A Land Far Away

Hi all,
I've been creating a lot of underground areas recently and have put a lot of effort into trying to make them winding and disorientating. Obviously the minimap makes this effort pointless as a player can easily tell that e.g. the "exit" passage is 50m to the NorthEast. There are haks that interfere with the map or disable the GUI but they would both require ALFA-wide alterations. I think I've found a (ridiculously simple) toolset work-around that dispenses with the need for any of these;

Place a Tileblock placeable in your area. (Placeables>Man-made placeables)
Scale it to (Area X, Area Y, 0.1) (X, Y = size of your area in tiles)
Position it at the centre of the area and at a height of, say, 40m.
Convert to environmental object.

When you run the mod the map for the area is pitch black (as it is displaying the tileblock object above everything else) but it is too high to interfere with the camera. Ta-daa!
Teric

Awesome idea T. From a players perspective i love reality of being turned around and stuff

awesomeness.. good job TND..

Does this work for exterior areas? If it doesn't, would it possible to do something similar with a cloud graphic?

does it prevent mappins from showing up? a number of spells and abilities work by putting up those pins.

fluffmonster wrote:does it prevent mappins from showing up? a number of spells and abilities work by putting up those pins.

I wouldn't think so, but I can test. Also it makes DMing more interesting because you can't just jump directly by clicking on the map ('cos you can't see it either ). I need to look into what you can see from the chooser to enable DMs to jump direct to "entrance", "room of rabid gnomes" etc etc.

@ fluff: Map pins are still showing up. You'd have to tell me which spells/skills work off the pins before I could test that they still work. On thinking about it I can't see any reason why they shouldn't.

@ Kest: Yes, a quick experiment shows that this works with exteriors too. There are a couple of tricks to it, tho':
1. Make sure the tileblock object is set to neither cast or receive shadows.
2. It has to be at an altitude beyond the maximum far clip distance + highest point on your map, otherwise it's visible in a spooky 2001 kind of a way. An experiment showed that with a far clip of 150m and an altitude of 160m it was still visible. With an altitude of 200m, however, it was invisible to the PC but still blacking out the map. (Don't forget to factor in any hills )
3. To black out all of the small round map you will need to make the tileblock the size of the whole walkmesh, i.e. area size + 160m on both dimensions.
4. Just to be awkward it appears that NWN2 tiles are 9m across, not 10, so you'll need to do a bit of maths to get the scaling of the block perfect. And don't forget that the co-ordinates need to include the 80m of unwalkable edges...

And just to reiterate - this makes the map starless and bible black. No fog-of-war, no nothing, except the position arrow and the camera angle indicator. So it may be a bit extreme in some circumstances...

TnD

ranger tracking and the detect undead spell both use mappins to locate the relevant creatures.

would it be cool to let rangers and druids see the terrain? add something to outdoorsy classes. just a thought.

One problem I see with this approach is that DMs could also "get lost" in an area built like this. Back when I DMed I used to frequently run ahead a group in a dungeon crawl to adjust encounters depending on their progress and I relied heavily on the map for this. Now, this was for NWN1, so maybe there's something I'm overlooking as I'm not used to the NWN2 DM client.

Regardless, it's a creative solution for a design flaw.

PL does bring about an important issue. As a DM, i use the map to jump around. No real way to do it otherwise. If i'm going to be 'in the dark' just like the PCs, then it's not a solution i would like to see presented in alfa too often.

White Warlock wrote:PL does bring about an important issue. As a DM, i use the map to jump around. No real way to do it otherwise. If i'm going to be 'in the dark' just like the PCs, then it's not a solution i would like to see presented in alfa too often.

Yes, that's the first thing that springs to mind when you log on as a DM with this in place. The fix is to add non-functioning triggers in important areas which you can jump to from the DM Chooser. Not a lot of help if you want to bounce around setting things up around a party, though.

I wonder if theres a way to add this sort of functionality directly shouldnt we be able to modify the GUI that controls Mini Map functionality via scripting and include that in a hak or over ride of some sort?

Just add a check on area enter to black out or cloud out an area by overlaying a picutre of a black box over the map? That way you coudl not do it for DMs or chars that have a certain familiarity with the area or certain classes etc. Could even add it tot he full map and such as well. Havent looked into it much but if you wanted you could possibly leave a hole in the center to show just the area directly around the PC and as he or she moves the map below still would as well. Woudl have to do some fiddling to see whats possible though.

Vaei ... had a minimap disable function. I believe it was a hak for NWN1.

It caused any area that was either ... 7X7 or 14X14 to have the map disabled...

[edit: I think Vaei's also disabled the compass]

It went white, though I think both map pins and party member "radar" still showed up.

just a thought, you may be able to tie it to the size of the area, the type of tileset used (all interior areas no map), use an object to affect just the PC minimap if not class X ... which would be cool to have Rangers and Druids the only ones with wilderness maps.