Tile Mania!

What is It?
Tile Mania is a tileset resource for modders. TM provides modders with a robust, versatile, generic, seamlessly tiling tileset that can be retextured to suit almost any purpose. Simply by changing the textures, modders can provide players with entirely new interior environments to explore.

Media
http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/TileManiaPromo01.jpg
http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/TileManiaPromo02.jpg
http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/TileManiaPromo03.jpg.
http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/TileManiaPromo04.jpg.

Details
Tile Mania will consist of dozens, if not hundreds of tiles to provide for maximum flexibility. These tiles represent generic architectural features like halls, rooms, stairs, etc., and can be assembled like Lego ^TM blocks to build extensive interior environments.

These tiles are non-rotational, which means they should not be rotated in the editor. This makes it possible to create seamlessly tiling textures. The added overhead of duplicating dozens of tiles is more than justified by the superior appearance of the tiles. (Edit: This may change if I find modular tiles more convenient for some reason or other. In any case, you'll have access to modular pieces on release so you get the best of both worlds.)

These tiles have been painstakingly UV mapped to ensure that all texture mapping remains consistent between tiles. Tiles have been mapped to a standard 1024x1024 texture, so as long as you use standard texture sizes your textures will map properly to the tiles. Tiles can be retextured in NifSkope or by using Texture Sets in the Geck. Some pieces (like stairs) require special handling, so UV maps will be provided for these pieces to make mapping them to your textures easier.

All tiles have been vertex painted for shading.

Tiles have multiple collision objects, but only a single collision material. The existing export scripts do not allow for the export of working multiple collision materials. While it may be possible to create multiple collision materials by hand-editing files in NifSkope, the amount of work required to create hundreds of tiles is simply astronomical. The tiles use HAV_MAT_STONE as the standard collision material, but this can be changed relatively easily in NifSkope. When (and if) the export scripts support multiple collision materials, the tiles can simply be re-exported.

Transitional pieces are planned to create transitions between stock tilesets and the TM tileset.

Progress
There are currently over seventy tiles, though some of them still have to be edited a bit. I'm hoping to have the initial set done in time for Christmas. The tile template will use stock textures, though I may release custom sets with original textures once the template set has been completed.

Caveats
Tile Mania is intended to be a resource to assist modders in the creation of custom interior environments. Obviously, there is a lot more to a convincing environment than a collection of generic tiles. It is up to the modder to provide these additional props to complete the player's experience.

Terms of Use
Tile Mania will be released as a free resource. There are no limitations on what you do with the resource except as follows:

1. You will not sell it or claim it as your own.
2. You will include a line of credit in your mod.

If you want to remodel, retexture, recollision, re-anything the pieces, you have complete freedom to do so. The tileset is intended to serve as a basis on which to build unique sets with their own style, so have fun.

Yay!

cool. but,
i don't get that part. a simple flat wall piece should be able to be used to make any shape, IF it is same dimensions on the x&y, then it can go any where, zig zag around corners and all sorts. it wouldn't matter if you rotate it on the z axis, those edges should still tile anytime it meets itself, and any angle on the Z. My most recent tile set doesn't quite do this, as the dimensions are a bit weird. So i did need special pieces for it to work around 45&90 degree corners. but in the editor i made the tile set do things i never intended it too when i modelled it. < the only thing you might need is floor pieces, because rotating those put the tiling on different edges it's not supposed to be at.

This was done for forward and backward compatibility. I could have released a tileset that consisted of a few simple pieces like walls, floors, ceilings, etc., (and will include such pieces in a misc folder) but as soon as you start making tiles any more complicated than that tiling issues arise.

Take something as simple as a tile that consists of three elements: a floor, wall, and ceiling. As long as you tile them alongside each other, you don't have any problems; but as soon as you want to round a corner, you have a seam in the floor and ceiling. Depending on the texture it may not be very noticeable, but it will stand out like a sore thumb with most textures.

The TM tileset is intended to be used as a base and to remain as generic as possible, so you could also model organic features like caverns (which do not generally tile) using the tileset as a base. If nothing else, you know what tiles you need to create and the general parameters of the tiles (like the constraining dimensions).

Using a non-rotating tileset also means it will stay compatible with new pieces I create down the road because everyone is using the same basic layout.

oh, you don't have separate floor/ceiling pieces.

my first tile set was set pieces. all the rest have been modular. where i had the ceiling/floors in one nif, but walls in another.

i found having floors as separate pieces, i was able to do some really unorthodox building of the set in the geck. i was making hexagonal rooms and stuff.

It's really a matter of preference, I guess. :shrug:

I had planned on releasing modular pieces with the download but I suppose I could release it as a separate download for people who want to assemble their own tiles out of components for a smaller download. I just assumed people would find the pre-assembled tiles easier to work with since they don't have to worry about things like tiling and lining things up in the Geck. Non-rotating tiles are very easy to work with once you understand the naming convention because you can leave your snap to grid settings high and easily drag and drop an area together in a few minutes.

I'll give the modular pieces a little more thought. Thanks for the feedback.

