Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Mar. 18, 05)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 2 forum highlights, collected by NWVault from Obsidian Forums. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Erik Novales, Programmer

Request: Resource aliasing in haks
I still don't understand why you can't do this with normal haks (or more particularly, why this doesn't work for models, which is what was alleged in the other thread). Simply have a low detail hak with the low detail versions of the files, and the high detail hak using the same file names but higher detail stuff. IMO all aliasing would do is add another layer of confusion...i.e. "I requested xyz but I'm actually getting abc".

Jason Keeney, Programmer

Converting NWN geometry - Step by Step
Normal mapping tends to look best at a "medium" distance from the camera... when you're too far, its as you say... you lose detail to the point where the normal mapping becomes pointless. But when you get close and the map has to be stretched to cover the surface of your polygons, the technique breaks down as well. Normal maps do not scale well.

Brian D. Lawson, Programmer

Converting NWN geometry - Step by Step

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Pip: I'm wondering, has anyone tried creating a cliff texture using difuse/normal mapping. When we were creating cliffs we always got frustrated by the poor feedback of the cliff texture, and because of the low polycount, creating realistic looking cliffs were pretty tricky. Be interesting to see the cliffs with a new texture and see the difference.

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Okay, so here's the deal...the terrain will not be normal mapped and for good reason. However, I feel confident that you guys will really like the options you have in terms of customizing the "look" of your terrain. One of the problems with terrain in general and an isometric view, is that a large portion of the time the terrain can completely fill the screen. That's 100% of the pixels having to do heavy hitting normal mapping calculations. Couple that with up to several light sources per pixel and you're chewing through fill-rate faster than you know what.

More: No problem on the reply. As for the step by step model conversion, there's no doubt this it's primarily applicable to items that will end up as the new style of "placeables". Pretty much what you've suggested up to this point really makes the most sense. Import, strip out old crap, add new crap, and re-export. I'm personally unclear at this point what the plan is regarding an exporter (for Max etc), but I believe there is something in the plans for ultimately releasing the one we use for static (placeable) objects.