PW Builders Guidelines

PW Builders Guidelines

Areas and Walkmeshes

• Keep external areas small (max 16*16, prefferred 12*12 or less)
• Give the NPC room to walk. ( less way finding problems )
• On exterior areas, doublecheck the baked walkmesh. If it looks messy, try to simplify it with manually painting walkable and non-walkable sections to make it simple and smooth.

"One thing I noticed is that you are using Walk Mesh cutters in some areas where just making the Terrain triangle unwalkable would be better. Particularly around the edges of cliffs. I know you mentioned that you are the type of player that likes to explore nooks & Crannies but what we need to be concerned with is the walkmesh remains very simple so that the game controlled creatures don't get trapped in a corner and the pathfinding engine can't find the way out. This is confirmed to cause massive lag spikes - 100% CPU usage.

(See this for pictures, words that follow refer to the pictures) http://www.dungeoneternal.com/phpBB2/ftopic6335.php

Don't leave triangles - try to make the walk path a straight line and keep them off the walls:

I don't think it is worth the effort to use a mesh cutter to save 1/2 a square on edges like these. They also slope a bit far down.

Little corners like this should be avoided as AI controlled monsters could get hung up in there:

As I said, minor issues but I think a clean, simple walkmesh is important."

Seed DungeonEternal.com

• Large enough transistion points

[quote]It has also occurred when a group traverses a transition together when, on the other side of the transition, the walkmesh surface area is small. Therefore, I think players might be getting 'bumped' into non-walkable portions of the walkmesh and thus crash out.

I was witness to this when a player transitioned with a group and he began to crash out repeatedly during multiple login attempts after the initial crash. As he logged in the final time but before he physically appeared, I grabbed him in the Chooser and Jumped him to my Avatar, which allowed him to finally log back in successfully.[/quote]

• No 1x1 interiors

any 1 X interior will crash clients running ATI cards [/list]

Objects and Placeables

• Minimize trigger vertices

triggers with 100+ vertice points have been proven to cause problems. Though having six or twelve vertices is probably ok (no need to have only triangles or squares).

• In order to prevent any of your placeables, doors, etc form being bashable, set the Plot flag wihtin the properties of the object to True (plot items can not be detroyed by any means disposable to an ordinary PC).
• Don't use to much placeables. ( better loading times ) Just enough to get the point across.
• Set placeables to environmental objects whenever possible, especially in non-walkable parts of the area.
• If you stack placeables, set them to env. objects and use a walkmesh cutter.
• Way points (from area transitions) should be in large clear walkmesh areas (not too close to edge, not in narrow areas, not near many objects)
• Minimize Number of Tree Seeds

Early on in NWN2, Obsidian had recommended not to exceed a total of four seeds The definition of a seed being the type of tree (example, a fan palm and coconut palm are already two, not one just because they are both palms) AND a seed number. Perhaps since initially prescribing that guideline, Obsidian has made improvements to their engine so that number has increased.

• Minimize use of grass

As grass flows with the movement of the wind, it is relatively very resource consuming. Use sparingly.

• 6 placeable limit on each tile

"I had read about some 6 placeable limit within a tile; It seems it must include trees, environmental objects (and possibly even triggers and encounters with some higher limit). I had a total of

• 4 trees
• 3 env obj
• 6 walkmesh cutters
• 1 encounter

I shifted the small tree on the left one ~ the diametr of it's cutter leftward, out of the tile, then it baked fine. I was suprised though as this didn't seem cluttered at all and I felt I was well under the limit.

envi objects never count, but the mesh cutters around them do. Walkmesh cutters are the only trigger that affects the walkmesh. Basically it is just cutters and placables and the walk/not walk terrain painting that affects the mesh.

Sometimes it is the shape of the cutter that is too confusing to the bake. You could have also tried redrawing the octagons into squares and trying again."

DM Hatred, Dungeon Eternal.com

Monsters and NPC's

• not to many NPC in the same area at the same time. ( I try to keep the NPC amount below 20.)
• Keep the number of active creatures (incl. the players) below 20 per area, if possible.
• Avoid spawning more than 2-3 creatures near eachother. Their OnPerception events will go berserk.
• No creatures near transition targets!

Lights and Shadows

"I ended up using quite a bit of lights on the Drow map and learned a couple of things about them in the process, so thought I'd start a thread on this topic that we can add to as we learn more.

Most importantly, regarding lights, keep in mind that by default, they cast shadows, and the more lights and shadows we have, the more we can slow the performance of our clients' machines (and possibly the server). One very good thing to do is to disable shadows. Two ways:

The properties of the map has settings for has directional light, and directional light casts shadows. I'd initially set has directional light to False, though got some very bad graphic bugs (on an exterior map), so had to turn this back on to true.

Though being an underground area, its most natural that the light would be very dim and not cast any noticeable shadows in a place already so dark. So I turned directional light casts shadows to False.

I then used a combination of the Power Bar plugin and the Area Contents tab in order to seek out and group my point lights. Area - select objects - Tag (copied and pasted the tag for my lights here), then temporarily grouped them, right clicked and opened properties in a new window, so that I could disable all of their shadows simultaneously.

I went further, since I had ~80 jail pieces, which are very dark wrought metal pieces, I selected all of these and set receives shadows to False.

Later I went through and read the help manual. It provided one more tip, recomending not to exceed light from more then 3 point lights on and surface. So if you set your Show/Hide selection to show the light spheres, you can see pretty easily where they overlap, and afjust the sizes and locations of your spheres so that you don't have more than three affecting any one surface."

DM Hatred, Dungeon Eternal.com

• Go easy on the number of point-light sources.
• Almost every light to Cast shadows? = False

(unless it is a very bright light in an area with a background where shadows should be obvious),

• Set most placeables and environmental object to Don't Receive Shadows = True

(especially in the maps I am working on more recently, in Underdark where its already so dark anyways, or, if the object is already very dark in color so shadows wouldn't be real noticeable anyways).

• Area properties, I set Directional Light Casts Shadows? = False. In underdark maps, I'd like to actually set it Has directional light = false, but that resulted in graphics errors (Obsidian Bug at least as of 1.06.980). Well, this is also great for interior or underdark areas, though probably not good on your current map since its in a desert, but good to keep in mind for future maps (and maybe even a good idea to bring all existing maps to some standards like these?).