A Land Far Away

This post will summarize all placeable suggestions for the NWN2 ALFA Base Mod. General and specific suggestions welcome but please read the summary before suggesting new placeables or their specific details. Also, if scripting is required for the placeable, please ensure that a matching scripting suggestion is in the script thread.

Thank you.

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Summary

Trash Barrels
Musical Instruments

I'll suggest something which OC asked me to script for Cormanthor. A VFX application associated with objects in the game, mainly placeables, for applying visual and physical effects (damage and saving throws if desired) on PCs when they interact with those objects. The idea behind this was to use effects to create a more immersive and interactive atmosphere for players to experience. Having tried this out with a couple of things from spore infested mushrooms to zapping statues and medusa like NPCs, I found it to be a real blast (no pun intended) and I think it would be a nice feature to have globally. Imagination is the limit here.

I'm not sure if this belongs in the scripting forum or this one, but I'm going by the assumption that the scripting forum is more "systems" related. I can be more specific on this if need be.

It would also be nice to be able to easily create "haunted" house placeable effects. This could be nothing more than activating/deactivating placeables at random times, like opening/closing doors, dressers, cabinets, chests, etc. I haven't explored this but I think it'd be fun to have and fairly easy to support.

I think that is a script function, Cipher, if I read you right. As I understand you, this is something that could be attached to any existing placeable in an onuse slot? I'll put it in scripting for now.

correct

Or any of the event slots available. If you want something to happen when a PC bashes an object for instance, you'd associate the effect to the OnPhsyicalAttacked event.

If I understand correctly, nwn2's placeables will be much more important in the overall scheme of things..expecially outdoor placeables. Outdoor placeables will "mold" with the terrain and help define where you can and can't walk...so all of that stuff is going to have to be redone. We'll need a solid list of things that need to be made, and a prioritized as well.

standardized working trash barrels.

ditto for anything else that will likely be used in all mods. (e.g. transportation tickets, musical instruments)

fewer tree & foliage choices...yes I said fewer...it's murder remeberign which ones look nice for a particular location.

Musical instruments are listed under items, but they make sense as placeables as well.

Regarding trees, I think exterior landscapes are going to be vastly different than NWN1. Gone are the days where you'll need to load a huge tree palette and manually place every tree model to create a diverse landscape. From the sounds of it, you'll be able to simply paint them in with a brush and even control randomization of colors, size, or anything else in the paint tool itself. Essentially, a more refined terrain tool. I recall reading something to this effect in one of the toolset reviews.

If my reading was correct trees are done by a seeding process...Sounds kinda farmer joeish but hey.

You can mix varieties of trees into a "mix* then you seed them into the landscape with a brush and viola trees. Not sure how they handle density of tree growth but im interested to see that .

Racerblue wrote:

If I understand correctly, nwn2's placeables will be much more important in the overall scheme of things..expecially outdoor placeables. Outdoor placeables will "mold" with the terrain and help define where you can and can't walk...so all of that stuff is going to have to be redone. We'll need a solid list of things that need to be made, and a prioritized as well.

Hammer on nail.

This is about the crux of placeables. We will have a finite amount coming out of the box. I would plan a semi bare building practice as about six months after gold we should see a good wave of community driven content hit the vaults. As for making our own placeables. Im not certain we have the manpower within ALFA to generate enough high polygon content to keep up with any sort of list presented to us. We will be semi dependent on the vault for new placeables. ( I think) The vault itself will suffer from a lack of high quality stuff until those that can learn high polygon rendering can learn it and those that dont give up after trying to put a few low quality products.


The other problem is there also is no current interface for 3dMax (min requirement) and NwN2 ...or the equivelant of NwNMax. Though there is those that say they will produce one within the community. The other option for modeling placeables is $14,000 and a license to use Granny (per pc). RB correct me if im wrong on this point.

In my browsing of the boards I found one recent post of talk of switching from 3dMax to another freeshare program. But that was only one post. Im paying attention for more on that front.

OC

With luck, palette menus can be customised in the toolset, adding categories and labels to the menu palette. That would be ideal.

Failing that, all palettes, placeables included, will need to be expanded significantly with a Forgotten Realms, Persistent World flavour.

Placeables may be changeable by size(3 ways) and color just the same as creatures.

OC,

It's gonna be a while until some of these plugins for gmax(or some other freeware program) get made. Personally, Im thinking Obsidian makes it as easy as possible to do...the real wild card is, will some of the same folks who did the nwn1 work be there to take up the flag.

I look forward to having more polys to work with...I'm just hoping that I don't have to learn this new mapping technique(normal mapping)..

How much manipulation, distortion, resizing and recoloring of placeables do our building DMs want in the basemod...and how much do they want left to there own creativity ?

Lets assume we are going to build a set of ALFA placeables. Will we have support ala the burtsplaceables erf ? If I understand Burts it was more a way to update the list after basemod creation than actually a function of the basemod.

We've used 3D Studio Max exclusively for this project. At this point in time that's the only package we have plug-ins for in terms of getting data out of. I believe there are plans for eventually releasing the exporter plug-in. This should cover all non-skinned objects. We're still currently investigating a solution for skinned objects (i.e. creatures).

Thats a big change from prior commentary on 3DMax. still gonna take high poly modeling skillz but hey if there using it..the community can use it.

*runs back to the NwN2 forums to check the custom content threads*