NWN Dark Sun: Website and Discord Channel
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Yes we are still working on Dark Sun for NWN and are looking for more people who are willing to help.
Dizzitt Gardan and I played PnP AD&D 2nd Edition Dark Sun for years in the 90’s and to say that we both really enjoyed playing the campaign setting would be an understatement.
This is just one of the main reasons why two years ago Dizzitt Gardan and I (Tonden Ockay) teamed up to create Dark Sun for NWN. However we didn’t know how to create custom content for NWN1 back then, so we had a lot to learn in order to do this project right. Now two years later, with everything the two of use has learned, we both feel more then confident that we not only can make this project happen, but also do it justice giving it the attention to detail it deserves.
The Project is all about bringing Dark Sun to NWN
If this is something that you would like to see happen please contact us to see how you could help.
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Here is a Screenshot of the Sandard Desert Tileset Revamp I’m working on for Dark Sun. I was going to make a total custom desert tileset, but I decided to do a revamp of the standard desert tileset. The reason I decided to go with the revamp is so more people/projects could use it.
So yes the screenshot posted above is the Standard Desert Tileset with a new sand texture, raised ground, and sloped hills added.
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Dizzitt Gardan has been hard at work on the playable races for NWN Dark Sun. Here is a character creation screenshot shot showing all the Dark Sun playable races we have currently working.
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We are still looking for more people to join our team. If this is a project that you would like to help work on, just contact us here on the vault.
Near the bottom of the Half-Giant description, you misspelled the word their.
Thanks for pointing that out Empyre65 things like that happen when your trying to do as much as you can in your free time. Dizzitt and I have spent a lot of late nights working on this project over the past 2 working on 3 years. However a lot of that time was spent just learning how to work with all the different tools needed to make the changes and to create the content needed to bring this world to NWN1.
Now looking back its crazy how far we have came, I mean we didn’t even know what a 2da was 3 years ago, so its really hard to believe everything we now know and can do with this game. But to get here we have really put in the time, shoot there has been weeks where each of us have spent well over 40+ hours working on this project. That is a lot of time for a project that we are only working on for free after working at our jobs every day.
Any way thanks for pointing that typo out.
Hi all
I have been asked a few times about new screenshot and we will be getting back to posting updated screenshots again soon.
We also just wanted to say that we are still hard at work on the project. Dizzitt and I are putting large amounts of time into this project each and every week. There is hardly a day that goes by that we are not working on something for this project.
We are currently working of the tileset needed for The City State of Tyr.
We have made custom desert tileset just for Dark Sun with all of the following so far.
- Water
- Hills
- Cliffs
- City Walls, Gates, Battlements
- Adobe City Buildings (We will be creating a lot more of these)
- The Ziggurat
- The Arena
- The Golden Tower
Our goal is to build the City of Tyr first to give us a good base/starting point. Since the buildings are adobe we want the tops of them to be walk able to give another level to the city. Also for those that don’t know Tyr it is built upon an ancient city, so there is a lot to explore under the city as well. We really feel we can do a lot with just the city of Tyr which is why we are starting with it first.
However we do plan on creating all the different terrains that Dark Sun has. We also want to build the other City States as well. However all of this is going to take time and a lot of work.
So if anyone wanted to help with the project Dizzitt and I would be willing to help you learn whatever you would like to help wit0h.
For example Dizzitt and I didn’t know anything about scripting or making custom content at all for anything just a few years ago. Shoot we didn’t even know what a 2da or even a tga was. But we have learnd so much that we now feel that are able to do just about everything needed.
That said If a true scripter doesn’t join us then that is one of the things we still have a lot more to learn yet.
Another area we haven’t done a lot with is creating custom creatures, so that would be another area we still need to work on more as well.
However we are very stong at working with 2da’s, Haks, and model making, which is why we feel that we can help others to learn as well.
Now we still have a lot of tileset work to do. Along with a lot more custom placeables and items for Dark Sun. Along with a lot of Area building, Quests and really good stories to create. We want NWN Dark Sun to look like the Dark Sun that we all see in the artwork and feel like the world that it was meant to be. I have even been looking into custom music to help give our project a different feel then the Standard NWN. We really are putting in the work and would love to have help from others.
So if you would like to help, even if you don’t know how to do anything we could help you learn.
Just contact us
Hi all
I thought that I would share a screenshot of one of the many things we have been working on for the Dark Sun project and explain on how I came up with it.
When we first started this project I didn’t know how to make a custom model let alone a custom time or tilesets. So we started off with a tilset that someone else had created. However as I learned more about making models and tileset I decided that it might be nice to create our own.
So we talked it over and decided to just do addons for the standard Desert tileset. However the tiles that we have been creating are so different from anything in the standard Desert tileset that if we left it as an override, we would have to rework all the older tiles to try and match them up with what we are creating, which would be even more work for us.
This led us to splitting off from the Desert Tileset override and creating a totally custom tileset for our project. That said I’m still glade we went through everything that we did because we learned a lot.
So for our custom tilset we decided to go with flat tiles instead of uneven tiles
- Uneven tiles are tiles that are raised a little higher on the corners, while not raising the middle edges of the tile. This helps to create an uneven ground look to a tileset.
The reason for not going with the uneven ground was because it makes a tileset look really bumpy and since we are creating a desert with blowing sand we felt that the ground would be more level. Which is why we went with flat tiles but we still added in tiles that are raised and/or lowered in the middle of the tiles to give the ground a little uneven look about them in places which can be seen in picture #2.
