Castano's Build tips

[Castano]

Since I'm a little gray now I get to pontificate:

1. Interior areas - make one large 24x24 area and cram all the shops for the city into this one area. This should the mod run easier by reducing the number of areas the mod needs to load. Keep the inns to separate areas if you are concerned about people resting in stores etc.

2. Interior areas - Link an entire room of placeables and copy paste it to new areas. then go in and make changes to randomize the setting.

3. Tile sets with known issues - ilefarm tiles - must only use the ilefarn door or they won't open.

4. Docks - avoid building these as the walkmesh invariably will fail when you bake the area. -- Remember most medieval villages woudl have used a beach - docks are for towns/canon settings. If you must build these, use as few dock pieces as possible - the problem on the walkmesh is when joinign the pieces. Lengthen existing pieces by 1.5 instead of using 2-3, differ the heights a bit and overlap by 1-2 planks. The walkmesh helper has been of little use to me - you may try it, but it failed on my areas.

5. Placeables - Convert as many of these to environment objects as possible. Good build rule - if PC could walk over it, it should be an environmental object (e.g. sacks, rope coils) too many placeables will create large nonwalkable areas (even if the placeables are small like coin piles, goblets, small chests etc.) - learned this the hard way when I did the loot room for my pirates.

6. NPC conversations - open the conversation, check properties - set to NWN1 style or you get that annoying cutscene that stops all action.

7. Check the builder forums as these and many other tips are in there. the above are what I found/learned was most useful.

[Castano]

NPCs & Items

Make a base creature or item or copy one which has the alfa scripts set in the properties window. clone a bunch of them (copy paste). You can then vary each NPC or item's appearance and other features at will and then make blueprints out of the ones you like. - This was all your scripts will be set. Nothing is more tedious than manually setting scripts for 100's of NPCs/items.

[Curmudgeon]

NPCs & Items

Make a base creature or item or copy one which has the alfa scripts set in the properties window. clone a bunch of them (copy paste). You can then vary each NPC or item's appearance and other features at will and then make blueprints out of the ones you like. - This was all your scripts will be set. Nothing is more tedious than manually setting scripts for 100's of NPCs/items.

As an alternative, download scriptsets.rar from the Builder Files folder of the Moonshaes Builder FTP and unpack it into the AtariNeverwinter Nights 2Toolsetscriptsets folder (that's in the game installation folder). Next time you need to add the ALFA scripts to a bunch of NPCs, select the blueprints (one or many) and from the Properties tab, choose Import Properties|scriptsets and find the set of scripts you need. One click on the scriptset.xml and all the selected blueprints will get the right scripts.

If you have a set of customized scripts, you can use the Export Properties function to save them for reuse later.

I find this also handy for saving a group of colors for tinting items in a mod (on TSM, I have colorsets for the Knights In Silver, the Argent Legion, and for other organizations). You can use this to keep colors the same across different variations of clothing and uniforms, for interior decorating to a theme, etc. You can also Export/Import lighting schemes. There are some nice ones on the Vault.

[Castano]

sweet!

[Tridisus]

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NW ... ail&id=551

just in case your interested