Merging 2da Doors and Placeables guidance

Neverwinter Nights 1 Custom Content
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What I think I know and what I think I have done.

I have a bunch of Haks I am trying to combine into a single basemodule to be used for a multiplayer campaign. Possibly a PW someday. Doors for some custom tilesets have no appearance and some placeable appearances do not exist/appear in the toolset.

Biggest offenders Zwuerlkes tilesets with drawbridges and Micro terrain placeables for the minimap placeables hak.

I read a bunch of tutorials and thought I could handle merging some text files to ensure the 2das are not trying to use the same lines.

I extracted ALL of the 2das for Doortypes and Placeables. I retrieved the bioware placeables and started with trying to create a custom 2da for the placeables before repeating my steps with the doors. Then my intent was to combine the two new 2das into a single custom hak and put that at the top and have my players include this new hak in their folders.

I started with the excell 2datool and started as the documentation says with the bioware original placeables 2da, then merged the CEP265 then Tarot Redhand’s Tophak 2da, then the minimap (SOZ I think) 2da… problem was I found a bunch of lines we using the same lines… my brain broke as to the best way to not overwrite them. I wanted to just copy and paste the offending lines to an open area (some very high number) and I did not trust myself to change it in notepad because of all the talk about spaces and such I figure I would totally mess it up. So I tried looking for a more automated system.

I downloaded Yata’s tool and I liked the way it showed specific cell differences which was better since the excel document showed entire lines being different since some of the entries had “quotes” for the name of the placeables and it appears that some of them were renamed (Tarots Redhand) which either included the name of the Author in parenthesis or had a convenient category prefix. I found out Yata needed a separate tool to merge the 2da files so I downloaded winmerge and … head exploded

So when I am working with 2das I know will have conflicts what is the most efficient tools to use and what are the step by step processes. I feel like I am not fully understanding the tools I am using even after doing my best to read/understand the provided tutorials and experimenting with them.

As a bonus piece of information… What if I wanted to reorganize all of the items for instance having the Armoire not be the first placeable appearance, instead could I reorganize ALL of the placeables with a pre-fix that would then be reflected in the toolset. Does the toolset translate all of these 2das in alphabetical order by its name or does it keep the numerical value of the line its listed at?

I have never voted for anything on the Vault nor posted here in years if ever. SO for what its worth… Thank you all!

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Lots of questions there.

Let me try to break it down.

Strictly speaking, the line number used as the internal reference to a 2da is generated from the order of lines in the 2da. As long as you label the lines sequentially, with no gaps, your label will equal the internal reference.

The thing to avoid at all costs (unless there’s no choice) is changing the line number for an entry. If you do, everything that points to it will be linked to the wrong entry.

In some cases - placeables, for example - the toolset list is in alphabetical order of description. You can tweak the description until you get the order you want (CEP does this), but never, ever, change the physical order of 2da entries.

To simplify the job, for any given 2da, merge only the haks you actually need. If you don’t need the EE stuff, start with CEP 2.65 as the base, as it already includes NWN 1.69. Then, for doortypes.2da say, focus on the tilesets that have one.

When two 2da files are using the same line numbers (which WinMerge will report) something has to change. First option is to discard one of the offending haks. Otherwise, choose the hak with the fewest new lines. Copy the content of each line to an unused line number in the merged 2da. Go through the hak changing every reference to those lines to the new numbers.

Tools are occasionally useful, especially to see what’s going on, but personally I do most of the splicing in Notepad as I find it easier. I put new stuff in the range reserved for users (if any) or at the end. If there are only a few lines to insert, I leave the line numbers alone, pasting over the other fields line by line. If there are a lot, I count them, highlight that number of lines in the master, paste in the new lines, then correct the line numbers.

Don’t know if that helps…

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Proleric you are awesome.

I can change the description names of all my placeables and it will be reflected in alphabetical order in the toolset. (Thanks for confirming that!)

I cannot mess with the physical location of the 2da entry, so Armoire will remain the first entry in the 2da but I can change the description to “Furniture: Armoire” and so on?

I will try just using notepad and reducing the number of 2das I am actually trying to merge. Thanks for the advice and detailed explanations!

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You can also do this with appearances for creatures.