After deciding on making a custom tileset and going with flat ground I created raised ground terrain along with slopes/hills. As you can see from picture #1 I went with an uneven edge along the top of the hills. The top wasn’t that bad to get it to look the way I wanted, but rather the bottom was a little more of a problem getting it to blend well from the lower ground to where the ground starts to slant up. All in all as you can see in picture number #3 I think it didn’t turn out too bad.
Well I thought instead of just posting a screenshot that I would take the time to give some background on how and why we did what we did.
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I thought that I would share that we now have
Website: NWN Dark Sun
Facebook: NWN Dark Sun
Discord Channel: NWN Dark Sun
Trello Board
We started recruiting this past week and now our team is growing, we currently have:
1 – Tileset creator ( we could use more )
2 – Scripters ( we may be able to use another one )
1 – Creature/NPC creator ( we could use a few more )
1 – Quest/Story creator ( We could use a few more )
0 – Area Builders (We could use some help here)
1 – Floater – (Our Bard) someone who can do a little bit of everything yet not a master in anyone area. They help out in any of the areas that they are needed.
The nice things is that most of us are BIG Dark Sun Fans which should help out a lot going forward.
If you think you would like to help with this project just contact me.
My Username on Discord is Tonden#9076
Any and all help are welcomed.
When I first started out with trying to learn how to create custom content for NWN1, I began with texturing. I would just pick different things in tileset I liked the looks of and retexture something I felt may look a little better to me if I was to change it.
So when Dizzitt first started talking about Dark Sun for NWN he showed me a sky that someone had made for NWN1 to be used for Dark Sun. After looking at it for a while I started to wonder what kind of sky I could make using paint.net (which is the first paint program I started working with beyond paint that comes with windows).
I looked around online and found some sunsets of here on earth and played around with them a while until they started to look like how I felt a Dark Sun sky should look, from all the Dark Sun paintings I had seen over the years. I then took the twin moons from one painting and the sun I used from another painting. However the sun wasn’t complete so I had to do a lot of work to it in order to get the full thing.
Using the different layers in paint.net I was able to have two copies of the sky with the sun and moon in between them, which allowed for me to delete parts of the top layer/first sky to allow for the moon and sun to show through and allowed for the other sky behind them to help blended everything together.
Anyway this was the first thing I really did for the Dark Sun Project over 2 years ago. I have learned so much since then and at some point I will try to see if I can create a better looking sky for the project. However for now this sky is the one we are currently using.
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Those moons and sun look good, but they are way too big. If you hold up your thumb nail as far away as you can, that is about the width of our sun or moon in the sky, about half a degree of the full circle of the sky.
The sky isn’t for earth its for Athas the planet our project NWN Dark Sun takes place on
Here is a painting showing the sky on Athas as you can see the planet is a lot closer to its moons and sun then we are.
Tonden that picture is done with a lot of artistic license. It has been painted to mimic what you would see if it had been photographed using a telephoto lens. Have a look at these pictures of the moon against a city backdrop, from google images. They show the effect in action. Were the bodies in that picture as close to Athas as the effect suggests, the land would experience severe tidal effects including constant Athas quakes.
TR
I understand what you are saying when talking about real life, I took I college astronomy, but I also understand that this is a fantasy world we are talking about and not real life.
Elves
Dwaves
Half-giants
Muls
Tri-Kreens
Wizards
Dragons
Avangions
Its all fake none of it is real. So our project isn’t recreating earth, we are recreating a fantasy world the way the writers set it up.
I didn’t create the world or make the art work. If you want to know and understand more about Dark Sun go read about it. Then you will find out magic has changed the sun.There are loads of books for 2e and a few for 4e, plus there is some novels as well, or I will even post some more art work for you to look at below. Most of Dark Suns Artwork was created by Gerald Brom who worked with Troy Denning who wrote the novels and Timothy Brown who created the campaign setting.
These guys work for TSR and created the work I didn’t. That said even though is not real and has elves, magic, and dragons in it, I still like it.
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Dark Sun is a low mass star like a red dwarf, they are much smaller and cooler than our sun is. So Athas can be much closer to its star than we are without the effect of tidal earthquakes and yes our sun and moon does look bigger when its down at the horizon and it would look the same on athas just bigger because the planet is much closer to its star.
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Those pictures look like you are on a moon orbiting twin planets, and all three bodies are going to be tidally locked to the star and have molten rock surfaces, even if the star is a red dwarf.
Sands of Fate has you traveling into the far distant future when their sun is dying by gradually breaking apart, with the pieces occasionally falling to the ground as luke-warm rocks, resulting in the planet getting colder and colder. If they can have that, you can have this.
Sourcebooks show it like that, so that’s how it is. A wizard did it, who cares, whatever. It’s not like DnD isn’t filled with “impossible” locations that exist because of rule of cool.
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Raised Ground Cliffs
It took far more time then I ever thought that is would creating these raised ground cliffs. I learned so much from then, when it comes to what can and can’t be done. That is part of the nice thing when it comes to creating something from scratch.
Now what was it that I wanted from these cliffs one might ask?
1 - No flat clear cut sharp straight line along the bottom of the cliffs where they meet the ground. I didn’t want it to look as if the cliff had flat bottoms to them being placed on a flat even ground. Instead I wanted it to look more blended and natural as if sand has blown up against the bottom of them.
2 - No straight clear cut lines where the sand ends and the rock begins on top of the cliffs. I wanted it to look more natural. So I created a custom texture that slowly blends the two together.
3 a - No sand at the top of the cliffs along the edge ( so it looks as if the sand get blown of the top next to edges)
3 b - Smoother tiles so that they look as if blowing sand has sanded off their sharp edges over time.
When creating these cliffs they really made me have to think outside the box to get what I wanted and work with in the limits of the game engine. So I have to try a few different ideas before I came up with the current look I now have.
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