I have sworn vengeance against sparkles

April 12, 2004 by Adam in NWN1

I have sworn vengeance against sparkles. There's a very common issue with tiles that seems to show up in virtually every custom tileset. Tiny gaps between the tiles can occur during the production process, causing "sparkles" when you look into the fog that surrounds the tileset in the game.

There are several desparkle utilities that have been released to battle this phenomena, yet it seems that this doesn't fully take care of the issue. After much fiddling about, my best results seem to come when I go in to the ground texture entry in the mdl file and move everything at 5.0 and -5.0 to 5.004 and -5.004. It's tedious work, but produces a lovely sparkle-free set of tiles.

Oh, and here's the improved mini-map icons. Much less grid effect.