Home For Builders Builder Profile - Alleys and Doors

Builder Profile - Alleys and Doors

Profile by Jay Watamaniuk,
April 9, 2003

In the upcoming weeks we will take a closer look at some of the excellent community made Hak Paks out there that can be included in your own modules. This week we profile ThallionStellani's Alleys, and Na's Doors.

 

Alleys are perfect for clandestine business

Neverwinter Alleys by ThallionStellani The cities of Neverwinter have always been open... too open for the tastes of your local thieves guild. It is very difficult to conduct clandestine business in the wide, well lit streets of any city to care to travel through. That has all changed with ThallionStellani's very impressive add-on for the existing city exterior tileset. He has given module builders the ability to create small alleys that can wind through the buildings to allow for those shadowy places that any discerning Rogue needs. Interview with ThallionStellani below. Download Alleys Here

 

There are 18 new doors in total

New Doors by Na To complement the very fine new addition of alleys to the cities of Neverwinter, are a fine selection of new and finely wrought doors to use to dress up your cities. Interview with Na below. Download Doors Here

 

Interview with Alley Creator - ThallionStellani

1. Where did the alleys idea come from?

The NW Alley hakpak add-on for the BioWare city tileset idea originally came from the desire to have a city have areas that feel more closed in and dark. I wanted to create areas within a city that nefarious characters would be at home, where they could hide there actions from the prying eyes of common citizens or the city guard. What better place than a dark narrow alley.

Alleys are what module designers know to be called a crosser. It crosses other types of terrain. An alley crosses the building terrain found in cities, as an alleyway is always surrounded by building, except where it exits into the existing cobble streets. This only adds to the city tileset, the Neverwinter Alleys (as I call them) adds 30 tiles to the city tileset without overwriting any. To incorporate them as seamlessly as possible I have used exclusively BioWare stock city textures, and tried to keep with the architectural feel of BioWare's city tiles. This also has the added benefit of keeping the hakpak very small in size.

2. Can you give us more technical information on the alleys?

Alleys are based on a 4 meter wide alley. The 4 meters is centered on the edge of a tile, so a 'standard' alley tile would have building from -5 meters to -2 meters, alley from -2 to 2 meters, and building from 2 to 5 meters. However alleys can be as narrow as 2 meters, but no tile will ever invade the -1 to 1 meter area at a tile edge. This ensures all alley tiles will mate up with one another and the alley at a tile joint will never be narrower than 2 meters wide. Anything that extends inside the 4 meters width, has walls that extend to the 4 meter width so no side of a building will ever be blank or missing. All alleys have incorporated tilefade to facilitate character viewing. Doors have been placed in approximately half of the tiles all with standard door types(no unique doors). The existing alleys were built BEFORE the tileset documentation was released, so the pathnodes for all alleys are A. They should be some other pathnodes, but at the time we did not know what they meant.

3. What is your background?

I have been a D&D fan since I was a kid in the 80's. I am an avid computer game player, as well I have messed with game editing on the side off and on since the Doom days, including doom levels and sprite animations (those were the days), Jack Nicklaus course design (from JNSE through JN6), and counterstrike level editing. I never released any of my work though before NWN. I waited with much anticipation for NWN, and couldn't wait to try my hand at playing it, as well as creating games or content for it. I learned 3d modeling on my own with various programs including Gmax. I was an architecture student for 1 year of my college career, which helped me in creating the alley tileset, but I ended up getting a business degrees, and in my full time job I am a supervisor in a large company's IT department. I have created for NWN: a hills and Halfling homes add-on for the rural tileset (This was my learning tool on getting used to how tiles were handled in NWN); the NW Alleys add-on; and A tracking script that uses placeables that has been (last I checked) incorporated into the HC Rules scripting add-on. Unreleased projects I have been working on include a circus tent rural add-on, and an interior circus tent tileset, a PC appearance pack, and various projects for DLA where I am now a member.

Combine alleys and doors to create new urban settings

Placing alleys in the Toolset

 

Interview with Door Creator - Na

1. What program(s) did you use to create the doors and what experience do you have with it?

I've had some version of PaintShopPro since it was first released, but everything else is new to me as of a month or so ago, whenever Danmar first released the LOK TileSet:

• PaintShopPro ver 5.03 - JASC; image editing
• DDS Compression Tool - Bioware; converts tga files to dds
• NWN Viewer - Zoligato; NWN file extraction
• TileSet Duplicator - Labtek; Easy way to rename existing models
• DDSTools - Posted by Janus on NWVault, Author unknown; converts dds files to tga format
• NWN Model Compiler - Torlack; Converts mdl files to ASCII so they can be edited using a text editor.
• LOK Dungeon TileSet - Danmar; This is the first user created full TileSet release as near as I can determine and used this as a guide and is what got me interested in custom content.

2. Why the work on doors? They are much needed but it is not a usual project to work on.

I've never played Pen and Paper but I can imagine a group of people sitting at a table. The DM describes the room then the doors or exits in that room. Doors can tell a player more about where he is going than his current surroundings.

3. What other projects are you working on right now?

My primary interest was scripting. I've completed my combat A.I. and targeting scripts, but am waiting on a patch to fix ActionEquipMostDamaging* and some word on what is wrong with ranged weapons and if a patch is coming to fix that (NPC's with ranged weapons either in inventory or equipped are a major stutter point).

Started, is an action queued NPC A.I. which leaves my NPC's without a heartbeat script, replaces WalkWaypoints, and has a very limited perception script for encounter creatures or other special npc's. The purpose of this is to minimize perception and listening pattern lag, provide more functionality to a WalkWaypoints type function and to reduce overhead, i.e. all my NPC's are inert if there is no player in the area. I set this aside for while to look at custom content but need to get back to it and start defining more actions.