Okay .. After a day of searching through the threads (Who needs a job when your wife is a Doctor) I have decided to give building a new area a shot.
So I am going to start this thread to glean the wealth of information that I know is out there in those of you already established .. such as Doom Dealer, Darth333, Fred, T7, Tk, kitty etc.. etc ..
So how do we create an entirely new area without a map maker? .. I have no idea .. I'm assuming I need to start with an .are file of some sort. Doom .. where did you actually start for the Holowan Spire?
Once I get a starting point I think I can figure out the bits and pieces needed to complete the area. I've browsed through the bifs, rims and erfs quite a bit. I might need to ask for help in the form of modelers and texturers as I don't have enough experience in that other than ships and vehicles.
Does anyone have any information concerning the .mdx files? I thought there was a tool for these but I can't seem to find it.
http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=130451)
Completely new areas can't be made only editing existing areas.
Hmmm .. is there a specific reason a new area can't be made .. or is it just that no one has figured out where to get started on creating a new area?
In one words......Models, Bioware/Lucas Arts wasn't nice enough to give us a fully operational modeling tool so all of are hopes and dreams are heavily on the shoulders of cchargin now, may god bless him, he is doing a tremendous job. Not that I know how to model anyway .... :(
cchargin! cchargin! where are you?! I want to be in on this tool of yours! hehe.
So cchargin is making a modeling tool much like the NWN tool?
Anyone know if he has any info about what he is doing anywhere?
yea there are a couple threads on the board of his that put up his tool for download etc. etc.
alot of people think you need to make the areas in a program like 3dmax skin it in photoshop, but that's where it ends as then no one knows how to convert it into a file type that kotor will recognise as an area.
You know I still have the JA mapping tool. I could try save a map as a .are file and see what happens.
darn I tryed in *.are, but it still saved as a .map file.
hmm....cchagin, you might have some idea havent you tryied to crack the .are file?
I doubt if the JA mapping tool would work on bioware's formats. I was wondering if the NWN area creator might be something to start with. I might have to reload NWN and then pull those utilities out to experiment with.
CChargin .. are you out there? how are you going about things?