How hard is it to make new areas?

semiticgoddess

I'm working on an NPC mod and I plan on recording a playthrough of Nox (an old Diablo-style game) so I can screenshot the maps and create image files I can use to make maps for the NPC mod. I don't plan anything particularly fancy; just some dungeons to put monsters and containers in. I have no experience in creating new areas, though, and don't know where to start. How do you create the polygons for walkable areas and so forth?

I'd also like to grab some of the graphics from Nox and use them for new spell effects--like the Fist of Vengeance spell, in which a giant stone fist comes plummeting from the sky and smashes whatever lies below.

Gwendolyne

Welcome to the club of merry masochists!

Creating a new map is very - very - very... (as many time as you wish) - time consuming. but I know of no other feeling of such profound bliss when the in game test is conclusive.

More seriously, IETME and DLTCEP are you friends.

Acifer

Yovaneth wrote a fantastic area making tutorial that covers every step in area editing:
http://www.simpilot.net/~sc/dltcep/areamaking/main.htm

You need some kind of image editor (e.g. Photoshop) to put the screenshots together into one large graphic.
However, for the first area I highly recommend editing existing ones. Creating some wilderness areas using original BG-images is a good way to understand the structure of the 7 area-related files you need for a proper ingame experience.
As a basic guideline, the are-files store the animations, sounds and creatures in an area, the wed-file the wallgroups (where a character is hidden behind a wall) and the doors, the tis-file contains the basic graphics cut into 64x64 pixels (so your image size has to be a multiplier of 64 in both the x- and y-axis), the SM.bmp-file tells the characters where they can walk, the LM.bmp ist for the lighting and the heightmap is not that important for the very beginning.
Oh, and Nox is a great game! I really enjoyed it 20 years ago.

bob_veng

IMO the projection angle of Nox is too different from IE maps for it's graphics to be so simply reused. You could reuse isolated objects and "textures" but the general spatial contours would need to come from somewhere else.

I've had some experience editing area graphics, I can help you in the Photoshop department.

there are cool assets here: http://www.baldursgatemods.com/forums/index.php?action=downloads;cat=39
another good resource is lionh. map rips http://www.shsforums.net/topic/32402-lionheart-extracting-the-maps/page-6#entry594910

there are also threads on this forum where people have posted their incredible original areas most of which have never actually been used in a mod, for example:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/35094/more-isometric-landscape-areas-for-infinity-engine
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/74549/city-area-art/p1

Zanso

It may also help, if you are good with Photoshop (or other photo editing programs). I created areas for Enemy Within mod (not out) by using Photoshop and 3DMAX (Blender is a very good free alternative).

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/46446/the-enemy-within-a-new-mod-coming-work-in-progress/p1

I patched together old BG1 maps and placed new buildings and such to the areas which I made by 3DMAX.

You can probably find some help from here too:
http://www.shsforums.net/topic/36781-comprehensive-ie-modding-tutorial-index/