Noob Builder needin some advice

[The Explorer]

Hail friends

Next time I lose Internet for a couple of days or more and at times when the playerlist is 0 I want to try building Cuhanna, now I remember the items I created last year would not be accepted in Das 2 because I put some wrong numbers in some of the feilds. Yes I have read the inciteful blog Falcon wrote on the Das.Net site but I would like someone with Das 2 building experiend I can bounce building problems/ideas etc off who intends to be around at least in Forum for the foreseeable future as this project is going to take some time.

I am going to start really Basic; areas of Desert with Dunes and a ship docking area etc then hopefully create the Great City of Maslam.

Anyone interested in helping a Noob builder out or teaming up? If Maevan 2 or Falcon were around I'd ask them but they arn't .

I have spent the last 3 hours introducing myself to the Toolset and created the Desert landscape, added the placeables and environment I wanted, the creatures, the transition points, the effects etc but came across a few problems:

1; It gave me a great massive area to work with but only let me focus zoom in to a single box in the middle, how do I change this so I can zoom etc in on the other areas?

2; How do I change the colour of the ground to look like sand? It's currently grass looking

3; how do I change the colours of placeables, change there axis and add shading?

4; how do I test the sounds, it didn't have a play option?

[Wired]

If you're just getting started, I'd definitely focus on item creation, moving up to NPCs and dialog, only then move on to interior areas.

Some highly artistic people make great "mappers" right out of the gate, but exterior areas, more specifically useful and integrable exterior areas, are just going to represent a higher degree of difficulty. There were a couple of fantastic player-submitted areas in PWC 13, but it still took lots of work to bring them alive (npcs, quests, scripts, items, conversations, etc).

No reason why you cannot become an accomplished area builder yourself, but if you're just getting your feet wet and looking to add some value quickly and painlessly, re-read the first paragraph.

[The Explorer]

Thanks Wired, I created a whole bunch of items mid last year and I know what I did wrong but had already deleted them all.

My plan was to build the two areas with all placeables, textures, buldings etc in place then RL tell two of the creators of Cuhanna and get them to help me with NPC's and cultural Cuhannan quests although I recently found out the main person I was going to speak to will be offline in a couple of months for at least 6 months which will mean the other one disappears as well. They also said Melthlavian or Maelstrom was already working on Cuhanna.

I might have another crack at building it as the vision I have of the two areas is quite inticing to try to get ingame but it's very frustrating to not have the know how already because I'd want it to be perfect.

[Balamor Lansmor]

is there a how to somwere? i loaded the toolset and had no idea were to go from there.

[Mon-da-oth]

Try this site out. http://www.nwn2toolset.dayjo.org/