Tool set feedback

[tenebra_uk]

Now that you've had a chance to play around with the tool set, what do you think about it? :)

[Dazlar]

I'll get back to that after actually getting and using it. *winks*

I've heard from one who feels like a newbie now. *nods*

[InhumanOne]

well I made another thread about my personal opinion so here is the short version.

pros: good helmets, great exteriour building, many many options, good graphics, armor attachment system, tintable objects, less ugly gnomes, scaleable creatures and objects, half elves got their own appearance instead of the human one.

cons: far less creatures then in nwn1 when it was released, far too conservative clothing options, male characters wearing a shirt when naked, clothing cant be changed piece by piece like in nwn1 instead we got a few options that we can only change color of and attach armor on, beardless dwarves, much harder to use, no body tattoos.

I noticed numbers were missing when creating an outfit so I assume there will be more in the final version. I definatly hope so since its not enough if we cant change the parts individually anymore. the outfits that are in all look good though, I really love the helmets and hats. there is something for everyone there, commoners of all classes and professions, soldiers, knights, barbarians, shady characters, pirates, pretty much everyone.

I really hope there will be a full plate armor with a surcoat over it. A skull shaped helmet was missing too.

[Zimith]

I'm not really a builder, but as far as environment goes, most things that seems to have limited the NWN1 toolset seem to be gone. In the first toolset, you generally came up with an idea on how you wanted an area to look like, then discovered it couldn't really be done. That seems to have improved vastly in NWN2, a lot of the things I come up with appears to actually be concievable. So from a first look, I'd say Obsidian has pulled off the most important feature, which is great. I also like the more moderate colors and models, and the models looks far better than in NWN1. However, while I don't feel it's necessary to see genitals, the victorian view on nakedness seems pretty unnecessary to me and goes against the traditional "chicks in mail" fantasy style: if I play a big barbarian, I want at leastg be able to flash some muscles. Skin seems to be considered evil in the Obsidian office.

The learning curve seems steeper, but it may be just me being unused to it. If I'm right, it's probably good anyway, because with the NWN1 toolset, anyone and their grandmother could slap together an action mod and while certainly democratic, it affected the quality of the mods and pw:s available. And I guess with more options, difficulty simply has to increase.

What do strike me as odd is the seemingly false advertising on creature customization. With the vast majority of the monsters, the only real thing you can change is size. I'll take goblins as an example: you can, of course, make the goblin as big or small you like. You can also change the color of its skin. You cannot, however, change its face or its hair, not even the color of it. The armor selection is slim: two of the three models looks more or less the same and the only details you can change are I think bracers and shoulderpads and there's like two models to play with there. So if you wanna make a warband of goblins, chance is it'll look pretty homogenic, maybe even more so than in NWN1.

Overall though, the toolset seems to live up to at least my expectations, and promises some great pw and mod-play in the upcoming years. :bravo:

[Knight_Sir_Galahad]

i absolutely love it, lighting etc is excellent. I can't seem to find the sun in the sky so i can move it tho. The Armors are very nice and the weapons too. i love all of it's features and content 10sur10

[tanita]

it's fun to use, and that's although my graphics card is on the lower end of the supported list. actually i'd hoped for far more documentation, that's the main reason i couldn't believe this is the "final presell version" at all. especially documents about the plugin-interface and some file- and data-formats would come handy, as it's hard to write plugins when you just don't know how to access for example terrain heightmap data. the release is more aimed towards modul-builders than tool-developers...

then there are some enerving bugs and "features", like having to change my regional settings for the object scaling to work properly, or having to restart the toolset everytime i recompiled my plugin (restarting takes about two minutes!). i hope these bugs will be addressed until the game ships?

i also would like the user interface to be even more configurable, e.g. i prefer scrolling around using keys rather then ctrl+lmb.

after inspecting the libraries i am impressed by the power the plugin-interface exposes to 3rd-party developers, i consider the toolset more a framework than an application! i'm sure there will be _tremendous_ collections of (more or less) usefull plugins!

so my next petition will be named "give us documentation, please!" :nuts:

[BlackHawk01x]

Well my first view was: Woah everything confusing.
Since it's quite different than the NWN1-Toolset.

But I get more and more used into things, what I really really like at the moment is the possibility that you can resize your area without needing to make a total new one, even the way that you can say 'where' to resize it (left, right, up and down :) ) that is a great thing for a person like me who always makes in first try the area either too big or too small for the plans and ideas *grins*

About the 'looks' of items... well I agree with the people who said that hopefully in the final toolset are some more, at the moment it looks a bit less to choose for some items.
The armors look great, too, but have to agree that there could be a some more revealing things. Not missunderstand me: nothing like a bikini or total nakedness (that I would add as contra-point if it would have been ingame *nods* It's a game afterall) or something like that, but just showing the tummy or for males as said about barbarians who really doesn't have quite armors I myself aswell think "barbarian-like" *nods* (Cannot remember though if the more revealing of NWN1 came through CEP into the game, so maybe it's a standard cause of rating or so, not know)
However: They look great anyways at the moment :)

Some things I really needed to get used to, like finding the 'maximize'-button for the windows, since they're quite small when using a setting of 1024x768 on a 17"-screen. So without maximizing the windows you have alot of scrolling especially in the placements-tab.

