A Land Far Away

Allright, after running into a hitch with ACR testing I decided to try dabbling in getting the Faerun Stained Glass placeables working. What I did for now was to merge the early snow texture hak with the one these came with, and edit the placeable blueprints to work and have ABR-compatible settings.

I called the hak "alfa_textures01.hak" and uploaded it to http://www.alandfaraway.org/downloads/NWN2/

The blueprints were exported as an erf, " stainedglass_abr.erf", in the same directory.

Technically, in addition to texture-type files, the hak now contains terrainmaterials.2da and placeables.2da.

Should the placeable blueprints be bundled into an alfa_place01.hak? I think in early testing, hak'd blueprints didn't show up in the toolset palette (though they could be created by scripts). Currently hak-dependent blueprints are kind of a gray area between Custom Content and ABR.

Thoughts?

I don't think these blueprints should be in the HAK. They'll just take up space and can't be used by builders AFAIK. However, this may be a nice way to distribute ACR-only blueprints needed exclusively for our scripted systems (keeps them from getting tampered with).

We should keep storing and publishing standardized palette contents for our builders on sourceforge to avoid the reliability issues that invariably creep up with storing content on member hosts. We simply can't keep people at ALFA forever so it would be prudent to use commercial hosts wherever we can.

I remember when we got similar hak forced "blueprints" in NWN1, they were a huge pain in the ass and nobody liked them. I'm also inclined to leave them out. We can make erfs available, and I would expect anyone who can build with NWN2 is tech savvy enough to handle it.