I was thinking of a change that would not bring any conflict with the existing modules and updating portraits of NPC creatures, etc. ... BD could make a change of style at least, there are some comrades such as Tomi who have a different portrait now compared to vanilla, vanilla's Tomi's portrait was much better than that of HoTU and horrible in my opinion.
I was thinking of a change that would not bring any conflict with the existing modules and updating portraits of NPC creatures, etc. ... BD could make a change of style at least, there are some comrades such as Tomi who have a different portrait now compared to vanilla, vanilla's Tomi's portrait was much better than that of HoTU and horrible in my opinion.
They are still int he game files however and there are overrides and haks which restore them.
damn! I had no idea! cabbage for years i am asked how they have changed the pictures and now i understand the reason ... thank you for having opened my eyes.
They should add SSAO, if they can integrate Depth of Field, they should be able add ssao at least, i've made a quick try with Reshade and the original game toolset : http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/124325
We played with SSAO. We had a few bugs around it and the performance hit was horrible. It willt be a while before we are ready to take another crack at it.
I'd like the Original Campaign to feature the original character portraits for Tomi, Sharwyn, Fenthick and Nasher alike. The newer "improved" portraits feel out of place and don't even look as good as the originals. I seriously can't figure out why on earth did they have to change them.
As a composer and musician, I appreciate this conversation. However, after "BD bring back better Portraits" "They were removed for legal reasons: Link", we should talk about it more in another thread. This one is for pooling suggestions.
This is a suggestions discussion. The portraits were removed for legal reasons and that was stated above. Please refrain from posting non suggestive materials to keep this discussion from getting any further cluttered.
Are we able to request new improved portraits for NPCs be made, not based on copyrighted works?
(I will take not offense if this is deleted as per the above post. I would like to see nicer portraits but completely understand the reason for removal of the old ones).
Nevermind, I see this has been added as a separate request thread. Disregard this post
*New heads *Lots of clothes *New weapon models *A way to see peoples portraits without owning their portrait - I don't know if this is possible but it would so cool if you could add it. *Mountable creatures (Not just horses) *Character body scaling *Auto downloader for Haks *Amend characters lips and eye colour in the creator * More summon and familiar choices * Purple dragons
As I suspected, a private "only acceptable way to voice concerns" didn't yield any results what-so-ever. Let's just conclude that I'm not surprised to see that there seem to be more moderators on these forums than actual users. If this is how you treat paying clients, then I say fuck you and I'm out.
How about enabling multilayered walkmeshes, so tilesets can be created that enable walking under/over other areas of the tile (ie bridges that can be walked under)
How about a switch in the toolset that shows the skybox for the area you're working in? Also, a lot more skyboxes would be great. Oh, and perhaps the option for higher-quality skyboxes too, making sure the system is still backwards compatible of course!
I second this and add that skyboxes that don't have a giant hole in the sky when using an unlocked camera would be excellent. (May have been mentioned elsewhere.)
If portraits are updated as some desire, perhaps leave the existing ones as well. More options trumps fewer options I would think, especially on persistent worlds. The built-in portraits are always preferable to me on persistent worlds because you can be confident they'll show up. Custom portraits can be hit and miss at best.
Also, I do hope there are some graphic (model and texture) improvements in the game. If none will be appearing in the game characters and world itself, then at least in the U.I.
an example of graphical improvement could be this ... it 's not a big deal but it can give the idea of how we could improve the aesthetics of NPC and some environmental details like plants and the sky, to notice this moddero made the water more realistic than the original version ... which BD is trying to fix some moddero the year resolved as in this case.
but what we do not realize and that there are modules and PW that have completely changed NWN, take for example this video of a PW of NWN called Resident Evil Online, already the name makes it clear what it is I when I saw it I did not even believe it was a PW of NWN, this makes it understand by itself with modd hak etc ... you can totally modify or edit some NWN stuff, so please BD get help from the modder!
these are images of a PW no longer online called "Wake" but from what I could see and really stunning the cure in the details of plants and grass and fantastic, another demonstration of how you can make better the graphics of NWN
here another notable example of modding, here not only transposes NWN into a science-fiction game at Star-Trek or Star Wars but it even changes some things in the game UI another example of how with a bit of good will you can improve the game .
