walkable area. Secret rooms would not have any representation on the map at all, making it harder for players to view the regions before found. Since all 4 sides of a 3x3 group have a potential to use a secret door placeable, I'll offer 4 varieties of the minimaps (each) so that the secret door variant tile can be used instead right from the toolset panel.

 

 

Back to the image above. I had another idea for single tiles with multiple purposes! What if I build the pit variety on to the base tile, and offer the raised portion as the alternative. This reduces the alternate placeables count, and makes the tile readily useful as is in the toolset.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Fester Pot]

               

I really like the idea of specific tileset that is strictly bedrooms, as an example. So it's a variety of different styles of bedrooms, some with windows, others not, with placed furniture or not. Premade 4x4 or 3x3 styles, 2x2, 3x2, etc., etc.


Much like this http://neverwinterva...s-temple-tempus


Was really looking forward to the author making more specific NWN tiles based from IWD designs, but it never happened.


Anyhow, I am a fan of premade tilesets, just as long as there are a lot of choices. OTR did that Fallout tileset for NWN, and that was really neat. Premade, ready to go. It doesn't allow for any tile placement customization, but it makes up for that with its unique look and design.


FP!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

That reminds me, I should revisit the infinity engine areas for room ideas!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

So far, I have dumbed this set down to 17 3x3 rooms, where 10 contain built-in pits which can be covered over or otherwise modified with placeables or decals. There are an additional 6 6x4 rooms, where 3 contain built-in pits. There are also larger rooms, including 2 6x6 rooms with pits, and 2 6x5 rooms without pits. I have planned another two 5x6 rooms that I just don't have the blueprints extracted from SCL (can't find them as they don't appear in the location editor even after 50 forced randomize commands.

 

I've also found a fantastic method of quickly producing cave-like rooms from drawn images using some techniques of the maxscript Line or SplineShape object. With the proper order of clone and attach, you can create super simple shapes and matching walkmeshes for any size tile group in about a minute or less. I must share this via video soon!

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

Nice Jessica Jones reference. Although I was thinking the purple one was Prince.

 

i dig those 3 tile rooms as well. Cool method for making them.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Prototypes are done. Just need to export them as is, and make a fake walkmesh to be used for each of them, and then I can view it to see if the scale is acceptable for NWN play.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Added 2 more 6x6 rooms, 5 more 3x6 rooms, and one more 3x3 room, some of which have height transitions built in. One 3x6 room even has two height transitions. But... before I get further carried away, I still need to export and check the scale. If nothing else, as is, they can be scaled down and probably still be useful.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

I've also found a fantastic method of quickly producing cave-like rooms from drawn images using some techniques of the maxscript Line or SplineShape object. With the proper order of clone and attach, you can create super simple shapes and matching walkmeshes for any size tile group in about a minute or less. I must share this via video soon!

 

 

Please do!  I would love to see how all that works.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Quick question to save me time, as I just jammed my finger and don't feel like typing a lot...

 

In what order are tile group tiles loaded? Bottom left to right, to top? or Top first?

 

 

Answer: yes, tiles are bottom left to right, bottom to top.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

ok, so because this is going into unique territory, I'm moving the "MiddleDark Tileset" to another conversation thread. I'll soon change my sig for easy locating.