Icewind Dale: ToEE - Total Conversion

Bah! Convert to mpeg then to BINK, that's the least of your worries!

Re the map areas, I think you're over thinking it. If you want the 54 world map areas of the original, I say, "bah humbug!" We currently have, what, 14? 17 with Spellslinger's efforts? Really, we need

- Candlekeep
- Nashkel
- Beregost
- High Hedge
- Friendly Arm Inn
- Entry to Cloakwood
- Gnolls
- Nashkel Mines
- Gullykin
- BG, of course
- Bandit Camp
- Peldvale, Ulcaster and Larswood (I don't remember any of them)
- Ulgoth's Beard
- The Sword Coast
and sod Durlag's Tower, that was rubbish.

That's about 16. Now, re the various maps in between, they (imho) should be reachable by 'doors' (I have a very nice icon by Sherrif05 that would suit this) from either end, and then open the world map when you get through. So, to go from say Beregost to Nashkel, you have to traverse said maps, but they are not 'worldmap' maps, just ordinary ones. When you get through the other side, you mark Nashkel on your World Map, and you can then in future use the World Map to travel it, with attendant chances of random encounters. If you really want to go back to those in-between maps for some reason, you go to the relevant 'door' at either end.

Otherwise (if you don't like that idea) we don't even need a .dll hack - you just have to change random_encounter.py to drop you on the relevant map. But that was one of the weakest elements of BG in my opinion. I used to save after doing the mines and hit 'back to the road', and if I REed somewhere in Cloakwood I reloaded. No one wants REs like that imho.

 

Sounds good, I did actually think about using the random encounter maps after I last posted.

I have now located the map files in BG, and it seems the populace are far more welcoming than the game would suggest, all doors on all maps are open by default, with replacement tiles depicting closed doors to cover the open door sections of maps when necessary.

So all maps with doors will need a little graphical manipulation, to remove the doors completely so we can replace them with opening doors from ToEE.

 

That's cool about BG's angle - I guess mainly it was the original KotB maps I was thinking of. Does anyone know if all IE games use 45 degrees throughout?

(And yeah, I expect the actual difference would be unnoticeable.)

 

From what I was reading on Beamdog's forum Baldur's gate is also on a 45° angle. So it's fairly safe to say the entire series are the same in this respect.

 

Agreed about that difference being negligible.

Another thing WB can do that WorldEd can't - scale those door models to the millimetre. Troika seem to have built a new door at the exact size for each use and then just inserted them with WorldEd.

Week after next, give or take two years.

 

Damn dude, I didn't even play it for more than 2 days yet, haven't even cleared the mines yet... The level 2 npc druid is my highest level character...

I'll see if I can piece together the Candlekeep map and remove the doors from the doorways, import them into ToEE and take a few screenshots to upload here. Gotta make certain the maps are the right scale first.

 

Nooooo, there's BG modding sites that have the maps. Maybe not at the resolution you would use for a mod but good enough for testing purposes.

I had a quick look around and came across this comment on the beamdog forums (mid-conversation):

They then have to be resized, presumably, to some specific ratio to make them appropriate size for ToEE models.

To anyone following this, it can be done with DLTCEP (whatever that is, some BG modding tool I guess) and Photoshop. So if you can use Photoshop in even the most basic way, you can help out and do this. As I said, if someone gets the maps and makes them an appropriate size for ToEE, I'll sector them (and add doors )

 

yup, downloaded that tool earlier, couldn't get it to open a map right from the game, maybe I need to extract the .bmp map files first... I'll figure it out. If I can remove the doors, and maybe even trees that we can replace with ToEE's 3d trees with that tool, even better, but failing that there's the good old cut and paste in MS Paint

 

875 maps in total... *sigh*

 

Firstly, you seriously gotta outsource that. I bet there's a lot of folks reading this who can handle MS Paint and have a copy of the game. We'll get a production line going - someone extracts and resizes the maps and sends them to me, I sector them and send them to you, you put monsters on them.

Secondly, how many of those internal maps were 'generic house #3'. I reckon we can skip most of that in the interests of sanity. People want to play the important bits, not the generic bits (there'd still be generic bits, but they'll be very generic, not each one a little different). If all the pointless upstairs lofts in Hommlet that had no reason to exist (before Gaear introduced a day/night schedule) had've all been the same map, would it really have detracted from the game?

 

Aye, as far as the resizing goes, I hope it will only require a minor tweak, say +5% to +10%, but I'll first add a map at normal size and check it out, take a screenshot, and adjust as necessary until it looks right, but not adversely affected by the alteration.

BG is itself conveniently organised into "Acts" so we can start with "Act 1" maps, and go from there.