how do I make lakes and such?
I was hoping to make an area (or five) which had lakes using the forest and desert tile sets. Do I have to download a separate tileset in order to make that happen? (Currently using CEP version 2.0 and nothing else in this setup.) As well, is it possible to make areas with depressions in them from ground level, or do I have to set up the entire area using some sort of platform and then sink the areas I want down to regular ground level? Once more, will I need a separate tileset for this?

Ah, lakes. If you are planning on making the lakes traverseable, you will have to use some tricks that are laid out in the NWN's forums at Bioware. The little known functions of the toolset has some stuff on this.

If, on the other hand, you want to just lay out a basic lake, there is a water tile in the terrain painter. For desert, or forest, I believe. In fact, I think most of the basic tilesets have water tiles in them.

I will look those up. As well in the forest setting all I get is a stream, no nice thick rivers or lake materials. Something else I get is this hole/pit thing, which I can have streams drain into, but nothing fill up. It is very depressing. I am still looking through the terrain files for "Forest" to see if I missed anything. I may need to change file sets in order to get my lake. (Still only going with what NWN has to offer at the outset.)

You may have to use the Rural Tile set. Place your lake right along the edge of the map, and use a stream on the forest to simulate it.

Found something interesting using the CEP version 2.0 placeables: 1x1 and 4x4 tiles of water at low, medium, and high levels. Using those and the pit tiles within the forest, I have achieved a basic and non-accessable lake with an island in the middle. I didn't go all the way down and really work with the tiles to make it truly seamless, as I chose the easy route and had them overlap as little as possible. Not the perfect solution, but something which will do the job quite nicely. I was thinking of putting fish in there, but I decided against it. I'll let the module owners do the fine tuning on the tileset I used itself. I just wanted a lake. *grins* Though it has been a learning experience, I really wish they had a "paint" tool that would just fill in spaces with whatever kind of terrain you wanted as long as it was a non-accessable space. *shrugs* Such is life, I guess. Thanks for the suggestions, RTB. They were a great help and kept me from putting my foot through my only working computer.

Note: I was working with a simple mod, with no haks.

I'm only using CEP (not the beta 2.0 tho) and made a pond easily. It's pretty easy to make boggy areas, though, with the low water tiles.


My mod doesn't call for a lake - no skinny dipping scripted - so no need for anything bigger *shrugs*.

CEP 2 is now out, not the beta. It has a lot of interesting things, as I found out today while updating the server I script for. Tomorrow is the busy day, I have to delete about 100 redundant scripts.

Brand New Issue!
================

How the heck do I change the ResRef names of all the lands? I have to rename twenty-four lands in order for them to be exported and imported properly into the module I am sending them to. (Not to mention the snow blowing outside is irritating me...) But in all seriousness, I need to figure out how the heck I can get to the ResRefs and redo them all. I never even thought of giving them customized names, so they are all listed as "area" to "area023." I have not found anything yet that lets me physically change them, just duplicate the area and that's about it. This is far more frustrating than I ever gave this job credit for. *sighs* I was sent a link to the "Toolset For Dummies" guide, but I haven't seen anything in there that allows a person to actually change the Resref of a area. I know it is possible for creatures and items, so there must be a way to do the same thing for an area. Well, back to the grind for me...

This will help when I try to construct a store. I know that as a fact.

Just like with creatures and items, you have to change the resref when you build it. You may be able to get around that by creating a copy of the area, and changing the resref there. I'm not sure if that will work or not, but you can try it by creating a copy of the area, and then hit the edit button. On the Advanced tab, I think, the tag and resref are listed. On a new area, you can change them there. Possibly, on your edited copy, you can change them. I'm not sure.

Edit: Ok, I went and tried it, and it will ask you for the new name for your area, and whatever you put there will be the area resref for the copied area. So, if I were to do this, I'd name all the areas I copy something like this rb_foresty_area or rb_lake_area. The area will keep the same name as the original, but this will allow you to change the resref. Note, the rb is for robert the bard, and I use it in my modules, a lot, when I do custom scripts or items that I want to differentiate with stuff I have either imported, or generated with the script generator.

[ 03-05-2007, 11:10 AM: Message edited by: robertthebard ]