Merricksdad's Granitelands 2 (EE)

**** The included fx_step_splash.mdl interferes with the current NWN fancywater shader in EE. When fancywater is enabled, you will probably see white squares emitted on water surfaces from any character crossing water. You can either remove all instances of my custom fx_step_splash.mdl from the included hacks (to allow fancywater to take over), or disable fancywater in the game options (to retain this custom water). ****

Current Version 2.1 [2020-03-04]

About

Granitelands 2 is based on my 2015 Granitelands tileset, and has been upgraded to look more like my Windspear Hills tileset. It will now serve as a base for future works.

Upgrades from GL1 include:

• makes use of normal and specular mapping in EE.
• includes water made with my wind-based Wavey Water shader
• includes a shoreline texture
• includes an underwater texture
• includes tile lighting
• includes updated walkmesh
• tile ambient, diffuse, and specular values are set to 50% so as to pick up more of each light at all times of the day

Terrain Options

• Ground
• Raised Ground (+3m, +6m, +9m, +12m)
• Shallow Water (walkable, -3m)
• Deep Water (walkable, -6m)

About Tile Base Color

GL2 uses a 50% grayscale for all tile colors (ambient, diffuse, specular). This helps maximize the effectiveness of normal and specular mapping, but also allows for the widest range of interplay with light sources. This means that GL2 tiles will be more sensitive to ambient and diffuse environmental lighting than you may be accustomed to. I find that 95% or higher saturation works well for sunlight, while 75% or lower saturation works well for moonlight. This also provides for a real-feel at night, and makes torches and other light sources important to the experience.

About Water

GL2 is released with a copy of my Wavey Water Shader (v0.10) affecting just the water texture "tx_md20_water01.dds". This modified version corrects for the too-bright nature of specular light coming from torches and worn items. Shaders v0.9+ were written specifically for vanilla light sources using "fx_light_clr.mdl". Feel free to modify the shaders to fit your own custom light sources.

Water is directly affected by global wind, which is either set in the area properties, or by using the console command ##setglobalwind X Y Z. Since global wind of zero length causes my wind-driven water system to fail, I've installed a default wind system which will be used if no wind is available. The result is a mostly-still glassy water with some texture which moves only slightly. Supply your own global wind to make the water move faster. Modify the global wind Z value to add more waves (higher number = more waves). As a suggestion, try a bottom limit of ##setglobalwind 0.1 0.1 7 for very ripply water.

This water shader is highly sensitive to color saturation in the area environmental properties. Not so much to fog, but very sensitive to ambient and diffuse light. See "About Tile Base Color" for tips on setting environmental color saturation. The same guidelines apply to water.

About Raise-Lower

As with GL1, this tileset uses the multiple-raise system developed by SEN. This system is unable to make full use of edge tiles. This system also sometimes confuses the toolset.

Compatibility with Granitelands 1 and NWN 1.69

This tileset can be used as a tile-per-tile replacement for GL1, however, since the tiles were modified slightly, and Windspear Hills rocky terrain was added, you may need to move some pre-existing placeables in your prefab areas.

To perform the replacement, simply download the replacement extension, which will override the TMD07.SET file and force it to use the new GL2 tiles.

Keep in mind this won't add any additional tiles you may have added to TMD07.SET.  For reference, TMD07 and TMD20b both have 1092 base tiles. Any tiles below that number were added by somebody else, or an expansion of this set.

As an alternative, you can simply open the TMD07 set and find & replace the first 1092 tiles from "tmd07" to "tmd20b". This would work even better if your custom additions don't use my naming prefixes.

All recent attempts to create a function area with the 1.69 toolet cause a crash loop any time tiles with elevation are used. I do not suggest trying to build a module with GL2 for NWN 1.69. That may change in the future, but I don't think I'm going to put a bunch of work into it.

Placeables Packs

Since the terrain textures are the same as those in Windspear Hills, you can use the first two placeables packs from Windspear Hills with this set.

The current version comes with a "wind" emitter that can be used as a placeable or as an applied VFX (using default, duration, or impact animations). To include the "wind" as a placeable, simply add a line like below to your placeables.2da.

1000 "Wind Emitter (MD20)" **** fx_wind_md1 **** **** **** **** **** **** 0 **** **** 1

If you want to use the "wind" as an applied visual effect, put a line like this in your visualeffects.2da (Use whatever index # you come up with for your scripted VFX value)

1000 FX_WIND_EMITTER D 0 **** fx_wind_md1 **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** 0

Here's another placeables.2da line to add a placeable plane of water, which uses the fancy water shader.

1000 "Water 10 m.sq.(MD20)" **** tmd20_water **** **** **** **** **** **** 0 **** **** 1

If you just want to make an emitter for a waterfall that affects the fancy water, simply have your emitter throw out chunks of "fx_step_splash" instead of whatever texture it normally uses. (Be sure to turn on chunk type emitter).

Intended Future Work

• I'm still debugging the pathing information in the SET file. That will go public in the first update.
• Merge with modified version of Windspear Hills (will include MOUNTAIN, CRAG CAVES, CHASM, AND TOR)
• See Windspear Hills: Intended Future Work

Testing

Please report backward diagonal tiles, especially once Windspear Hills is merged.

I've found that some water tiles are too tight to walk through, and am planning to maybe make underwater boulders walkable. After all, units should be relatively more buoyant in water so climbing rocks isn't as difficult.

Suggestions

If you have suggestions, please find a picture of what you have interest in adding. If it's from another tileset, please link the tileset (if not vanilla) and which tile(s) you woudl like to see retextured and added to this set. Direct message them to me on Discord. I'm happy to add simple tiles, or copy tiles from vanilla sets. Tile groups take more time, and I suggest you try making those yourself, maybe even from placeables.

Patch Log

v 2.1

• Water chunk emitters have been replaced with standard water planes to hopefully reduce crashing for some users when loaded in the toolset.
• Initial water chunk emitters were specifically to force the transparency of water planes. A new method has been found which forces 1.69-like water transparency. This change has been applied to all water planes in all models. However, on-tile water is not always transparent to things like held torches, so this version has the potential to obscure held or worn VFX, even if they are meshes, not sprites.
• The full hak has been chopped into 4 parts: "main", "wok", "plcfx", and "fancy".
• If the "fancy" hak is left out, the water will not animate. You may find that it's easier to work with GL2 in the toolset. Simply place the "fancy" hak back at the top of the stack before testing your module to see the water animating. The "fancy" hak also includes the water shaders and material files for the base textures.
• Included in the "plcfx" hak are the modified fx_step_splash model, another wind emitter fx_wind_md1, and a 10m water plane placeable.
• For the full effect of Wavey Water, the "fancy" and "plcfx" haks must be in the module stack, or their contents must be dumped into override.
• This version still doesn't work in NWN 1.69, and suffers the same crash when placing raise/lower or either water terrain.
• Two new module files haves been produced which are built in EE-8193.5. One module includes the "fancy" hak, while the other does not.
• The water shader supplied in this package is now version 0.10, with cleaned up code and fog limits.

v 2.0

•  Initial Public Testing Release