[Looking for] Basic tutorials on creating custom areas in NearInfinity
hiyosilver
Member Posts: 4
Hello there!
I tried getting into area creation with DLTCEP. After running into some serious problems I realized and was reminded by a helpful soul that DLTCEP really isn't up to date any more. Now I've been trying to get to grips with NI, but I'm not making any real progress.
I know roughly what files I need but I only managed to create a few of them and even then they seem to have fields missing or become corrupted when I don't edit them just right. Not to speak of adding wall polygons and the like.
The file type documentation has been some help, but that only takes me so far.
Does anyone have a basic tutorial (and we are talking basic here: background, walls, searchmap, lightmap, heightmap; just enough to get into and walk around in) on creating a custom area in NI? I'm thinking similar to that famous one on DLTCEP by Yovaneth that probably everyone knows, though it doesn't need to be anywhere near as extensive.
Thank you for reading!
I tried getting into area creation with DLTCEP. After running into some serious problems I realized and was reminded by a helpful soul that DLTCEP really isn't up to date any more. Now I've been trying to get to grips with NI, but I'm not making any real progress.
I know roughly what files I need but I only managed to create a few of them and even then they seem to have fields missing or become corrupted when I don't edit them just right. Not to speak of adding wall polygons and the like.
The file type documentation has been some help, but that only takes me so far.
Does anyone have a basic tutorial (and we are talking basic here: background, walls, searchmap, lightmap, heightmap; just enough to get into and walk around in) on creating a custom area in NI? I'm thinking similar to that famous one on DLTCEP by Yovaneth that probably everyone knows, though it doesn't need to be anywhere near as extensive.
Thank you for reading!
0
Comments
this is only a small piece of it since it's also about the old Tileset Map Editor and quite old.
I think you might have slightly misunderstood my post. I was asking specifically for NearInfinity tutorials and said that I DON'T want to use DLTCEP since it's not up to date and doesn't really work for me (because of graphical glitches).
Not exactly what I need but thank you for making the effort!
I agree that DLTCEP doesn't provide all of the EE features. But they are not really needed to create basic map structures. You should stick to the DLTCEP tutorials for map creation. Make sure to work with the old palette-based tileset variant, since DLTCEP has some issues with pvrz-based tilesets.
To make the resulting map EE-compatible you have basically only convert the tileset (TIS file) into the pvrz-based variant. You can use NI for that. Either via Tools > Convert > Image to TIS, or better yet, place all your map resources into the override folder, select the TIS file in NI's resource tree and select Export button > as PVRZ-based TIS. A MOS file isn't really needed anymore if you target EE games patched to 2.0 or higher.
Btw, creating maps from scratch is probably one of the most complicated and time-consuming tasks in modding the game engine.
I felt like I was doing reasonably well with DLTCEP but I couldn't get my maps to render without black seams between the tiles, not matter what I tried. Someone told me to use NI instead since DLTCEP was so out of date and I haven't been able to find a better solution so far.
I assume the MOS file is instead just an automatically scaled down image of the main map like with portraits?
I know it's the most complicated bit and that's probably why very few people seem to be interested or ask questions about it. Sadly it's the only (or at least the main) part of modding that really interests me. I'll just have to suffer through it. If I could get the damn thing to render properly with DLTCEP I'm pretty sure I could make a (simple) new map work without that much trouble (citation needed).
Edit: I suppose I will go back to DLTCEP for now, at least for the initial map creation. Maybe I just need to try a different approach.
thanks to your tip about converting to PVRZ I finally got my area to work on the visual level.
I seem to have done it in the wrong order before or maybe changed things around too much, but by simply creating all the files as normal IN DLTCEP and then converting the TIS to the new format in NI without touching anything afterwards, it finally looks like it's supposed to without any seams!
Thanks again