Well Monsters... I hope there will be more, these who are in looks great already - even you have to change a few sizes since there is one of the minor bugs e.g. the wolf is so big that it's 4feet not fits into an area of 6x6 tiles, hehe. But really miss some monsters like Slaads.
Most dragons/trolls/etc. (these you have at least a base-monster to change) who are missed at the moment you can make by changing the color etc. of one of the existing I think so that's just a matter of time.

The documentations help me alot already - I guess partly cause I'm only good in making area look nice, all the scripting and so I'm very bad in so not even a documentation helps *blushes* - like finding the infos about how to change direction of things and so.
Only thing I miss there at the moment - or I overread it 2 times - is the data'type and how large the pictures have to be used for the 'Worldmap', since there seems to be none of such files in the installation-folder aswell (I searched through all of them and not found one example)

Well all in all it really looks good, which makes the loading-times a bit okay even they seem sometimes a bit longer (especially the starting) but at the moment can live with it (especially since I'm happy it's working afterall with my GeForce6600GT where I had fears that even the toolset not working, now only fear that the game will make trouble with it, hehe :) )


Well.. so much from me at the moment :)

[aphrodite1]

I want more docs and some drow tiles and/or objects. I want an 'undo' option :)

Otherwise, I'm good :) The terrain building is fantastic. Way easy to get carried away.

[InhumanOne]

Oh, I forgot to say that I like the medieval style, I always thought there wasnt much human looking stuff in nwn1.

I personly love simple things like a simple chainmail shirt, a chain coil, typical soldier helmets, commoner hats and simple outfits.

The outfits are still too conservative though, I just tried to make a barbarian only to find out it is impossible. there are some hides to wear but they cover everything. They seem more suitable for druids and rangers.

Basicly it comes down to one thing that I miss:

The ability to create whatever character I can come up with.

I could do that with nwn1, I am not complaining about races thats handled perfectly but clothing can tell a lot about a person. I know we can download haks and that the talented Lisa will certainly come up with many great things but its always better if you can have it without using haks.

while the boundaries of area creation are removed the character creation part has become limited.

[Taneli]

At first it feels like totally new and really hard to get into. But quite soon you can get inside and start making fast something what atleast looks kind of pretty like:

mountain still without waterfall (http://www.sci.fi/~jon1/sanctuary/graph/waterfall_toolset.JPG)

That take about 30min without not so much trying. More like "playing around and looking what you can do". And yes, I know that is not nice enough for PW but atleast it shows that with little practise you can fast to get into and get decent looking stuff done.

[BlackHawk01x]

Have to add something aswell.

Many things are quite more complicated it seems, partly what what I read in Bioware forums like making waterfalls sounds quite complicated or setting up bridges.

What is a downpart for me personal though is the "Area Transition"-upsetting, it is far more complicated than the NWN1-Toolset and until the game is out to test it I'm not really sure if I am doing it right... So just can hope I'm doing it right *smiles*

Most times I worked interior yet, will start soon on exterior and see if I can handle everything I want *grins*
Well just felt like adding the Area-Transition problem... that's a problem at the moment for me at least until I can test it ingame how it really works :)

Oh yes one more thing I just read about exterior:
What seems really cool is that you have a 2-tile-border which won't be walkable ingame but you can set up things so you can create yourself what people will see when seeing in the far :) (not like in NWN1 where the end of the map just was copied over and over again)

[Dazlar]

First impression was good... but then you come to making a half-orc and it's about 200m tall... unscaled. An unscaled human is about 1/100th of anything of about the same size... couldn't they have fixed that before, it's too annoying to work with that, hounestly.

http://ww1.pureupload.com/stfiles/77/Half-orc%20ranger.JPG

And this one I made does show her Half-orc tummy (but I scaled her down to about 1m, so it's a tiny tummy), so there isn't no non-revealing.

Might reply more later. *nods*

[InhumanOne]

yes thats the only outfit that shows some skin, it looks like a drow outfit.
but thats only for women.

the size problem can be corrected if you change dots and commas on your computer.

[Dxon15]

Have to add something aswell.

...

Oh yes one more thing I just read about exterior:
What seems really cool is that you have a 2-tile-border which won't be walkable ingame but you can set up things so you can create yourself what people will see when seeing in the far :) (not like in NWN1 where the end of the map just was copied over and over again)

hehe thats prob the only thing i didnt really like.. i see the benifits but did we really need all that extra space? It creates so much extra work for a map. A one tile on all sides would of been more than sufficient for me. The border regions on a tiny map are 24 times bigger than the area itself rolleyesa

Apart form that, a great and easy to use toolset. 10sur10

[Frisk]

First impression was good... but then you come to making a half-orc and it's about 200m tall... unscaled.

Uhm, yea. the reason is that they presumably did not have many (or any?) European beta-testers....the different uses of "," vs. "." in numbers.

This is one of the (few?) things that is pretty certain to be fixed in the toolset that will ship with the game.

[Dazlar]

I thought I mentioned that I agreed with Dxon15, seems I never posted that, well, I do.

I changed the number notation, in fact, I changed all notations to US, but I really hope they fix that cause notations are better for me in my own language, for everything else english is good.

[Fluxx]

Pretty impressive for 30 minutes work Taneli ........... :bravo: 10sur10 :respect:

[Dxon15]

just curious but have any of the mods had a chance to play with the toolset? have they played nwn at all ?


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