Suggestion: update the game's DDS file format to the industry standard DDS format (or other modern format). I dunno how much work it would be to update the engine bits, and I'm assuming files can be batch updated. But is that's reasonable effort, workflows could be simplified and/or tool options expanded when messing around with textures while doing Custom Content.
I don't think redoing the old art is a good idea for Beamdog. I wish they did more to promote community content and educate players about it, maybe make it easier for them to install and manage. An auto downloader and installer for persistent worlds would go a long way too.
I'm not so keen on the idea that a company trying to enhance the game should try to take ownership of community content and definitely not try to recreate it from scratch. That seems like a lot of wasted development time spent on which is probably a five minute download for the player today. Community content will always be better given the same tools as the developer even if it's just simply because they're passion projects with no deadline and no budget restraints.
I hope they do increase limits instead and maybe offer support for alternative formats, and add other features like physics and cloth simulation. Give people amazing tools and they will make even more amazing stuff.
Develop a way that allows a mesh to specify different material physics over different areas similar to a tint map. An example of why would be a cloak with a heavy leather and metal area around the shoulder blades and then cloth extending down the back of the body. The leather warps slightly with upper arm activity, the cloth moves with the wind around the body or flows behind them as they walk. None of the cloak ever pushes through a body mesh, a long cloak does not slice the legs when playing the idle yawn animation.
So material physics would be really great.
@HunterRayder93 Are you sure that video is Korean? Everything in their client is typed in Japanese, most of it uses katakana.
@HunterRayder93 Yes, I just looked at their youtube channel and it's all in Japanese.
I don't think the tiles are tho, it's a commonly used one you see a lot. I think I even saw some tiles by worms in one of the videos. It might be an idea to track down and categorize the good tiles off the vault which is often impenetrable when trying to find something with their search function.
It would certainly seem a lot easier than asking Beamdog to redo the old ones from scratch but not in a way that would conflict with the position of placeables and walk paths in old modules. I think internet speeds and hard disk space have improved a lot since 2002 so I'm not really sure why some still have an aversion to downloading haks and overrides.
I would love to see the addition of bump maps for texturing. Not sure if it is possible, but it would be great to make textures that have texture in game
Edit: Just found out there will be support for normal maps. That is so cool!
Would it be possible for module builders to have the ability to disable post processing on a per area basis?
I love post processing effects. However, the lighting in my world has been very carefully designed to create a certain atmosphere and the heavy handed contrast, vibrance, and DoF post processing means that the tone of much of my work has been shifted and many areas are utterly unplayable due to them being so dark.
I know they are still a WIP but it shines a light on a deeper problem. How do we create a cohesive ambience for our players if the lighting is to be so dramatically different on a per player basis?
It's like trying to create a music score where the songs jump up or down an octave on a per player basis.
If I have seperated the players from the big bad by a chasm and they are giving a speech, I need to make sure my players can actually see what's going on instead of a dark blur of in the distance.
A per area flag for each post processing effect (kinda like sky boxes) would be fantastic!
Someone mentioned updating the dds format from nwn specific version to regular dds.. Although that would be awesome and definitely eliminate a step for cc makers, I'm concerned that would break all dds textures that came before.. If it doesn't, I'm all for that.
It would be really nice to find someway to handle custom portraits better in a multiplayer setting. For example, if Player A downloads and uses custom portrait Z, but Player B does not have that same exact portrait, by name, they only see the silhouetted head portrait.
