A change is as good as a holiday

Chance favors the prepared mind - Louis Pasteur

It's been a while.

I've been on a bit of a break. In fact I've done bugger all in the way of 3D stuff. I even took some time off work, packed a tent, my two dogs and enough beer for a week and headed south to bum around some of the places I used to camp and fish in my younger days. Quite a bit has changed in the forests of the south west of Western Australia. I hope the mining royalties that the West Australian government are getting from Alcoa is worth the destruction of state forest and the disruption to recreation. But it was great to get away from the technology that has dominated my life in recent years.

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Here's a screenshot from the ultra-realistic game called "The Real World - Life Outdoors" expansion.

BTH Mini Review - Fantastic graphics and realistic companions. But many of the NPCs are complete tossers, there's not enough loot and the deity system is broken. The game enforces an ethics system called "political correctness" and some factions are easily offended if you choose an inappropriate conversation response. The game also lacks DMFI support.

Summary - "The Real World - Life Outdoors" is not recommended for powergamers or those that like to role play chaotic evil alignments. 6/10)

(Campsite at Waroona)

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One of the things that greeted me on my return was a message from Dirtywick. It was brief and to the point, basically asking me if I wanted to join a NWN2 project. It was perfect timing as far as I was concerned as I was looking for something to inspire my modeling. Skipping over the nitty gritty and jumping forward in time by a couple of weeks to the present and I find myself involved in a BouncyRock Entertainment project and in the company of some very fine NWN2 talent. Elysius' blog entry lists the people involved in the new project.

I can't reveal much of what we are working on. But I am excited about being involved in a community project with such depth of talent and I've already started work on some custom shields.

So this project is good news in that I have a challenging few months ahead me and bad news in that I don't expect to be releasing any additional custom content until after the BouncyRock project is completed.

On another matter, the NWN PW I co-developed with Sporaxis and Relexx has been raised from the grave. Sporaxis has decided to dust off the Aeon: Frontier PW module and take it in a new direction. The work I did on the Aeon: Frontier tilesets was pivotal to me moving on to 3D modelling for NWN2. It will be good to see Aeon running again even if I don't have the time to be involved. The Aeon forums can be found here : http://aeon.heavenforum.com/

It's no simple thing to climb a ladder

Twelve months ago I sent a note to Slimer of the Aussie NWN team asking if they needed a part-time developer for their custom content. The Aussie NWN team had plans for a NWN2 persistent world set in Britain around 300AD and it sounded like an interesting project to contribute to. Plus I had played on one of their NWN PWs a couple of years ago and so I knew the guys involved. I had only been modelling for a few months when I contacted Slimer, but I was confident enough to be able to make placeables and other non-animated models for them.

I started with some rustic houses. Many of the original Obsidian models in NWN2 are way too clean and the rural house models are a perfect example. The thatched roofs look like piles of hay and every wall and corner is perfectly square. It was a good opportunity to grunge things up a little and knock a few walls and door frames off square.

While I was playing Bob the dodgy Builder, I noticed that the rural watchtower model (that looked great) was mostly a useless pile of timber that you couldn't climb. Duh! Not much use to a module builder. NWN2 seemed to be devoid of towers and platforms that could be climbed and used to defend a rural town. I took up the challenge of making watchtowers and archers platforms that the players could climb.

And so started my love/hate relationship with the NWN2 walkmesh, for it's no simple thing to climb a ladder in NWN2.

The walkmesh is used to stitch the geometry of a model into the terrain of the surrounding area and it defines where players can and cannot walk. For most placeable models this is easy enough; you have a wall and you don't want players to be able to walk through it. If you add a walkable gradient to a model (such as stairs) the points where the model intersects the terrain usually stitch adequately, but only as long as the terrain and the stairs terminate at the same level. If the stairs are sunk into the terrain the walkmesh creates a dip that makes the ground in front of the stairs unwalkable.

I settled on a walkmesh that worked well with the base of the stairs level with the ground and so in October 2007 I released my very first placeable hak with watchtowers and rural fort wall models on the NWVault site. I have been a little surprised at its lack of popularity and in ten months it has only tallied 280 downloads. In any case, I recently found myself in between projects and I decided to take the opportunity to revisit my watchtower hak.

I never liked the texture that Obsidian used for the fort walls. For a start, the models cannot be tinted. The texture also makes the upright posts in the fort walls look like mutant asparagus cross-bred with giant bamboo. It was time for the BTH texture treatment to add a more weathered look for the timber and an opportunity to include a tint map. The new texture is on the left, original texture on the right.


I also wanted to build an archers platform that was integrated with the style of the fort walls. I am quite pleased with this one, it turned out nicely.

The walkmesh for this model also has the same ground level restrictions as my previous towers. I can't claim to have mastered the NWN2 walkmesh just yet. Nonetheless, it was pleasing to look back on some of my early work and reflect on how much I have improved my workflow over the last 12 months and become more efficient.

I did have an idea on how I can improve the walkmesh for these watchtowers with a walkmesh helper model, but I was having difficulty getting it to work and so it was cut from the v1.10 release of the BTH Watchtowers. I have since read a tip from Sporaxis about converting placeables to environment objects and adding a walkmesh helper over the top. With this in mind, I have created walkmesh helpers specifically for the watchtowers. This has worked really well and I'm currently working on the v1.20 update to the Watchtowers to include the walkmesh helpers, an additional archer's platform and a gate with double doors.

My Watchtower hak for NWN2 can be found here: http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2HakpaksOriginal.Detail&id=12022&id=226