Cloak and General PLT questions

Neverwinter Nights 1 Custom Content
1

I have a few questions regarding cloaks.

  • Is there a hard-coded upper limit to the number of entries in NwN EE’s cloakmodel.2da?
  • Do the various layers of the plt texture have to be just black and alpha or can these layers handle full greyscale.
  • In lisa’s tutorial for surcoats and tabards she uses an outline as the logo yet it appears filled in when the final product is viewed. Do the logo images have to be in outline or can a filled in black image be used?
  • As an experiment I loaded lisa’s example psd image into gimp and exported it to plt. When I viewed the plt in the image viewer program I use (it can handle transparency), the alpha was rendered as white. Is this normal?

Thanks

TR

2

The limit is 255 (but I would stick with 254 to be safe).

PLT images afaik should not be grayscale.

I don’t see why a filled in logo couldn’t be used. IIRC, there are some custom cloaks out there where the logo on them can be colored, but they are outlined in black.

Alpha’s always render as white afaik.

3

The layers in the plt are indeed grayscale (8 bit to be exact, so 256 colors).

Plt don’t directly support alpha in the file format, instead it can be done by:

  1. White color in the skin layer (afaik this works for inventory icons only, I could be wrong here)
  2. Setting envmap in the cloakmodel.2da to **** and selecting the chromatic/reflective color in the toolset for the item. It will be transparent. A good example here is Lisas spiderweb cloak or the standard tattered cloak.
4

Thanks guys, I appreciate that.

TR

5

So to see how it’s done (I haven’t seen tutorials on it but I could well be mistaken) I’ve downloaded a few cloak projects and extracted them to their own folders. When I looked at FR Deity & Faction Cloaks by Estelindis, I saw that her cloakmodel.2da was included separate from the hak, for others to use. When I looked at this 2da I noticed that it is padded to line number 380, yet appears to work. Now I’m even more confused than ever.

TR

6

I’m not actually sure whether there was a limit (or maybe it was was higher than 255?). Since the visible cloaks were added comparatively “recently” in 1.69, I’d expect the 2da limit to be much higher, if there is any.
Either way, I wouldn’t worry about it, especially with the EE.

7

I’m confused too. Maybe its the other parts_ 2das that have a limit. Hard to remember because its been nearly a decade.

8

One final question. Are plt files only used on things that are worn by PCs/NPCs/Creatures or are they used elsewhere?

TR

9

Afaik, the following use/can use plt:

Body Parts
Cloaks
Robes
Tails
Wings

10

parts_2das definitely have the 255 limit in EE. I don’t know about cloaks or robes.

11

I hear there are ways to get alphas on plts but its an involved process. I just physically cut out the shapes from my cloaks for the time being

12

Funny you should mention that… (hint it’s the top one of the list in -)

Various Old Tutorials

That I posted just in the last week.

TR