New Settlement - Falheim - Now Testing!

[Status as of 03/01/10]
E2M2: Complete
E1M2: Complete
E0M2: Complete
E2M1: Complete
E1M1: Complete
E0M1: Complete
E2M0: Complete
E1M0: Complete
E0M0: Complete

Settlement now ready for testing. Download can be found here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0K9IF31N

Screenshots of E0M0 (Camp)


Screenshots of E0M1 (Manor)


Screenshots of E0M2 (Castle)


Screenshots of E1M0 (Village)


Screenshots of E1M1 (Manor Village)


Screenshots of E1M2 (Castle Village)


Screenshots of E2M0 (Town)


Screenshots of E2M1 (Manor Town)


Screenshots of E2M2 (Castle Town)





Original Post

Thought I'd post some screenshots of my first settlement, replacing Empty50. There's still much to do (including everything before E2M2!) but I think it's coming along quite well.

In building the castle, I did a bit of research, and tried to make it reasonably realistic in design. The main focus being on the keep protected by two layers of walls, and accessable only through a single access point.

And so, the screenshots: (Old)


Well, I think I might have got a bit carried away with the screenshots!
But still, I'd like to know what you think, and I'm always open to critisism and suggestions.

Looks sweet, keep it up!

Be bomb when all the 'empt' settlements are finished. 

Thanks, Ostego. Was hoping for maybe a few more replies though..

Well, here's a few things I've added so far;

For anyone who's looking, here's some more screenshots.
The town centre is now just about finished with all buildings placed. There are plenty of stalls to look at around the town, selling a variety of goods.
I think the last thing to do to the town centre will be to place some items around the market area (seen in the overhead screenshot), then just some tweaking and tidying up.

Hi! I know I haven't played Custom Settlements much and I don't post often, but I saw your thread and I really want to encourage you. I admire the detail that went into the town center and the shops. There are a lot of nice touches and details that go really well together. I'm looking forward to more, and I hope to play in your settlement in a future update. 

Thanks for the nice words, King Loras!

Here's some screenshots of the market stalls, and some more shops;

Very nice, yeah it'll be nice when all the spots are filled up, but I saw that some of them need redoing, they are either of poor quality. Or little to no attempt at all to create.

Well I'm very annoyed at the moment. Just finished a big AI mesh job, only to have the game freeze up when I attempted to save and close, losing all my changes.

Lord Kehm, I agree that some of the Settlements are a bit poor. Some with no AI mesh, others just bad design. hopefully when there are many more settlements added, there will be more quality ones. Though it will be annoying for the player who picks a bad settlement to claim as their own..

[Edit]

Well, I re-did the work I lost pretty quickly last night, and today have been making more progress until now. It seems like I've hit the limit for the number of AI nodes. At least I'm guessing that's what's happened. Every new face I try to create ends up all distorted and stretching across the map - no matter where I make it. As soon as I delete node - any one - it sorts itself out. This is quite a problem, seeing as the AI mesh is still far from complete.

So it looks like I've got two things I can do: Delete as many nodes as I can around the map edges
Or, merge many small nodes into single, larger ones. What I'm unsure about is how large they should be so as not to cause any problems.

Would be very helpful if I could get a response to this.

I'm afraid I'm not too familiar with the work that goes into the AI mesh, but I think a combination of your two solutions might suffice. Try to replace a couple small nodes with fewer/bigger nodes, but also try to cut some nodes from the edges of the map. Again, though, I don't know much about this sort of thing. I didn't even know about the limit on nodes until you posted here. As for sizes, I can't be of much help there. I hope someone else can help you better than I can. You've done a lot of great work on this settlement so far.

This would become one of my favorite settlements man great work dont give up not yet or not ever ^^

Thanks, I seem to have the AI mesh under control now. The whole town is now mesh'd, with just the outlying terrain remaining. Half of it is already covered with many default-sized nodes, so I should be able to strip those away and replace them with bigger ones. After that, I think it's time to start on E1M2!

Again great work

I've since completed E1M2, and I'm now starting on E0M2. hopefully things should start moving pretty quickly now!

Some screens from the Castle Village:


And just because, here are some shots of the Castle Town at night. I just wish I could do more to control the lighting...


The original post has been updated with a few new screenshots too.

Looking great, thanks for the hard work!

Been having a hard time completing E2M1.  Took E2M2, stripped away the castle and all the walls and towers, and have been replacing them with boring wooden walls which are much less interesting and useful than the castle walls. Been losing inspiration  and have only been making small changes every few days...

I also felt a bit down after looking at some of the other existing settlements. While I think my town is nicely detailed, one thing that the others have is varied terrain, whereas mine is very flat and open, and a bit boring.

It's also really annoying that there's no way to copy and paste. When it comes to E1M1, I'm going to have to do the same thing all over again - take out all the walls and replace them, trying to make it look the same as E2M1. If I could just copy all the walls from one scene to another, I'd be done in 5 minutes...

Ah well, in the mean time, some screenshots of E0M2:
Oh, and merry Christmas!

Very nice HLM.

Thanks, Rubicon. E2M1 is complete, and screenshots have been added.
Next up is E1M1!

Nice, will it be like a savegame compatible addon DL once its finished?
Keep up the great work.

I don't know enough about the game to give a definate answer, but I don't see why it shouldn't be savegame compatible.
I will put the settlement up for download as soon as it's complete for anyone who wants it. Maybe some time in the future it might get included in the next update, whenever that is.

Well, after just over a month, I'm ready to release the settlement!

All 9 scenes have been completed, and I'd like to think I won't have to make any changes, but there's always the chance of bugs coming up. It would be very useful if people could take a look at the settlement (all scenes if possible) and report any problems you find. Things to look out for are floating objects, pathfinding issues and any gameplay problems. Any general feedback is also appreciated of course!

Here's the download: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0K9IF31N

The original thread has been updated with all-new screenshots of all scenes.