Thursday 31 January 2013

Tower of Bone

Sin had mentioned he had seen a way to do larger scale interiors that actually used interiors rather than the usual way of making an exterior look like an interior.  It seems if you use one of the walkmesh helpers in the toolset and lift it above the ceiling of a normal interior you can then build above it. 

Its quite a neat idea as it allows you to get some height into these areas and do something a little different.  I tried it out tonight with a new underdark area called the Tower of Bone, the results are below:




Sunday 20 January 2013

One for Cormyr.

Sschindylryn

 
 
Well after my plug for the PW Forgotten Realms Cormyr I had a few more chats with Sin the Admin for the server and decided to throw my lot in with him.  I had been planning on taking my copy of the old server I helped build and put it onto the vault as I think it deserved better than just having all that work die off.  The excellent work by E.V with scripts and GUI's especially should be showcased a lot more.
 
Anyway with myself joining FRC I offered Sin the module to rip apart and use what he wants, mostly interiors as he has nearly all of his exteriors built for the initial launch.  Keeping each part of Cormyr with the same feel is something we need to try to do and my areas do have a different feel to his.  Hopefully Ill get some exteriors up at a later date after we go live, I really want to get back to doing some mountian areas!
 
On Gray Isles I did have a large underdark though outside of the Grimmhold I was largely unhappy with the wilderness areas so they are getting a revamp to make them a lot more interesting!  As the Underdark under Cormyr is not well known in terms of lore it does leave us a good amount of freedom in what we do.  What we do know is we have the following points of interest:
 
Sschindylryn - Drow Trade City
Blessed Seahaven - Kuo-Tuo Temple
Lake of Shadows - A lake (clue is in the name!)
 
I have started work on the Drow City of Sshindylryn (try saying it fast 3 times).  Chatting with Sin gave me a few ideas as coming up with something with a "drow" feel can be hard at times.  I am probably 90% through mapping the exterior at the moment so Ill give you a few sneak peeks!
 






 Still a lot of work to go as all the interiors have to be done but it should be a place our evil little drow want to hang out.
 



Sunday 6 January 2013

Cormyr

The Road to Cormyr

 

I found out about this place through the Bioware NWN2 boards, it has the making of being a very nice PW even if it seems hardly anyone knows about it!  Sin who is the the host, owner, scripter and builder all rolled into one has done a good job getting the place to the stage it is and if he is to be believed soon into a closed beta.


As you can see from the screenshots its going to be a good looking place to look around, which is going to be better than most bland looking PWs and that's always a plus.  What will of course make or break a place is how he sets it up, in my own opinion too many PWs are pretty much the same as each other.  Outside of a few places nothing is new or fresh, everyone seems to have the same systems and game idea.  In fact too many of them are just into a numbers game instead of trying to build something special and push the game engine.


 
With not having a PW of my own to work on at the moment I have helped Sin out with a few interiors for him to populate with nasties looking to eat you!
 
Hopefully I can feature more of his world as it gets nearer completion.
 
Vist  Cormyr and check it out.