I trust everyone had a happy holiday.  I'm taken a BRIEF break from Pine Forest.  I got tired of seeing the same old textures and shapes, so I'm putting in on a back burner for a few days...I think this will keep in fresh.  I'm currently working on a new tile for a separate project, and am converting the canyon tiles in the PF set to MP.  In a few days time I will return to PF with gusto...lol.

Happy New Year everyone !!  Well, as far as the tileset goes, I have 5 more new tiles done.  These are what I am calling "canyon" tiles.  Like the cliffs but in reverse, these go down instead of up.  Creates a walled canyon.  I still have to do the diagonal tiles, but these are working good right now.  And of course I am going to create variations.  I am also going to add this feature to MP.

Got water??  Yep, we sure do.  Got the 6 basic water tiles done and added to the set.  Need to iron out a few walkmesh problems, but they look pretty good.

Today I reworked the stream tiles.  Actually I scrapped the original and went with all new ones.  I haven't changed the water texture yet, but the landscape has completely changed.  The tiles are a little sparse right now, but I will be adding tufts of grass to the banks as well as a few trees on the tile edge.  I also think I will be adding some more trees to the road tiles.  With the streams and the roads the forest gets kind of thin and I definitely want to keep it thick.  I think I will also add a few more different geometry tiles on the streams for variety.  I also want to get back into the forest and add undergrowth.  But that's going to be one of the last things I do, I want to get all the terrains going first.

Got some water in the streams.  I had to work at it, had a few problems with it at first, but got it running.  Uploaded a screenshot.  That blue texture is probably going to change, and I think I'm going to rework the stream a little to knock off some of the straight edges and maybe decrease the width a little. 

Well moving right along.  Today I worked on streams.  I have all the main stream crosser tiles done (end, straight, T, X, and corner), that brings the tile count up to 16.  I still want to go back and add duplicates with variations add some variety to the landscape.  I made it unwalkable.  In other words the PC cannot walk through the water.  I will add a "bridge" to the stream tiles.  Three actually; a fallen log, stepping stone rocks, and a bridge wide enough for a wagon.  Added a screenshot if you want to check it out.  The tiles do not have water in them yet.  I'm gonna have to do a little research on animating water and such before I do that.

Okay, got a few more tiles done, the count is now at 11.  Roads were the focus of this building operation.  In keeping with tiles from scratch I created completely new tiles and then used the road texture and geometry from the rural set.  I also darkened up the road texture as well as toning it down some.  Added a screenshot if you want to check it out.  I also changed the viewing order on the screenshots.  They were listed from oldest to newest.  I reversed them.

Well, I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas.  I got a new toy...MS Office XP.  FrontPage 2002 came with this so I spent the day kind of fiddling around with the site layout.  Really didn't change that much but I'm sure improvements will follow.  I added Mountain Pass v1.2 to the downloads page.  Its just a link back to NWNVault where it is listed.

Nothing new as far as tiles or landscape goes.  I did iron out the walkmeshes though.  Next step is to add some canopy to the top of the trees.  This is going to eat up some polys so I'm going to have to be careful, and they may not be as full as I would like them to be...but we'll see.

It's late and I'm fixing to go to bed.  But I wanted to post a few screenshots first.  I have 6 general terrain tiles done and thought it was time to add some trees.  I was quite surprised.  It looks pretty good.  I still have to add canopies and a few kinks to work out with the walkmeshes, but all in all...I like it!

For the time being I'm reverting back to the original floor/needle texture.  I did increase the UV tile number to make it a smaller needle.  I'm going to leave the option open to change it back later.  

Got a nice little pine sapling going.  Figured out how to put in alpha's on a texture and used that for the small needles that appear on most pine saplings.  I think it came out pretty nice.    I'm going to also include this as a placeable in the final hak.  May add a small bud at the top of the tree and branch.  I loaded a screenshot of a single sapling.

Good morning.  I spent a little time this morning on the forest floor texture.  I wanted to add a little "depth" to it as well as a touch of green (all pine needles are not brown).  I also increased the UV tile number to make the "needles" a little smaller.  Check out the new screenshot for a better look.

Now I haven't forgotten about MP, those extra cliff tiles will be coming soon.  They will be included in this set also, but with a slightly different twist.

Hello everyone.  I've been gone for awhile, been helping my daughter recover from a surgery.  So I'm back.  Version 1.2 was released and I've pretty much stopped working on the set since then...for my daughter.  Now, I have an idea for a few new tiles to transform the cliffs.  It would put walkmeshes on top and allow a rocky trail (walkable/climbable) on the face.

I'm gonna begin work on this pretty quick.  However, my main attention has been turned towards a Pine Forest tileset.  A forest setting completely different from Bioware's with emphasis on piney woods.  I hunt in the piney woods of Southern Louisiana so I'm gonna try to bring some realism to the set.  If you have any ideas or suggestions please e-mail them to me.  I have 3 very basic tiles done, but not complete.  Have a few screenshots posted.  Nothing special, but will give an idea of some of the texture/feeling I'm trying to produce.  BTW...this is completely original.  I've started from scratch.

Was testing out the new minimap...almost through, and found a missing walkmesh.  Walked right through the corner of a lake...lol.  Fixed it.

Doh!!  I forgot to do something that's kind of a BIG deal....the minimap!!  Gonna get it going ASAP!!

Got the trees fixed.  I also retextured the small posts of the suspended bridge and the tops of the large post that extend into the bridge floor.

