Friday, February 27, 2009

(Re-) Building a city

Yeah, that's right. My first attempt wasn't satisfying enough for me, so I plan to start over and do it right this time. The basic layout with the canals is still nice and I plan to keep it, but I ran into a lack of proper buildings for what I tried to achieve. There's the slum buildings on the screenshots (last post) that are kinda cool, but they are a.) not tintable in the way I need them (the wooden parts can't be changed), and b.) don't fit in with the standard NWN2 row houses. But I need row houses, and the fix is: Get a replacement for the row houses, haha.
Fortunately, there is exactly the right hak available at the vault, the absolutely awesome, 100% casa-vision-compatible City hak that includes pretty much everything NWN2 doesn't include: Realistic city houses, towers, walls, bridges that don't look like plastic (I already replaced the one in that old screenshot by a self-built stone bridge) and a lot of other things that just look a tad better than the standards. Maybe I should mention that most of the content is taken from Oblivion (sigh).
But, and yeah, there's also that HUGE "but" we all know too well from NWN1: hak incompatibilities. 2da rows. ( *include 5 minutes of cursing in here* ). So what I'm doing right now again is trying to fix 2das to get the city hak and 3C to work together, and I'm sure the next step will be getting 3C and various other stuff to work with Storm of Zehir content etc. etc.
If I was safe with custom content, I'd first drop 3C completely (btw, 3C is some sort of CEP for NWN2 - the author would immediately say it isn't, but for a naive builder like me it is exactly that) and make my own collection, but that's way too much work. So here I am again doing all that stuff I never wanted to do, and that's why the next screenies might take a little longer to show up again. I'm on it.

3 comments:

Sherincall said...

The 2DAs should be the same as in NWN1, meaning that I can help you merge them if you want. It is really just a bunch of copy-pasting.. And if the HAK approach is the same, all you need to do is make a top hak and put them over those ones.

Casa said...

Unfortunately it's not the merging process that gives me problems, but overlapping 2da lines, i.e. lines 4000 - 4300 used for placeables in hak #1, and the same lines used for other placeables in hak #2.
So far I simply decided to live without one set of placeables in favour for the other, but at some point I'm afraid I'll have to do some serious editing. I haven't dared to look already, but heard that the 3C hak set is seriously screwed up by the content of the 2nd expansion.
However, the process of editing this stuff is exactly the same as in NWN1, and I'll keep your offer in mind. Thanks for that! :)

Sherincall said...

The only problem with overlapping 2da lines is that once they are merged you cannot use old blueprints, but need to create new ones. There is an easier way to do that in NWN1 (Converting a module to XML, then editing it with a text editor), but I'm not sure about NWN2. If not, you'll have to do it manually. It can be tedious (I did almost 2000 of them for S&S), but shouldn't take more than 5-6 hours.