So after a longer break, I found some air to continue. Main reason was RL-workload after my last “life sign”, but also the fact, that I couldn’t motivate myself to approach the pathnodes during my shrunken spare time. I was very close to leave it to “pathnode A”, but a certain human, who uses a well known dwarf-avatar-symbol all over the place, wrote in very clear words (to me), that “everywhere a pathnode A is a NoGo!”
So I put that back onto my to-do-list.What made it so difficult - at least for me? Well, until then, I didn’t have much experience with choosing a fitting pathnode for a tile and those first approaches with the Solace set gave me the feeling, that many of those groups were not designed with having existing/fitting pathnodes in mind or maybe I was/am just to inexperienced/dump to spot them…
Since a real tile didn’t help me very much to find a fitting pathnode, my first step was to only use the walkmesh, create a (3D-) grid (-mesh), which resembles the tile bounds, and put it on top. Then I chose a top down view and made a screenshot. Here is an example of the Inn-group:
All this was done in Gmax (since up to now nearly 100% of the set work was done in Gmax).
Since this set is 100% 1.69-compatible, I decided to just use those 1.69-pathnodes. So I used those pathnode-symbols (created by Velmar IIRC) to be found on various NWN1-pages and placed them onto my grid:
(Remark: During this process I got additional tips from @Zwerkules and @Pstemarie. Thanks for your help!)
Well, if you know how to work with pathnodes (which I didn’t too well at that point), you’ll notice, that some of them don’t work, because they don’t really connect to the neighbouring tile(s), eg. g01_30.
And this is exactly what I found after adding my choices to the set-file and doing first test in EE, which has this nice option to render pathnodes in game (Debug -> rendertpn - big thanks to the EE-team!). So I learned, that…
1. for paths to work, the paths/lines need to connect nicely to the path on the connecting tile and …
2. that it is with some symbols kind of difficult to tell (at least for me), if a connection is working OK by using the original pathnode-symbol-printout:
So I started to redo the pathnode-symbols using colored lines to make clear, which paths/lines do actually connect and here is my final version:
(It will also be posted to the vault and wiki!)
Also the lines now show the same way as how they’re displayed in game, eg. like in pathnode “J” or “hh”.
The diagonal tiles with a connection to normal tile exits gave me some headache, but after some puzzling, I seem to have found a working combination.
I tested all of them IG in EE. The existing pathnodes (1.69) sometimes don’t fit 100%, but if the toon is in the right spot, it’ll find the right way. But if the start is a bit off from the “correct” path, the toon might choose seemingly the shortest way via a not working connection. But I found, that this happens also with some of the vanilla tilesets. And besides the pathnodes, the engine - of course - also takes the walkmesh into account.
So, what is left?
During the pathnode-work, I found, that some walkmesh surface-settings are not correct (non walk <-> obscuring). I did not pay attention to that before, because (most) the walkmeshes were already done by DLA and they worked so far.
Some of the smoke is not “affected by wind”. That was due to a flaw in the exporter script, but thanks to @Zwerkules, the script is fixed, but I do need to re-export or edit some smoke-tiles again.
And I have a list with some more things, which need adjustments. So I’m not there, yet, but I got MUCH closer to a release-stage!
Addon: Some more info on pathnodes can be found here:
Bannor Bloodfist of CTP:
viewtopic.php?p=14872&sid=f1ef737f174fc ... bcbf860e99
https://nwn.wiki/display/NWN1/Tilesets
https://nwn.wiki/display/NWN1/SET
A PDF by Tonden Ockay:
https://neverwintervault.org/sites/all/ ... ?fid=30302
https://neverwintervault.org/forums/nev ... -node-hell