I don't really have a great solution to fix this, but as some rough, uneducated ideas -
1. When a custom portrait is used by a player in a multiplayer game, automatically load the portrait into a servervault "portraits" folder that other clients connecting to the server can access. Although the possibility for duplicates or naming conflicts arises here (hopefully remote, but still possbile)
2. Upload the custom portrait to the server as part of the .bic file. Parse out the portrait to other clients as they connect, per session
3. Allow servers to have a custom portraits repository on the server which is per server. *OR* maybe a global repository if someplace like a Beamdog server or the Vault is willing to host it. Then, in order for a client (player) to the server to use a custom portrait when connecting to a particular PW or multiplayer game, they must first upload it to the server's shared portraits folder or the global portraits folder. Each portrait uploaded must have a unique resref or ID from any other.
It would be really nice to find someway to handle custom portraits better in a multiplayer setting. For example, if Player A downloads and uses custom portrait Z, but Player B does not have that same exact portrait, by name, they only see the silhouetted head portrait.
I don't really have a great solution to fix this, but as some rough, uneducated ideas -
1. When a custom portrait is used by a player in a multiplayer game, automatically load the portrait into a servervault "portraits" folder that other clients connecting to the server can access. Although the possibility for duplicates or naming conflicts arises here (hopefully remote, but still possbile)
2. Upload the custom portrait to the server as part of the .bic file. Parse out the portrait to other clients as they connect, per session
3. Allow servers to have a custom portraits repository on the server which is per server. *OR* maybe a global repository if someplace like a Beamdog server or the Vault is willing to host it. Then, in order for a client (player) to the server to use a custom portrait when connecting to a particular PW or multiplayer game, they must first upload it to the server's shared portraits folder or the global portraits folder. Each portrait uploaded must have a unique resref or ID from any other.
In general this is a problem that is also found in BG: EE, BB2: EE and IWD: EE, the custom portraits of the other players can not be displayed unless you have the portrait in question and then let you view it. ..and a little frustrating this thing ... because it takes away in my opinion immersion, originality and personality you have characters created in multyplayer.
Your idea is not bad, it could work but having a single portraiture server could create problems, it would be more ideal, a similar system as in social networks or forums that insert your image as you want and that is displayed to all the others ... obviously it must be within the minimum allowed for visualization, this would solve the problem but ... can it be implemented?
1999's Unreal Tournament allowed you to connect to a server and download maps/custom content that you did not have before joining in.
It would be really, really nice if private servers had the ability to send compressed portraits and hak's etc to people trying to connect. Bonus points if we could even set out own download server.
I even seem to remember at one point NWN had a 3rd party tool that worked something like that. But it's a long time ago and my memory is not what it used to be.
A lower barrier to entry for heavily modded persistent worlds instead of just a list of missing content would really help in regards to possible growth and accessibility.
Can we bump the skill, spell, feat, and quick bar icons up to 64x64? Most modern games are at least that, 32x32 is real taxing on the eyes especially at higher resolutions.
Comments
They are still int he game files however and there are overrides and haks which restore them.
(I will take not offense if this is deleted as per the above post. I would like to see nicer portraits but completely understand the reason for removal of the old ones).
Nevermind, I see this has been added as a separate request thread. Disregard this post
*New heads
*Lots of clothes
*New weapon models
*A way to see peoples portraits without owning their portrait - I don't know if this is possible but it would so
cool if you could add it.
*Mountable creatures (Not just horses)
*Character body scaling
*Auto downloader for Haks
*Amend characters lips and eye colour in the creator
* More summon and familiar choices
* Purple dragons
Also, I do hope there are some graphic (model and texture) improvements in the game. If none will be appearing in the game characters and world itself, then at least in the U.I.
but what we do not realize
and that there are modules and PW that have completely changed NWN, take for example this video of a PW of NWN called Resident Evil Online, already the name makes it clear what it is I when I saw it I did not even believe it was a PW of NWN, this makes it understand by itself with modd hak etc ... you can totally modify or edit some NWN stuff, so please BD get help from the modder!
here, other videos of how we can improve the internal and external structures of buildings and plants in general.
these are images of a PW no longer online called "Wake" but from what I could see and really stunning the cure in the details of plants and grass and fantastic, another demonstration of how you can make better the graphics of NWN
this is a Korean video, but once again demonstrates the potential to improve graphics in NWN:EE
another example of a PW
here another notable example of modding, here not only transposes NWN into a science-fiction game at Star-Trek or Star Wars but it even changes some things in the game UI another example of how with a bit of good will you can improve the game .
