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More Map Making Help

Started by UnkoMan, December 28, 2008, 05:30:59 PM

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UnkoMan

Alright here's a question for you fellows; How do I make a map look like winter? How do I cover a map with snow when it has no snow? It'd be even better if I could make that snow a little bit deep, so that a person's feet are covered when walking through it. And, can we have some kind of environmental effect that looks like it is snowing, and wind is blowing? A light wind, at least, since none of the objects or characters will look wind blown.

So there you have it. Changing a plain, regular map into a snowy map. Specifically I'm going to try this on the FFvsTR map where you run through that Cuban canyon and eventually do battle with a very large Nuclear Winter.

GogglesPizanno

Simple answer is to just use nifscope to reassign textures to new snow ones...

More in depth answer would be to construct a new large ground mesh that had no bounding box, texture it with a snow texture and overlay it on the regular map raised up to the depth you want the "snow" to be. SImilar to the water object done by conduit -- http://freedomreborn.net/archive/index.php?topic=42368.0.

In fact you could probably just use his object and remove the transparency and retexture it and it should work for what you are after.

And I believe the first game had a snow fall effect on the winter levels. I think it was just a snowflake mesh with a bunch of emitters...

*EDIT Yep. Two of em... Snowfall_01 and Snowfall_02

- If you have FF1 its located: Art\library\area_specific\frozen_enterprise\small_objects
- If you have my map pack for FFvTR: Art\library\area_speciff1\frozen_enterprise\small_objects

UnkoMan

Ah thank you. I shall try this soon.

I had thought of making a new ground mesh, but then thought there map be some clipping issues and whatnot. I may end up doing a combo retexturing the original ground and this water object. Perhaps I ought to reinstall FF1 and check some of their winter maps for things, as well? Something to use as snow drifts or the like?

GogglesPizanno

Those winter maps are in my map pack as well.
Just look in "Art\library\terrain\"

There are several snow levels and each of them have snow banks and what not that you could cut and paste with nifskope (though you probably would have to convert the old FF1 nif files to FFvTR for compatibility in copying blocks.)

UnkoMan

Does your mappack have an objects.dat file that I overlooked or something? I remember downloading it and not being able to run any of the old maps for some reason and then just not opening it back up. Could this have been my mistake? Plus then it allows me to see what templates you used for stuff so I can swipe... I mean... borrow them. At least, I assume, since I don't really know what I am talking about.

GogglesPizanno

The whole mappack is built as a mod, so it should extract into its own directory like any other mod and be able to be run with a shortcut. It includes all the maps and FF1 objects with bounding boxes added. If it wasn't running I can only guess you extracted it to a wrong location, didn't run it with its own shortcut, or tried to merge stuff and broke something...  Or maybe one of 1000 other things  :D

Since its built as a mod it has all the dat files included, but the only ones that were modified with FF1 content were objects and characters.

The things I mentioned like snow banks and what not, are actually pieces in the terrrain nif themselves, so you would either have to create new objects out of them (because they currently are just part of a mesh and not their own template objects), or else paste them in nifskope onto the terrain nif you are going to be using.

UnkoMan

#6
Hm... Actually it totally does work now. Granted I only tried a couple maps, but I recall them just being objects on blackness and I couldn't move or anything. I do have this darkness issue though. Would that just mean I need to convert all the terrain nifs and brighten their light values?

(EDIT: Actually quite a few maps are missing their terrain nifs. I think this must be my problem. I don't know where they would have gone or anything.)

Also I royally messed up this snow business. The snow came out pure bright white for some reason, even though I just copy and pasted the red october snow files onto everything. They worked in her missions, after all. Any idea about that (or can you even tell what I am talking about)?

Heck, this is gonna take a bit of work to get right, I think. It was so much easier when I just downloaded maps.