If you include a test esp. with a test cell. it doesn't even have to make sense as an interior. like just have corridor/room chunks prebuilt, and various demos of what might be possible with the set. Any modder wishing to use the tileset would load your cell and start from there and just start building by duplicating whole chunks if they wanted< even if you did not make modular pieces, I would recomend doing this. it's the ultimate visual guide to how to use the set. and saves time having to drag it all into the cell.
then they can just delete the unused pieces from the cell. and rename the cell and clean your test cell off the esp later.


the snap to grid settings would be the same if it was broken into smaller pieces. the grid setting is only relevant to the piece with the smallest snapping dimension - my last tile set only works at like 8 or 16, or what ever it was, because the hallway door way was pushed into it 8 units. so that on the other side, 8 units out could be the other side of the doorway. I should have made a special end cap for the hallway/doorway transition. anyway, everything else would tile at 128. I fubared that bit, now I have to assemble everything at a 8 unit set up because of that one piece.

Personally I find totally modular pieces easier to work with I do not have any videos of my recent Tilesets but a few videos of my older Oblivion sets do exist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1kZLokUo6k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRxm5LjP7hg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jMgEMwKNXk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yXZGWes9HM

As I went forward with each progressive update I found it easier and easier to work when the pieces were seperated into Floors, Walls, Ceilings, Decoration, and Doorways -> doing this I was able to lay out my Floor Pieces to get a general area layout and from there all the Walls and Doors to give the areas Depth then I would clutter the place and finally add the Ceilings last.

For the Modular Tower I would Lay out Each floor individually going up and out in the end that tileset was implemented into a spiderweb like appearance of confusing as hell areas where you would get lost just trying to find the way to the top most tower.

I actually had thought of bringing these tilesets into FO3 just to piss of the Loremongering Canonite idiots. , except I was not sure what I wanted to do around them just having a castle is not enough !

@Ghogiel: All of my tiles use a standard 128x128, 256x256, or 512x512 layout. The door frames are included within the bounds of the tile; I've simply retracted the wall by 16 units to make room for the walls/doors, with half a door in each tile. When using other tile sets, I've often been frustrated by attempting to line up tiles that use non-standard measurements. One of my design goals is to make that impossible. Everything will fit on a grid composed of 128 unit squares.

In principle, there's no reason why the frames couldn't be split into their own module and positioned between gaps in the wall, it's just not the way I thought of it when I was designing it. I may rethink it after our conversation.

Incidentally, would static collections be a more useful alternative to test cells with prebuilt 'chunks'? I've never used them, so I'm not exactly sure what kind of restrictions might exist. Could the interiors of entire small buildings be constructed in this way?

@SaidenStorm: Thanks for the input, especially the videos. I haven't seen those before, but amazing as usual. :tops:

As far as bringing the tilesets into FO3 goes, I say do it anyway. You can release it as a modder's resource and watch the Lore-hounds gnash their teeth in vexation.

Aside: I just tried viewing my test cell in the Pipboy and all I'm getting is a black screen. Is this normal? I thought the map would work automatically like in Oblivion. Is there something special you need to do to get the local maps working in FO3?

Auto Gen works for me at least in the small test I did -> I duplicated a Cell and deleted half of the tiles (to make sure it was not just using already Generated maps) and popped myself into it and it generated my local map exactly as it should including all of the missing tiles.. being missing.

Apparently there's an 'On Local Map' checkbox on static objects. :facepalm:

Ok. Back on track. Have the local map working and added a couple more tiles. Current tile count is 28. Still doing the non-rotational atm, though there will be modular pieces in the release for do-it-yourselfers. I still kind of prefer dragging completed tiles from the Object window over having to assemble every tile, even if it does only take a few seconds. I'll keep comparing styles, maybe I'll decide on one.

http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/TileManiaPromo03.jpg.

http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/TileManiaPromo04.jpg.

I've also been working on custom textures, so the textures you see in the screenshots will be changed to my custom ones for release. That way you get a new tileset you can use right away.

Update.

I'm now on my fourth iteration of the tile set and have to agree that creating modular pieces is the way to go. (You win! )

The only thing that can't be done with modular pieces is vertex shading, since you can't predict where the shadows will fall. I really wanted to implement vertex shading for the meshes, but the additional work involved, the exponentially larger set of tiles, the additional complexity of the meshes (adding polys to allow for realistic shading), and certain issues I was having with getting the shading to tile properly (I was getting seams from the vertex shading itself, even though the textures tile seamlessly) finally convinced me to go the modular route.

Consequently, the set will be much smaller, but much more flexible. Additionally, since the floors, walls, and ceilings are implemented as separate meshes, it is possible to assign havok materials to each mesh, making it possible to make 'tiles' with multiple collision materials...you just have to put them together in the editor yourself. A little more work, but worth it in the long run.

The set does have a peculiarity, however: the floor and ceiling pieces will retain their non-rotating nature. (The walls may be rotated freely). This was done for three reasons: 1. the ensure that the pieces would tile seamlessly; 2. to impose exact snapping to grid at high settings (256 or 128 for most pieces); and 3. to maintain clean images in the Pipboy local map.

