Terragen + NWN
Discuss ideas for tiles or tilesets for the ambitious. Community requests here (no guarantee anyone will build it) and show your WIPs.

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Primogenitor
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Terragen + NWN

Post by Primogenitor »

This is a really, really, extreme idea that probably isnt feasible, but never mind.

Generate a random continent of seemless terrain.

You may be familiar with random terrain generation software, such as Terragen Its a great bit of software for generating realistic terrains.

You can export from terragen and import into NWMax, via a couple of plugins. Ive kind of done this in the roughest sense. From there, I assume you could use the TileSlicer to cut the terrain into individual tiles, which you might be able to use in NWN.

However, I know next to nothing about how terrains and modelling works on a practical level, ("Damnit Jim, Im a scripter not a modeller") but what I can think of as issues would be:

the polycounts would be astronomical (maybe not if it was large enough scale)

you would have to have players download the hak

the hak could be very big (but if you stuck to just plain grass texture it might not be too bad)

very CPU intensive to do

it would have to span many areas in-game

each tile in the set would be unique and only used once ingame

how would the walkmesh work? would you be able to scale mountains without noticing?

how does water work? could you add a sea level? (see also about walkmesh)

how would the minimap work? could you use a screenshot from the tileset for it?

integrating overland features (towns, forests, etc) that use "standard" tilesets could be tricky. Flatten an area in terragen first?

but on the plus side, you would end up with a seamless smooth overland area, and you could scale it easily to produce an overland map for travel purposes.


This is probably one for the "Crazy ideas that should be shot" bag, but I thought Id throw it out to see if anyone can do anything with it.

Banshe
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Post by Banshe »

Terragen works on the principle of grayscale. Meaning that everything is in black and white and "pure white" is the highest elevation and "pure black" is the lowest with everything in between being a gradient between the two.


I saw a program on the vault which autogenerates areas depending on grayscale but all it can really do is place the "raised terrain" at different elevations. A neat idea but I don't think the NWN engine is optimized for that.

As for your query, if you can make a grayscale terragen map into an "environment" in 3dsmax as a max file, then you should be able to chop it up into 10 meter squares, add a walkmesh and list it as a group in the set and itp files.

A 100m x 100m area is going to come to 100 tiles that you would have to make.

So I reckon it would be possible but you are looking at a very, very labor intensive process. For which you would only get one area at a time. Overall, it is probably cheaper (effort-wise) to make re-usable tiles.

As for polycounts, I would guess that would be big. ;)

Chandigar
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Post by Chandigar »

I posted something about this elsewhere here, but in theory you can just link all the meshes to the central tile then create 99 blank tiles surrounding that central tile. This would save a pile of cutting and slicing.

I haven't tried this yet with wokmeshes because... well... wokmeshes are such a PITA I didn't want to risk it and didn't have the patience for it. It may be worth trying with the wokmesh too if its easy for you to generate it.

Polycounts could be big, but I can't really tell without looking at the actual mesh. There are a couple plugins you can get for max that will optimize polycounts. Well... the "optimize" function will do it and I've used a plugin called "polychop" that lets you set how rigid the poly reduction rules are.

Overall, I think its worth trying out, if you have the time... but expect NWN to vomit fatal exception errors all over you until you get it right ;)

Banshe
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Post by Banshe »

Terragen would probably generate a single object which "could" be copied and used as a walkmesh.


Edit: I also have never seen a walkmesh bigger than a single tile. Can you do that?

Chandigar
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Post by Chandigar »

Banshe wrote:Edit: I also have never seen a walkmesh bigger than a single tile. Can you do that?
I dunno ;) thats why I said I was too chicken to try that, but I invite someone else to...

Lord Sullivan
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Post by Lord Sullivan »

Never use a single layout of a walkmesh that is bigger than a 10m x 10 m tile. You just have to chop it. The visible tiles can be a single model which will have one Model Helper object and all other tiles will only contain walkmeshes linked to their own Helper Object. But it is not good practice for huge amount of tiles. when a model overlaps on a neighboring tile... no biggy but note that the walkmesh must not... the walkmesh of the neighboring tile is the one that need contain the appropriate params for the overlapping parts of the model from the other tile.

Hope that makes sence :_glasse:

Primogenitor
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Post by Primogenitor »

Glad to know no-one has disregarded it outright ;)

With slicing, initially it would be easiest to do them both into plain 10x10m blocks right? Youd probably have more polys that youd need to get the edges, but thats not a huge concern to start with.

Im more worried about the modelling than the .set entries. sets are plain text, so with a reasonable naming convention I can automate (to a degree) that part. The set would be so basic that it wouldnt have different corners, they would all be individual tiles (no groups). The same goes for making the actual area files, I can use leto to output them in an automated fashion. Also, I was planning on having the terragen output spanning multiple areas. So for example, there might be a 160mx160m terragen product that is split into 10x10 areas, which are each split into 16x16 10m tiles. Hmm, intially I was thinking of using TileSlicer to slice 160 tiles on each axis, but could you use two steps? I.e 1 slice into 10x10 and then each of those 100 models into 16x16?

Chandigar
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Post by Chandigar »

Well, it'd have to be arranged as a group for you to place it... otherwise when you paint it it'll just paint random tiles with random rotations and nothing would match up etc.

Primogenitor
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Post by Primogenitor »

Exactly, Im saying thats not a problem for me. Since every tile would be unique, there would only be 1 arrangement and that would be determined, so it doesnt matter that you cant hand-edit it because youd never need to.

Primogenitor
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Joined: Sat Dec 11, 2004 9:24 am

Post by Primogenitor »

Im curious to see if this can be done or not, so Im having a play with gmax to try to do it. However, I get an error with TileSlicer. Ive posted it on the bioware fourms, http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic ... 5&forum=48, if anyone can prod me in the right direction it will be appreciated :)

Ruyjin kindly solved that problem for me, but now I have another. How do I export from gmax to a mdl? The "export all" button does some work, but no files seem to be produced.

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