Technical / Building ACR Compatible Areas

Creating an area under the ACR is little different from creating a normal area under NWN2. There are a few things which need to be done, however.

As with other types of building in the ACR, additional parameters are specified by editing local variables. If you aren't familiar with how to use local variables, look here: Using Local Variables in the NWN2 Toolset.

Event Scripts

All of the area event scripts must bet set to the following:

• acf_area_onenter
• acf_area_oncliententer
• acr_area_onexit
• acf_area_onheartbeat
• acf_area_onuserdefined

Planes

If your area exists on a plane other than the Prime Material (Toril), you need to define it by setting a local variable on the area. This variable is a local integer, and named "ACR_PLANE_ID". Make sure to set the plane id correctly. In future ACR updates, plane IDs could be used to enforce the special rules of different planes, and prevent teleportation spells from functioning between them. If your area exists on a pocket plane unique to your server, make sure the planar id is a negative number. [Add list of planes here, with coorisponding id numbers for each]

Overland Travel Areas

To use an area as an overland travel map, you must set the following local float variable: "ACR_3DT_SCALE". The scale should be calculated by dividing the size of each tile in terms of its span in Faerun by the actual in-game tile size (which is 10 meters, 32.8 feet or .00621 miles). For example, a scaling of 10 miles per tile would mean ACR_3DT_SCALE should be set to 1610.

Setting the scale correctly ensures travel will be the same speed across ALFA. The scale setting also controls PC-scaling, so players will be able to tell the rough scaling of the map by looking at the size of their PCs.

Always set overland travel areas as no PvP zones. Combat and running are impossible in overland travel areas. DMs, however, are unaffected by them.

Seamless ATs

Seamless ATing under the ACR requires three triggers be set up on the edges of areas. Though these triggers are already in the base mod's template area, anyone creating an area from scratch will need to add them. [Add instructions for creating seamless AT triggers here]

Grid areas tagging

Grid areas should be tagged as follows: SAT_NNNXXXYYYZZZ

SAT_ is a prefix in order to quickly identify a grid area from another area (inside areas mainly).

NNN is the number of the grid starting at 000 and ending at 999
The grid number acts as a priority for overlapping grids. The smaller grids should have small grid numbers.

XXX, YYY and ZZZ are coordinates.
They can be of the form nXX (for -XX when X < -9), n0X (for -0X when 9 <= X < 0), p0X (for +0X when 0 <= X <= 9) and pXX (when X > 9).

This means that you can have 99 negative and 100 positive areas in each dimension.

Here is an example of grid areas positions and tags:

Area positions:

Matching tags (for grid 0):

                         ^
  Y axis being |
  X axis being ->