I was interested to learn what people claim they did with the *Neverwinter Nights* toolset ONE.
I fired this up, and yes its nice and fast, but the grid size it totally off. One grid is about 100 feet? Now I can make a "huge" area in the toolset at about 32by24 grid. I can them "zoom" out and pretend that these are 5 foot grids. However. This has a number of problems.
1 The graphics are not really "scaled" to this level. So at this extreme zoom out, a lot of the effects and images are frankly useless.
2 The grid itself is the most annoying bright red colour, totally *ruins* the map.
Now if there was some way of getting a grid onto it, maybe some transparent photoshop file that you can put into a texture? I don't know, but since the original pictures have been taken down, I have trouble believing that the NWN toolset in its current state would be any good at all.
You are referring to the scaling issue of furnished interiors I presume? A grid square in NWN terms is, as I recall, about 32 feet or thereabouts? Something like that.
For unfurnished interiors, this has few significiant graphical effects as you can use zoom to get rid of the issue. It becomes an issue only for when you are then looking to furnish your interiors. Once you do, the scaling you meant to "fix" by zooming is shown to be clearly off once again.
The solution to this is to turn to NWVault. You want to download a few hak paks and a utility to create another custom one.
The first haks you grab are the "stripped" tileset haks, which are all the interior tilesets used in NWN1, with all of the furniture stipped out of each of the tiles.
This removes most of the distracting graphical scaling issues automatically for you. They vanish.
To re-add the furniture, you then use a utility on NWVault's site to autoscale placeable furniture to the "correct" size for one tile = 5' or 10'. You then use that placeable hak as your default in the toolset for all your placeable furnishings. It sounds hard and "techy" - but it's quite easy to do.
The scaling problems you mention then completely go away.
As for the grid being an issue for you, I don't use the Grid in the toolset. I project on to a white surface which has a pre-printed 1" grid on it. My grid is therefore always correct (and is never red)
Anyways, that's how I have dealt with those issues. Stipped tilesets, resized placeables and an external grid. When all of those features are present, the issues you identify are reduced to -10 hits and promptly die. It's well worth it to me as the speed with which I can build and detail a map in NWN1 is rather
breathtakingly fast, if I do say so myself. I expect I can lay down an external area and detail it NWN1 faster than most people can draw it on a battlemat.
These are, btw, rarely issues which crop up for use in external areas. The main issue in external area is the "gridlock" look, where NWN's square grid sructure can look "off" and too tidy when there are multiple buldings on the map that are near one another. In cities it's fine, but in towns and rural area? Not so much.
Again, there is a hakpak to download off of NWVault to fix this. I recommend using placeable buildings instead of tile based buildings so the "grid" layout in NWN1 goes away and you can have buildings put down at arbitrary angles, rotations and distances from each other in a completely arbitrary manner wherever you want.
Again - for those familiar with NWN1 custom content, placeable buildings frequently broke AI pathfinding when used to play the module in a computer game. For our purposes however, we don't need in game pathfinding and AI to work bug free because we aren't using the Toolset to create a computer game. It just needs to look pretty in the toolset for use as a projected map
Placeables buldings is the silver bullet for this problem.
As for the VTT. I think I'm going the LCD route, less hassle, less DIY. Also the players hands wont cast shadows on the map.
I'm going to simply buy a thin mount for about $40, take the platsic casing off the LCD, and then mount; the mount fixing itself will be screwed into a base of wood. Job done; I will worry about making a nice "box" for it afterwards.
Do be sure to post pictures of this approach. I am greatly interested. In my view, the Dynex 40" 1080p flat panel at Best Buy for $499 seems to be the most practical and affordable candidate for such an LCD approach.
Please post pics when you have it up and running. I'd love to see it installed in a table "in game".
I have no doubt that this is a very viable approach if constructed properly. In the coming years, especially as flat panels drop in price more, this will become the default choice in preference to projection.
Not sure we are there
quite yet, but I certainly am very interested in what you plan to do.
