NWN2 Cities - A Suggestion

[NickD]

Cities in NWN2 come across as being rather difficult to build and the end result make the cities feel smaller than they should be (for extremely good reasons! Can't fault any of the builders for that).

I was thinking about Waterdeep and how I would build it (if I had any building ability) and I had an idea on how to make cities feel big, but with potentially less effort than is currently required.

This all may be too late as I don't see too many more new servers getting developed in the near to middle future, and I wouldn't expect any of the current servers to change what they already have, but I'll put it out there anyway...

If a city was built with the WHL overland map system (only briefly seen it, never made it to a city, so it may already have implemented this idea), even very large cities could be built with a relatively small number (or even just 1) of areas. By shrinking everything down to 1/12th of their size and restricting speed to 1/12 (if possible), the city could have a small number of 16x16 maps with a number of sub areas. e.g., Silverymoon could have one or two (north and south?) meta maps covering all of Silverymoon, with a dozen or so tiny areas imbedded, such as the dock, the market, the university and vault of sages, temple district, shopping district, etc. Some stand alone places such as the fochulan, the glade and a couple of the inns could just be ATed directly into from the meta map.

I think this will give the illusion of a city being large without having to actually build proper sized areas for the vast majority of it, and the proper sized areas could all be kept relatively small, which I suspect would add some efficiency.

[Teric neDhalir]

As someone who's working with scaled areas on a regular basis I should point out a couple of technical draw backs:

When you scale everything down it becomes difficult for PCs to get close to each other. It's just about acceptable on WHL and that's only at 1/4 scale.

Basic maths. If you made something at 1/12 scale it would have 144 times the area of a similar "normal" area. If you're looking at putting buildings in that's an awful lot of placeables.

Perhaps it would be more sensible to explore using a world map a la OC.

More importantly what's to be gained by having large distances to travel just for the sake of it? I grant you that NWN1 Waterdeep was huge but it was also pretty empty. I think smaller areas with something interesting on every street corner has to be more immersive than trudging along empty streets. FWIW I think Silvy's about right at the size it is now (apart from the vertiginous vertical scaling ).

[NickD]

When you scale everything down it becomes difficult for PCs to get close to each other. It's just about acceptable on WHL and that's only at 1/4 scale.

Perhaps it would be more sensible to explore using a world map a la OC.

World map vs. resized map, 1/12 vs. 1/4... are really just details. Whatever works best, really.

Basic maths. If you made something at 1/12 scale it would have 144 times the area of a similar "normal" area. If you're looking at putting buildings in that's an awful lot of placeables.

However, the walkmesh could be limited to just the streets, so that's a bit of saving there, especially if players are limited to only the main roads.

To make it a bit easier, you could make a single row (block) of resized houses and keep reusing it. Especially for houses that aren't on the edge of the walkmesh.

More importantly what's to be gained by having large distances to travel just for the sake of it?

In a word: Immersion.

Besides, you'd actually be travelling shorter distances. Slower speeds, but without AT to AT to AT. It'd have the illusion of longer distance, but would probably end up taking about the same amount of time.

I grant you that NWN1 Waterdeep was huge but it was also pretty empty. I think smaller areas with something interesting on every street corner has to be more immersive than trudging along empty streets.

Sure, however, under this way of doing things, you'd then take out all the empty areas and replace them with one single meta area that connects every single area that has something interesting in it.

FWIW I think Silvy's about right at the size it is now (apart from the vertiginous vertical scaling ).

But you could remove a good 60-80% of Silverymoon as it is now and replace it with one or two areas.

Don't mention the steepness of the streets! I questioned them and indio got angry with me.

[Rotku]

I liked those old Waterdeep streets.

But Nick, if I ever make a city using the NWN2 Toolset, I'll certainly use your idea. Sure, the chances of that happening are amazingly slim, but at least this way you don't feel unloved.

[Grand Fromage]

I've built a large city in NWN2 (http://www.grandfromage.net/retana/imag ... etFull.jpg if you want to see what I mean) and it's not actually hard to do it at proper scale, it's just time-consuming. Silverymoon was built on such a small scale because of the technical limitations of the time, but the performance has been increased enough that you can run a massive city without much trouble. Indio also wanted to save space for wilderness areas, but Waterdeep wouldn't need any of that grass nonsense.

[wvincenti]

Sweet work GF.

Your map looks just about the same size as dear old Waterdeep too.

-Bill

[Rotku]

Eh? Maybe the Dock Ward, but Waterdeep is a massive sprawl.

[Kest]

I did a little of this, but that was back before we were SoZ-compatible... we didn't really have a basemod and I was struggling to find useful placeables in the vanilla toolset. Totally forgot about it until now.

[Grand Fromage]

Eh? Maybe the Dock Ward, but Waterdeep is a massive sprawl.

It's about half the size of NWN1 Waterdeep, by number of areas. If you were doing WD you'd want to make it denser than I built, but since it was just me and taking forever I spread it out. Also the game wasn't handling density so well way back then, you could do it now no problem.

[stormsong]

It's about half the size of NWN1 Waterdeep, by number of areas. If you were doing WD you'd want to make it denser than I built, but since it was just me and taking forever I spread it out. Also the game wasn't handling density so well way back then, you could do it now no problem.

How much of the server does it take up? I have some designs of doing Raven's Bluff or Saurbreenar and am wondering if it is going to need a server all by it's lonesome or not.

Stormsong Wyndsinger
Bard at large and
Adventurer for hire

[Grand Fromage]

It's about half the size of NWN1 Waterdeep, by number of areas. If you were doing WD you'd want to make it denser than I built, but since it was just me and taking forever I spread it out. Also the game wasn't handling density so well way back then, you could do it now no problem.

How much of the server does it take up? I have some designs of doing Raven's Bluff or Saurbreenar and am wondering if it is going to need a server all by it's lonesome or not.

The city is one entire mod, since it was a campaign I wasn't concerned with mod size. The folder version is 886 MB, and it's from a while ago--I don't know if more recent changes have reduced mod size at all.