-Dave
I'm not so keen on the idea that a company trying to enhance the game should try to take ownership of community content and definitely not try to recreate it from scratch. That seems like a lot of wasted development time spent on which is probably a five minute download for the player today. Community content will always be better given the same tools as the developer even if it's just simply because they're passion projects with no deadline and no budget restraints.
I hope they do increase limits instead and maybe offer support for alternative formats, and add other features like physics and cloth simulation. Give people amazing tools and they will make even more amazing stuff.
Develop a way that allows a mesh to specify different material physics over different areas similar to a tint map. An example of why would be a cloak with a heavy leather and metal area around the shoulder blades and then cloth extending down the back of the body. The leather warps slightly with upper arm activity, the cloth moves with the wind around the body or flows behind them as they walk. None of the cloak ever pushes through a body mesh, a long cloak does not slice the legs when playing the idle yawn animation.
So material physics would be really great.
@HunterRayder93 Are you sure that video is Korean? Everything in their client is typed in Japanese, most of it uses katakana.
I don't think the tiles are tho, it's a commonly used one you see a lot. I think I even saw some tiles by worms in one of the videos. It might be an idea to track down and categorize the good tiles off the vault which is often impenetrable when trying to find something with their search function.
It would certainly seem a lot easier than asking Beamdog to redo the old ones from scratch but not in a way that would conflict with the position of placeables and walk paths in old modules. I think internet speeds and hard disk space have improved a lot since 2002 so I'm not really sure why some still have an aversion to downloading haks and overrides.
Edit: Just found out there will be support for normal maps. That is so cool!
I love post processing effects. However, the lighting in my world has been very carefully designed to create a certain atmosphere and the heavy handed contrast, vibrance, and DoF post processing means that the tone of much of my work has been shifted and many areas are utterly unplayable due to them being so dark.
I know they are still a WIP but it shines a light on a deeper problem. How do we create a cohesive ambience for our players if the lighting is to be so dramatically different on a per player basis?
It's like trying to create a music score where the songs jump up or down an octave on a per player basis.
If I have seperated the players from the big bad by a chasm and they are giving a speech, I need to make sure my players can actually see what's going on instead of a dark blur of in the distance.
A per area flag for each post processing effect (kinda like sky boxes) would be fantastic!
Thanks,
- Jamie
Although that would be awesome and definitely eliminate a step for cc makers, I'm concerned that would break all dds textures that came before..
If it doesn't, I'm all for that.
I don't really have a great solution to fix this, but as some rough, uneducated ideas -
1. When a custom portrait is used by a player in a multiplayer game, automatically load the portrait into a servervault "portraits" folder that other clients connecting to the server can access. Although the possibility for duplicates or naming conflicts arises here (hopefully remote, but still possbile)
2. Upload the custom portrait to the server as part of the .bic file. Parse out the portrait to other clients as they connect, per session
3. Allow servers to have a custom portraits repository on the server which is per server. *OR* maybe a global repository if someplace like a Beamdog server or the Vault is willing to host it. Then, in order for a client (player) to the server to use a custom portrait when connecting to a particular PW or multiplayer game, they must first upload it to the server's shared portraits folder or the global portraits folder. Each portrait uploaded must have a unique resref or ID from any other.
Your idea is not bad, it could work but having a single portraiture server could create problems, it would be more ideal, a similar system as in social networks or forums that insert your image as you want and that is displayed to all the others ... obviously it must be within the minimum allowed for visualization, this would solve the problem but ... can it be implemented?
It would be really, really nice if private servers had the ability to send compressed portraits and hak's etc to people trying to connect. Bonus points if we could even set out own download server.
I even seem to remember at one point NWN had a 3rd party tool that worked something like that. But it's a long time ago and my memory is not what it used to be.
A lower barrier to entry for heavily modded persistent worlds instead of just a list of missing content would really help in regards to possible growth and accessibility.