Well, the tileset is now listed at the vault, and has been downloaded a few times.  Another bug that I've found was that when I added the shack I retextured the roof.  That has resulted in some trees with the shingle texture, that will be fixed shortly.

On the Bioware Boards someone asked for me to include buildings in the set...I didn't think it would fit the landscape so I didn't.  However, I am going to release some addition mountain theme hakpaks.  Such as, Mountain Village and Mountain Fortress.  Each one will be completely compatible with the original Mountain Pass set.  If you use MP to build an area you should be able to go back, change the hakpak to one of the new paks and everything still work fine.  My plans this far is to have "grass knolls" (the rock texture with grass overlaid in various spots) in these sets, and with completely new building tiles, or at least in the Village set.  The Mountain Fortress will by a new designed stone block castle type structure.  I would just make this one hakpak and have it all in one, but the resulting file would be rather large.

I started a new Message Board system...well, its not new, but its new to this site.  It's a MSN Group/Community so you'll need a hotmail or passport account, but those are free.  Clicking on the Message Boards link will open a new window and take you to the boards.  When your done exit out and you'll be back here.  Don't know if anyone will use them, but thought it might be useful.

I got the new doors into the tileset for Stilt Building 1 and Shack.  Still trying to figure out how to reskin a door, so that will come soon.  Waiting for the hakpak to show up at the vault so I can update.  As soon as it does I'll update to v1.1.  BTW...I haven't released hardly anything worth mentioning, but what I have has been released under the name of Gideon Upright, and River's End.  Mountain Pass will be released under Gideon Upright.

Got the HakPak posted at the Vault.  Fixed part of the door problem.  I found a neat way of renumbering my [TILE] files and forgot to renumber the attached door files.  That fixed the not being able to place doors and a pesky door that kept appearing with the water tiles.  Now I need to go in and manually create and place a door in the Stilt Building 1 and the Shack tiles.  I also seriously need to reskin a door to match this set.  Bioware's just don't do it!!!!  I'll release v1.1 to fix the door problem as soon as v1 shows up.

Well, I've finished version 1 on the set.  There is an issue with doors (it won't let you place them), and I don't have any of the custom tiles done yet, but the reskin is basically finished.  I'm hoping for input on improvements so I am about to upload it to the vault.  I have some screenshots that I'm posting here.

Well, got the cliffs and pits added, I also added the bridge and a few buildings that I took from the mines set.  Starting on the reskin now.  I found a nice texture for the bridge.  It spaces out the planks and allows you to see through them.

Got the water tiles working.  Found some more that I could strip out.  Good.  Now I'm down to a bare bones set.  Now I can add the pits and cliffs.  To do this I will use the Viewer and find all the related models and then add them to the hak file.  I will then have to include the rules and tile/groups into the .SET file.

Back to the tileset...I've finished stripping the .SET and .ITP file.  After checking it out in the toolset I find that the water terrain has some missing models.  Now I haven't deleted any models yet so I know that I must have deleted some model references in the .SET file (probably when I was taking out the boat tiles).  It's late.  I'll work on that tomorrow.

Ok, just went to check out the updates.  The screenshots aren't working properly.  Will try and get it fixed ASAP.

All right, got the screen shots working and found another problem the e-mail form didn't work, so I changed it to just a regular e-mail link.  It will open your e-mail program ready to send.  I also set up a discussion board.  New boards will follow.  Let me know if you have any problems with anything.

Well, got the screenshots posted here and an e-mail form up.  Let us know what u think.

Well, there was a request for a mountainous tileset on the vault and I replied and told about the tileset that I'm working on.  I'm also working on getting some screenshots up here, should be on later today.

Happy Thanksgiving all.  I haven't had a lot of time to work on the tileset the past couple of days with the holiday and all.  After taking my traditional turkey nap I woke up, fixed a pot of coffee and began tinkering again.

I've got the original rural tileset renamed, and  the .SET file stripped down.  Now I have to edit the .ITP file and then remove all the unwanted models and walkmesh files.  I used the ITP Tool to remove the unwanted tiles and groups from the palette.

The first step in the creation of my tileset was to decide which existing tileset I was going to model my new one on.  I decided to do this with the Rural Tileset.  After all, it has roads, water, bridges and all other essential parts of a good set.  I then used Zoligato's NWN Viewer to extract all of the files needed for the new set into a new folder.  This includes the .ITP files.  I also wanted to include the new Hills tiles in the set, so I copied these files into the same file and used the provided .SET file.

I then used the NWN Tileset Duplicator to rename all the files that I just extracted.  I have decided to call the new tileset "Mountain Pass", so I used the prefix "tmp" for the new set, and since there may be subsequent releases on design I used "tmp01" for the final prefix.  With the files now renamed I used HakEdit to create the .hak file.

The tileset is basically meant to reproduce the look and feel of a rugged mountain terrain.  I've decided that I want very few if any man made structures in it.  So the next step for me was to use the viewer to form a list of all the different models and tiles.  Then I opened my .SET file in textpad and began taking out those tiles that I didn't want to include in the tileset.

v1
Basic hakpak...door problem known
released 12/3/02

v1.1
Fixed door problem and added doors to the other buildings
released 12/5/02

v1.2
Fixed texture problem with trees.  Retexture on the suspended bridge.
Minimap working.
Included missing walkmesh on one of the water tiles.
Added doors to the tileset exits.
released 12/9/02