The floor and ceiling pieces have been designed to include the wall space within a 256 or 128 gu bounding box. That means your pieces will always tile at the right scale and you won't have to worry about halls not lining up properly and similar inconveniences when using the set. It sounds complicated, but it's really quite easy to use once you get the hang of it.

As always, I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions.

solution to vertex colors. shadow meshes...

i am using them- have a look http://rapidshare.com/files/416400776/testTiles.rar

ignore the actual vertex color on the rest of it... personally i think it looks pooh in game anyway, so i either have to add another edge loop and blend those colors in a bit, or cut the edge loops back a bit to tighten them up. or i reckon if i can get it to look good, do without it, and replace with shadow meshes entirely. which from my experiments will probably look good. and i am probably going to loosen up the shadow meshes a bit as well. they are a bit tight atm

there is only 1 caveat to using the shadow meshes, they will not work correctly if the mesh they are shadowing has a nialphaproperty. the shadow mesh will just end up being an alpha window through that mesh... different solution will probably have to be sought if that happens. ie just use regular vertex paint or

Or...?

A cliffhanger ending? C'mon, spit it out.

I'd actually been considering something like this as well, though I'd planned on adding it to my wall dressings (baseboards and other trim, also modular) and never thought of just adding it to my wall mesh directly for some reason (thanks for sharing). My second thought was to use decals, and my third to use shadow volumes.

I really hadn't gotten beyond the mere idea of creating the shadows externally, so I have no idea how feasible these other ideas are. Probably not very.

I thought decals might be good because then you could place them where you want to simulate directional lighting instead of having them baked right into the mesh. One of the problems with using vertex shading for shadowing is you can't really predict a light source, so you just have to shadow everything. It's sort of a toss-up whether that looks better or worse than having no shadows at all. The problem with decals is that you'd run into the same problem with overlapping alphas and that might mess up the bullet decals, etc.

I thought shadow volumes might be cool, too, but I don't think they would work very well. You might be able to make them look good from a distance, but if the player walked into the shadow it would just disappear. Or they might just look crappy. :shrug:

Be happy to hear your thoughts on the matter.

[Edit:] Or I could just hand edit my vertex colors in NifSkope to get them to match. For some reason I can't get Blender to produce uniform vertex shading even using the same brush with the same settings. Probably just me not having enough experience using it.

....or nothing at all if it looks better that way. :teehee:

eww don't hand edit the verts in nifskope.. i think that time would be better used figuring out what you are doing wrong. i would guess you are using a brush function to paint the individual verts, and the brush setting has a blend falloff somewhere, there is probably a menu/setting somewhere. instead of painting, i am just making a vertex selection and just fill bucket dumping a solid color onto them. Dunno how blender does vert colors, but i am sure it will produce a uniform color if you know how to tell it to.

anyway, volumes. no idea. will it look pooh? maybe. these things are all in the realm of experimentation.

i did try a shadow mesh in the corner walls. actually looks alright. I am still undecided on it all atm. and no idea how much the decal style would mess with impact data decals. :shrug: it's all testing at this point.

News time, everyone!

Iteration 5.

After spending some time using modular floors, ceilings, and walls, I've decided that they are a pain in the butt to work with in the editor, so I've gone back to making pre-assembled tiles as I had originally planned. This has two consequences:

1. No more separate havok collision on walls/floors/ceilings. At least, not until they figure out how to export mopps with multiple collision materials.
2. Vertex shading is back. I figured out how to get even shading by playing with the brush settings so now that's no longer an issue. (Sound advice, Ghogiel!)

I will still be releasing the modular components with the package, so you can still assemble the tiles manually if you want with separate havok collisions, so you're really getting the best of both worlds in any case.

There will probably be three downloads: a small 'assemble-your-own' tile kit with the modular pieces (very small download with few pieces); a 'rotate-all-you-want' pre-assembled tile set (for those of you who don't need/want tiling floor/ceiling textures) that gives you one of each of the tiles; and a 'full' tile set that has the complete set of non-rotating, pre-assembled tiles (ie. four variations on most tiles). With the full set, you can literally drag tiles into the editor with your snap settings at 256 and everything will line up perfectly with 0 rotations and almost 0 tiling artifacts (there are a couple of very minor ones I'm working on) and will look great in the Pipboy to boot.

Here's a screenshot of the current set, which currently includes 52 tiles:

http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/TileMania_Sept14Update.jpg

The tile set is far from complete (eg. still need to do stairs, ramps, balconies, pits, windows, transitional pieces, a smaller version for residential interiors, a larger version for large installations, etc., etc.). I'm also planning on doing tiling air vents, pipes, wires, wall trim, etc., so this project could go on for a long time. Here's hoping I don't get sick to death of working on it! :laugh:

Just another quick update, since it's been a couple of weeks.

I am now up to 75 tiles, and I think I have most of the basic pieces done for the medium size-interiors. Still have to do stairs, ramps, windows, etc., but getting there.

Here's the http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/TileManiaPromo05.jpg.