Talk:Develop Your Dungeon and Clutter

The first part of this page needs a total rework. Making a single room is nothing to a full cavern. Especially when you now need "CN" which makes little sense to new modders. (CN is for the hall) Then you get to the second room.

A listing of good things to use for the cave wouldn't hurt here. You can also meantion the fact that while for room everything needs to be at Z position of 0, however when the CNhall is place, you have to raise the position of the hall pieces to around 64 for it to even look good. Kinglink 20:05, 26 March 2006 (EST)

I agree

While this is my first crack at elder scrolls modding, I've modded extensively with the NWN toolset and wow I was like "OK got that first room done" and seeing the next step was like "Aw crap, oh well I'll just play the original campaign for awhile."

Playing the guessing game of deciphering which block to drop into the world is going to be a headache without some kind of preview pane or a key as to which pieces fit into which other pieces well.

(Also--Yes, had to figure out to either manually set the Z-value for the piece at 0.0 or just copy+paste the same value into every tile before attempting to line up or you'll be pulling your hair out)

I feel the power of the toolset and all its possibilities but definately need a stronger crutch to get started. Thanx

Don't Give Up!

The slowest and most frustrating part of working with any kit is learning it. While I agree that having to manually get everything on the same Z-plane is annoying (manual entry is a fine way to do this), it sounds like the main obstacle here is not understanding the cryptic names on the pieces. Stick with it, pull pieces out and play with them, and look at existing dungeons and tear them apart to see how we built them. Whenever I start working with a new kit I spend a few hours just doing this sort of experimentation to get inside the head of the artist who built them.

Once you get comfortable with the kit, you'll fly through laying out dungeons from scratch and get to focus on the fun stuff. JBurgess

Key:

Seeing that some people appear to be getting confused (I know I was), I've looked over the entire cave set, and fiddled with it a bit, to come up with this key:

C = Cave, N = Narrow, Rm = Room, S = Small, W = Wide, Trans = Transition Piece

So, for example CSRm = Cave Small Room, CWHall = Cave Wide Hall Etc...

Hope this helps some people. I've also managed to recreate the entire dungeon, and will come up with an edited picture at some point to name all the pieces.