I realised the other day that I don't think I'd gone much into the Overland map I'm using for WPM. I used the 'tracing technique' described on here previously and in the shot above you can see the area map alongside the tracing template. There's some colouring and texturing to be touched up, but I'm fairly happy with it. You'll see in the swamp a slight ridge that is unfortunately due to the terrain megatiles and the need to lower the water level, but its not really noticable in game.
Sidequest encounters covering the southern part of the map are done - barring some dialogue I keep putting off. I'm currently working on the NE swamp sidequests and these are ~80% done, then there's just the NW swamp side quests, of which there are only a few - areas prepped for 60% of the quests, but no dynamic content as yet.
Some shots of the locations on the original map that have translated into the game are below (still playing with overland scripts so there is double the XP at the moment but that will be fixed). Bah, my texturing always looks so much better in the toolset than in game... Lighting settings aren't final, I need to get back to that.
The weekend was spent working on a quest around House Orogoth which as a sidequest has been jumping between the include/drop list more than the others, but I found two prefabs that were just right, and I figured I needed more BIG dragon encounter (now there are 2 at CR > 15 plus one CR 11 and one that's a dragon but then again not...). So Orogoth was slotted in. Then I moved on to some mines occupied by the Zhentarim - who really should have got more love in the existing FR games as bigger villains, although their presence to the west is less than in the Dalelands. I'm playing on the link to Darkhold nearby to justify the presence and give people the chance to kick some Zhen butt. Overland map sidequests are bigger than in SoZ - this Zhent one covers 1 exterior and 6 interior levels, and hopefully sees the challenge increase significantly the deeper the player ventures. This is all part of the goal to allow players (and multiplayers) to pick and choose sidequests if they only want to play for 1 hour - 3 hours on something they can drop in and out of, rather than the core central plot.... which I really should get back to at some point...
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4 comments:
Man, you really are churning it out!
I love the OM. Don't know if it was intentional but the river almost looks in perspective.
Have you thought of laying down some projection VFX on map enter with "The Great Swamp", "White Plume Mountain" etc. that could fade out after a few secs? I'm only half joking. ;)
Some excellent texturing there. I'm reminded of some of Phoenixus' work before he disappeared.
BTW, really enjoyed your little dungeon in the SoZ add-on pack. Very immersive and clever.
Is your overland map free camera? The shots seem to have different angles?
@ E.C. - thanks, hoping the SoZ dungeon I did give s afeel for what I'm trying to do with the other quests too.
@ Kamal - I think it's an optical illusion depending on the height of the terrain and slopes nearby. The mountain is quite a bit higher than the swamp. I'm using fixed camera to avoid risking slowdown with everything else going on in a fairly busy map.
Like the side by side overland map and the old map. Nice job repriclating it in the toolset. It may be lost on a few players but it would be neat to have the "Great Swamp" written out in the water ways.
When it finals gets to the release point you will get to try to fight a zhent outpost in Risen Hero. You can tuck tail and run throught the fort or you can explore it a bit and kill a few of the bastards.
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