Hello there!
I am still working on my first module and I have a sort of cosmetic issue. I like the pieces of wood and splinters that come flying when you destroy a standard chest or a door. In my module I want to use these placeables (broken doors from CEP (original models by Brother Roth - thanks to him!)), but when I destroy them, they just…vanish to nothingness, no splinters or anything. I would like to ask kindly if there is anything I can do to make them explode as nicely as the default wooden door?
I tried using their on death script and apply the dust explosion vfx at least, but it only works when I set it to affect the player…which sorta works when the player is bashing the chest in melee but looks weird when someone destroys the placeable using anything ranged…
Anyways, thanks to everybody who read all that and I wish you merry christmas!
Nate
This is a model problem, not scripting or usage issue. The model is missing the animation and you would have to add it to the model. So you can’t do anything. (I mean there is always a way but it depends on the user willingness to learn new things and how skillful is he)
This is one of the reasons I criticized CEP2 in past and why I don’t use it. I would say that 80% of the content in it is unfinished in one way or another, ugly or at least of a very rare usage which just doesn’t justify the presence in an all-rounder package.
Do you happen to know which constant gives the “placeable destroyed” visual effect? The one with the angular bits and pieces flying off? Because I’ve been looking for that one and couldn’t find it. Had to make do with combat-stone-chunk-small which just doesn’t cut the mustard.
All that @Shadooow said and in addition to animations missing, I’d wager that the emitters that actually cause the explosion effect are missing as well.
If you’re interested in getting into 3-D modeling, its a pretty simple thing to export a Bioware placeable that explodes on death and import the meshes from the CEP placeable into that model, removing the Bioware visibles model and replacing them with the CEP meshes. Just make sure to parent the CEP meshes to the Damage node in the Bioware placeable.
The “flying chunks” VFX is invoked by the engine through die animation inside the placeable’s model (can be seen via nwnexplorer in inbox plc_*.mdl files). BW sadly didn’t make a standalone VFX for it to apply as an effect.
But it should be possible to (just?) copy & paste die anim from any BW model to the one that misses it. This is probably the best course of action to fix a single placeable. Alternatively, one could make a universal VFX based on this animation and apply it on placeable’s death.
Yes, indeed, I hit almost exactly this problem recently. Solved by painting an additional door object (which has the death animation) in the doorway, hiding it with the cutscene ghost effect, then revealing and destroying it when the door placeable dies.
In a perfect world, all custom placeables would have all the right nodes, animations and walkmesh, but we are where we are. Better to have stuff that looks right, working around the defects, than perfect models that look wrong.
can’t say about newly added Ossian’s stuff as I am stuck with outdated patch, however at least the new treasure models have an open animation, unlike treasure models from NWN2 in CEP2 that can only act as a decoration
I got intrigued, and because it is seems to be a common issue, and because I managed to fix the snow before, I tried to actually do this:
Looks like this was easier than I thought, all done again with a text editor
So, I present to you:
NWSH_ChunkyWood: placeable death animation as a generic VFX
Example - applied at PC’s location (low quality gif - looks better in game):
It seems to be a fairly good workaround for the missing die animation. It avoids the need for modification of many models, and - being an instant effect - does not require any additional in-game objects.
Advanced users - how to replicate / modify this.
I copied die animation emitters from placeable plc_a01 to VFX vff_gassmoke and overrode the effect’s impact animation (this is 90% of work).
I made a new row in visualeffects.2da for this VFX (no need for sound as the placeable plays it automatically on death - see placeableobjsnds.2da).
If you really need the sound in VFX, put its ResRef in SoundImpact column in visualeffects.2da.
Because the emitters use update Explosion, it is mandatory to include event <delay> detonate in the newanim section; I used delay from the source - 0.667s.
PROTIP: to hide the wood chunks (to keep only the dust cloud), comment their ChunkyWood emitters at the bottom of the model (in newanim). actually you have to delete both ChunkyWood emitters from the model geom definition as well.
There is also something extra in this package - click to learn more.
I’ve noticed the dust cloud makes a good smoke cloud VFX, way better than vanilla VFX_DUR_SMOKE. So I extracted it to standalone model and made a DURATION_TYPE_TEMPORARY VFX from it.
Here’s how it looks in-game (again, crappy gif):
You’ll find instructions in the script files inside the archive. It is also rather easy to tweak if you need to fill a whole area with smoke or something.
See an update to this post 
