There are three types of terrain that can be found on the terrain palette: Features, Groups, and general Terrain.
Features and Groups are usually multi-tile formations that can be painted with a single mouse click, rather than having to hook up many individual tiles to achieve the same effect. Groups tend to be larger than Features; some Groups are entire areas in their own right. Look at the temples available in the City Interior tileset, for example.
The third group, Terrain, generally consists of single tile artwork such as corridors, walls, and small rooms.
With a little practice, you will soon find how easy it is to lay down the graphics for an area. An entire town can be painted in mere minutes, especially if you plan ahead.
Placing Terrain
To start with, we'll be building our abandoned cabin. This means that we will need to get rid of the default room that the Toolset made for us automatically when we created the area.
Unfortunately, this is not quite as intuitive as it would sound. After placing a feature or a group, they can usually be easily deleted by highlighting and pressing the <Delete> button. No such luck with the default room. To delete the default room, expand the 'Terrain' option on the Terrain Palette, and click on the 'Wall' option. Then, move your mouse across the area display, into the very middle of the room, and click to drop. The default room will disappear and leave us with a nice, empty black area to play with. Hit <Esc> to cancel the pointer icon that indicates we are still in terrain dropping mode.
While painting terrain, or any other items for that matter, keep in mind that if you make a mistake, you can use the Undo menu item to reverse it.The Undo item is located on the Edit menu at the top of the screen. <Ctrl-Z> is the shortcut key for those who are more inclined to use the keyboard instead of the mouse.
Now that we've got an empty area to work with, go ahead and expand the 'Terrain' item on the terrain palette. Then, click on 'Inn'. Your pointer will change to a paintbrush, and as you move it over the blank area a green box will move with it, indicating where the terrain item would be dropped if you clicked at that particular moment. Move your pointer directly into the middle of the area, and click. You should see something similar to the following figure (but probably not identical):
A room will be created based on the 'Inn' model that you selected. The configuration of the room will be randomly designed. If you continue to click in the spot where you dropped the room, the configuration will change to something different. The walls will change shapes, the default furniture will change, etc.
Notice in the middle of the room is a blue circle with a red arrow in it. This indicates the starting point of the module. This can be adjusted using the 'Paint Start Location' tool, which is located above and to the right of the palette toolbar. It looks like this:
Using this tool, you can drop a new start location wherever you want. Every module must have at least one starting location, and only one. You can also change the direction the player will face when he enters by selecting the start area and using the camera control 'Rotate Object' arrows to rotate it. The direction of the red arrow is the direction the player will be facing.
Go ahead and leave the start location where it is, we want new players to start in the abandoned cabin we are building.
Now, try moving your mouse over one square to the right, and one square down, and click again. You'll see that a second inn room is created, joined with the first. The Toolset takes care of making sure the walls connect all by itself:
Go ahead and Undo the second room, we won't be needing it.
Select the 'Wall' tool from the 'Terrain' portion of the terrain palette. Hold it over the area, and see how the green square is offset from the tiles that you have already painted. This is for a reason. To see how the 'Wall' tool works, move the green square to the upper right square of our inn room, like so:
Click there, and see what happens. Keep clicking, do it a few times. Just like when we continually clicked the middle of the inn room while we had the 'Inn' palette item selected, the configuration of the wall in that corner of the room will continue to randomly change. To do two walls at once, straddle two squares:
Now when you click, both walls will randomly change configuration. Neat, isn't it? Go ahead and play around with different terrain palette items, and see how you can get them to connect to each other. Note that Features and Groups can only be dropped one at a time, and then your paintbrush cursor will turn back into a select cursor, whereas Terrain items can be dropped many times without the paintbrush cursor disappearing.
Undo back to your basic one-room inn every so often so you don't get yourself into too much trouble. If you get to a point where you can't get things to delete, just exit the Toolset without saving, and load your module back up again.
Corridors and Doorways
We're not going to use a corridor or doorway palette item in this particular area, but you should understand how to use them before we get to the point where we need them.
Go ahead and select the 'Corridor' item from the 'Terrain' list. Position your select box like so:
I've adjusted the camera to view things at an angle, which gives a better idea of how the room will look to a player.
Notice how the select box reflects a rectangular shape, and stays perpendicular to the walls as you move it around our room. If you move the selector inside the room, the box turns red, indicating we can't drop it there. Go ahead and drop the corridor into the spot indicated by the above figure, it should look something like this afterwards:
We have created a corridor in our room, with a wide doorway that links seamlessly into the original room.
To create a doorway, select the 'Doorway' tool from the 'Terrain' list. Again, notice how the selector box stays perpendicular to walls as you move it around over the area. Drop it in the place indicated below:
After dropping the doorway, you'll have something that looks like this:
A more confined doorway was created on the border between our original room and the new corridor.
