The Harvest Moon Consortium

[Nissa_Red]

If this sweet-looking (barring the above bug) and extremely useful tileset (especially since Christopher included YumiChan's hall) gets updated, may I please request to have some "stream" tiles included to it, maybe even the pyramid like Tukaram did in her/his compilation :

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Ha ... il&id=6913.

Thank you for your consideration

[Tiberius_Morguhn]

Been using the original cave ruins tileset and wanted to switch over to the CTP version. Did so, saved, closed the toolset, re-opened and voila - List out of bounds errors for the area....

Were the CTP version designed to be drop in replacements for the originals or were they only intended for new development?

[Bannor Bloodfist]

[quote=Tiberius_Morguhn;33765]Been using the original cave ruins tileset and wanted to switch over to the CTP version. Did so, saved, closed the toolset, re-opened and voila - List out of bounds errors for the area....

Were the CTP version designed to be drop in replacements for the originals or were they only intended for new development?[/quote]


New dev only, same with any set we release.

We change tilenames, texture names, number of tiles in the .set and sometimes (specifically in this set) we also change the .itp (pallette entries).

[Tiberius_Morguhn]

[QUOTE=Bannor Bloodfist;33789]New dev only, same with any set we release.[/QUOTE]

Hmm. Okay, good to know. However, I guess I would say that this will limit deployment. Especially with persistant world builders since they probably won't want to redo areas. I have not scoured the forums so forgive my ignorance, but was this fact advertised? I would like to see more and more use of the CTP but since NWN1 development is decreasing some (not a lot since NWN2 learning curve is steep still), use of the CTP for totally new development might not happen. Retrofitting is where I saw its as a biggest helper - especially with buggy original tilesets.

Thanks for the update Bannor.

[Bannor Bloodfist]

[quote=Tiberius_Morguhn;33815]Hmm. Okay, good to know. However, I guess I would say that this will limit deployment. Especially with persistant world builders since they probably won't want to redo areas. I have not scoured the forums so forgive my ignorance, but was this fact advertised? I would like to see more and more use of the CTP but since NWN1 development is decreasing some (not a lot since NWN2 learning curve is steep still), use of the CTP for totally new development might not happen. Retrofitting is where I saw its as a biggest helper - especially with buggy original tilesets.

Thanks for the update Bannor.[/quote]


Yes, all of those types of notes have been posted in multiple locations.

CTP tilesets will NOT replace existing tilesets, period. They MIGHT expand on those sets, but will never actually be plug-n-play replacements.

During initial design stages of the project, builders were asked what they wanted. At that point in time, they more or less demanded that our sets NOT break existing areas on their worlds.

If you make any changes to the .set / .itp files, those areas break. So, we renamed the entire series of tiles to ensure that no overwrites would occur. The same thing was done with our textures, with the few exceptions of a couple clearly marked, reskins. Our textures won't be changed by a builder having an overriding hak set above them in hak order. This was again done to prevent damage to their sets, hak orders, etc, and done to prevent accidental corruption of the CTP sets.

No going back now. We will NOT be renaming sets again from their current states. Too much work involved to accomplish that and still be sure that everything works.

With Cave Ruins, we added a few missing, single tiles that affect the .set and .itp and we also added at least one large group (dwarven hall). So again, even IF they had not been renamed, they still would not directly replace an area already created with the older set.

Now, on our 'Expansion' Sets, you could, theoretically, replace a Rural area with our expansions (yet to be released), but, again, the .itp has changed, so you might get some screwy areas. No tiles were removed from original Bioware sets during these expansions, but a huge number of tiles, features and groups were added. This again makes it likely that there would be issues with direct replacements of existing areas.


Now, as to NWN 2 causing people to leave the scene?

The CTP Answer is: "They will be back!". NWN 2 is not an easy engine to build with. It's pretty, but VERY limited in content, and it will take at least 18 months before any real CC work exists. Oh, there will be a few peeps that release a reskinned creature or two, but no animations can be done, yet, which means no new creatures. No real phenotypes are available, everything seems to be one size fits all. No thin, no fat, very few choices.

All of that will change over time, but the building of an NWN 2 PW will take major work, and would absolutely require Broadband connections to even consider running a server.

All of that information is freely available on the NWN 2 forums. So I am not expressing any views, or facts, that are not already evident.

NWN 2 looks great though. And we hope to help get some Custom Content out to folks once the building tools are available.

Meanwhile, for those folks that truly enjoy the PW scene from NWN 1, I would expect those servers to still be around for at least another 2-3 years. Sure, some will convert, some will just shut down, but that is the way it's been since people started building PW's in the first place. They get a flock of new peeps, play very well for a short period of time, then those peeps move on to other things.

What the CTP offers, is a way to expand those PW's. To breathe some new life into them, with the best tilesets that we can find, with as few bugs as possible still in them.

We will continue to offer NEW tilesets, Expanded tilesets, and Repaired tilesets. At least for the foreseeable future.

[Tiberius_Morguhn]

Hey thanks for the clarification Bannor. Again, sorry I missed that this was covered elsewhere and sorry to have touched off a seemingly "bad blood" issue that was already hashed out. Thanks for taking the time to go over the design reasons and what has changed in the sets, pallettes, etc.

[Bannor Bloodfist]

[quote=Tiberius_Morguhn;33871]Hey thanks for the clarification Bannor. Again, sorry I missed that this was covered elsewhere and sorry to have touched off a seemingly "bad blood" issue that was already hashed out. Thanks for taking the time to go over the design reasons and what has changed in the sets, pallettes, etc.[/quote]

Ohhh... No bad blood at all Dude. If I came off that way in the post, it was NOT intended. O:)

I just wanted to make sure to explain how/why things were done the way they were.

There are actually arguments for doing it either way.

All in all, we tried to cause the least possible pain we could by simply renaming sets as we worked on them.

An even largr reason for the renames in the merged/combo rural/city sets is that every single builder used their own initials, or their own naming convention. CTP sets all follow the same pattern now, real easy to determine what tileset a specific model/wok belongs to.


There is a design document somewhere here. It's a sticky. Probably in the release one forums somewhere. It helps explain things with a bit better description I think, at least the details of what was done.

The rest of the sets that we are working on, have already been renamed, and most of the adjustments made to pallette entries etc. (Still a bit more to go on a few of them for pallette stuff). To try to rename them back again, would cause us to have to retest. It's too easy to miss something in those rename processes. Especially with textures.

[DM_Mask]

Generally speaking, the problem with CTP being a "drop in and replace" tileset would be the fact that so many diffrent authors have done so many strange and weird alterations to the bio-rigional set's. The vast majority I understand all "Expand" upon the base set, which is to say, you start swapping out that set for the CTP version, you have a majorly broken area.

Easier to make CTP non-dependant and force the area to either be built with CTP, or built with Other Package X so that while a touch inconvient for builders, its much more convient than having one's module/server broken by changing CTP in and taking out Other Package X which added 48 features of its own that are incompatiable with CTP.

[Bannor Bloodfist]

CTP_Cave_Ruins_1.1 patch is available now

It is updated on the CTP Release 1 download page on the vault, now.

Special thanks to Nissa_Red and to Christopher for these final patches.