Play around with corridors and doorways for a bit to get a feel for them. Make sure to undo everything when you are done, and then save. We are going to talk a bit about tile properties and such next, and we don't want to lose any work while we are doing so.
Tile Properties
When you right click on a particular tile in the area display, a one-item menu will pop up, with 'Properties' on it. Left click on 'Properties', and the tile properties dialog will appear:
There are four lighting options, and three animation loop checkboxes. The animation loop checkboxes will only be enabled for certain terrain tiles, so we won't worry about those for now. There should also be four lighting properties: Main Light 1, Main Light 2, Source Light 1, and Source Light 2.
The two Main Light options provide a way to adjust the color of light being cast on the tile. In order to see lighting effects, you will need to turn area lighting on, which is done via the 'Use Area Lighting' button on the main toolbar (it is also located on the 'Environment' menu option).
Go ahead and change the Main Light colors, and see the effects. In some cases, it is very subtle so you may have to look closely to see a change.
The other two lighting options, Source Light 1 and 2, control the color of lighting sources in the tile. Neither, one, or both may be enabled depending on how many light sources are in the tile. Chances are, at least one of the tiles in our abandoned cabin has a lantern or two on it, so look at the properties of that tile in order to see the Source Light options enabled.
Notice that changing the source light colors causes the flames/light to appear in the selected color upon exiting from the dialog. So, now you can have all the nifty glowing green lanterns you want!
Area Properties
The properties of an area are varied and complex. As a beginning builder, it is not a good idea to mess with anything other than the most basic properties. Keep that in mind as we progress through the next discussion. It covers some advanced properties that you shouldn't let confuse you at this point. The REALLY complicated stuff has been linked to so you won't have to sort through it to find the basics on this page.
The area properties dialog is accessed by right clicking on the area over in the Module Contents list box, in the case of this tutorial the item named 'Abandoned Cabin.' Then, left click on 'Properties', and the dialog will appear:
There are several tabs categorizing the various options that can be set for an area, and standard buttons at the bottom for applying/canceling changes.
The first tab is called 'Basic'. It contains mostly summary information about the name, configuration, and size of the selected area. The only thing you can actually change here is the name. If you want to change the area height or width, there is a menu option available from the main Toolset menu, by going to the 'Edit' menu, then selecting 'Resize Area.' The selected tileset for an area cannot be changed after the area is created. If you are not satisfied with the tileset you selected, delete the area and recreate it with a new tileset.
The next tab over is the 'Visual' tab:
As you can see, there is a host of preconfigured Environment Schemes to choose from. As the note in the dialog states, if you select a new environment, all custom options you have set in the current environment setting or tile settings will be lost.
The items in the list above are only general descriptions. In order to see exactly what settings each scheme uses, select the scheme you wish to examine, and press the 'Customize Environment' button. Go ahead and select the 'Exterior Clear' scheme, so that all customization options are available to view:
Okay, alert readers will notice I cheated a bit. The last four options, for weather, are most likely disabled on the dialog you are looking at. I loaded up the 'Exterior Clear' scheme in an outdoor area that I created, and the 'Weather' options are ONLY available on exterior tilesets. It is possible to turn an interior area into an exterior area via one of the other tabs on this dialog, which will then enable weather effects.
There are so many different effects that can be achieved through various combinations of the options, that I won't go into the detail of each one here. They are pretty self explanatory, but the exact look and feel of changes to each option can really only be appreciated by compiling and playing the module to see how things look. A more advanced tutorial specifically geared to using these options will be forthcoming.
The next tab over is the 'Audio' tab:
As you might expect, this tab controls the various audio properties of the selected area. There are options for both ambient sound and music. Again, most are self explanatory enough for casual use. An advanced sound tutorial will be available in the near future for more detailed information on creating and using custom music and sounds.
Next, we have the 'Events' tab:
Here, scripts can be specified to handle the four area events that are available. An 'event' is just what it sounds like; when the system detects that the player has entered or exited the area, for example, it will run any scripts that are defined for that event. Scripting is an advanced tutorial that will be covered later on, no need to overwhelm you with it at this point.
The next-to-last tab is called 'Advanced':
On this tab are contained all remaining properties that don't really fit into one of the other categories.
Here's a rundown of the advanced options:
Check Modifier - Listen: Used to apply a modifier when checking Listening success. A positive number acts as a bonus, a negative number acts as a penalty.
Check Modifier - Spot: Used to apply a modifier when checking Spot success. A positive number acts as a bonus, a negative number acts as a penalty.
Loading Screen: Brings up the 'Loading Screen' dialog. If you've played the single-player game included with NWN, you'll no doubt remember that a random picture was displayed on the screen as each area got loaded. This is where you control which picture is displayed. By default, 'Use Random Loading Screen' will be checked, which will cause a random image from a set of images appropriate to the tileset you are using to be displayed.
If that is not suitable, you can uncheck the 'Use Random Loading Screen' box, and you can then select a specific image to be shown by highlighting it in the selection box. By default, the selection box will show only images from the tileset selected in the pulldown, but you can uncheck the tileset filter and see all available images.
For a really bizarre experience, uncheck the tileset filter, and then turn 'Use Random Loading Screen' back on, which will let the program choose randomly from all available images. Nothing like seeing one of the dungeon transition screens display as your forest loads, but each to his own.
No Rest: When checked, players will not be allowed to rest in this area. Useful if you want to force a party to face an encounter in whatever condition they came into the area in.
Player vs. Player: Controls the PVP assignment of this area, 'No PVP', 'Party Protected', 'Full PVP', or 'Default' which will use whatever the settings of the server are set to.
ResRef: As far as I can tell, this stands for 'Resource Reference', and is not directly modifiable via this dialog.
Tag: This is the tag name that scripts will use to refer to the area. Normally it is the same as the area name, but you can change it here if desired. This is useful when you have a long area name, and would prefer to not refer to the long name in scripts. You can then specify something shorter, and easier to type.
Terrain Type: Here you can control whether the area is inside or outside, natural or artificial, underground or above ground. These properties help tegorize the area for purposes of weather and lighting defaults, and can be accessed via scripts to allow for behavior customization based on those properties.
The final tab is called 'Comments'. No creen shot is necessary, it's just a large blank space for you as a builder to put comments into. It's a good place to explain what properties were modified from the defaults, so that you can figure out what you did later on.
Elevating Outdoors Terrain
In order to get a feel for how some of the other tilesets look, and to work on some other interesting terrain capabilities, we will now create a second test area in our module.
Go ahead and create a new area, using the Rural tileset. Use at least a medium size. It doesn't matter what you call it, we will be deleting it once we are done.
When you open the area in the display, you should have something that looks similar to this:
One of the neat features of the outdoor tilesets is the ability to raise and lower terrain to create hills, valleys, bluffs, and cliffs. To do this, you will need to use the Terrain tool called 'Raise/Lower'.
Go ahead and select the 'Raise/Lower' tool, and then left click on a spot near the middle of your area. This should result in the selected terrain being raised, like this:
Clicking again should raise the terrain even further:
Notice that in addition to the original terrain square being elevated a second time, a square area around the original square has been elevated one level as well. This is normal, multiple levels of elevation from one square to another are not allowed unless you are using the cliff terrain object in the Forest tileset.
You can take an area that has been raised, and lower it by right clicking with the 'Raise/Lower' tool, instead of left clicking. To create a pit in our new mountain, select the 'Raise/Lower' tool and right click twice in the middle square of the formation:
Quite often, you will want to provide players with the ability to climb onto these elevated areas. You can do this with the 'Ramp' tool under the 'Features' area of the terrain palette. Go ahead and select 'Ramp', then hold it over an area you would like to both elevate and provide access to. In order to control the direction the ramp faces, right click as you hold the tile over the area. You will see the ghost image of the tile rotate. Once it is facing the direction you want, left click to drop it and your ramp will be created:
Building Roads
Building roads is easy. Just use the 'Roads' tool under the 'Terrain' menu, and click in success on the tiles that you wish to build a road on:
As you can see, if you click on adjacent tiles the Toolset will automatically take care of joining your road and making it curve. You can continue on in this manner and build a road across the entire area, complete with crossroads and such.
Water Features
Lakes and streams should be easy to figure out with the knowledge you have gained so far. Lakes are like any other tile, just select the 'Lake' tool from the menu and left click on the spot you want to place it. Try making the pit in the middle of our plateau into an abandoned quarry by filling it with water:
Streams are very similar to roads. Just select the 'Stream' tool, and lay out the path of the stream:
In order to build a bridge over a stream, we need to use the 'Footbridge' tool. Select it, and hold it over the road in the area shown (note: you will probably need to right click while holding the tile over the chosen area, which will rotate the bridge and allow it to be placed):
When you left click to drop the footbridge, you will see that the Toolset automatically extends your stream to go under the bridge:
You could also have erased the road on that square, manually drawn the stream two more squares long, and then dropped the footbridge. However, you should take advantage of the shortcuts the Toolset offers whenever possible to save time building.
Summary
As you can see, the Toolset terrain features are very powerful indeed, although throwing down the basic structures of a map is very easy. You should practice, practice, practice as much as possible in order to get a feel for the things that can be accomplished. Try creating a new area in your module for each available tileset and then play around with the various groups, features, and terrain items. This will quickly give you an idea of what can be accomplished, and spark some inspiration for your module.
A full reference of all available tilesets, and pictures of the terrain, features, and groups contained in each, is available in the Tileset Reference.
Those of you who are feeling comfortable with terrain mapping and want to proceed to the next part of the tutorial quickly, feel free to download the Stage 1 version of the module when available, which will let you get on with the tutorial as if you had created the areas yourself.
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