This is my first post on this forum. Hope you find some minutes to spare and help me and others out. Like the title suggest, I’m looking for a very specific configuration/set of mods for the official campaign and expansions. Is there some consensus about what are the best nowadays in my specific area of intererest?
For now, my only bet is Tony K AI improvements (Henchman Inventory & Battle AI Mod), for the AI tweaks department.
PS: There’re tons of lists in Steam, but I have failed to find yet the “essential” collection to make the game look better.
I don’t think there are any major visual enhancements that are unequivocally popular. NWN is unusual, in that most of the community effort goes into making new modules and PWs, rather than enhancing the OC.
There are lots of piecemeal visual mods, such as new weapon models and tileset facelifts, which you might like, if you have the time to collate them all. I’ve heard that there is a community team working on something like that, but I don’t think it’s ready yet.
I hear that Tony K is quite popular for the OC, but best to uninstall it before playing community modules, as it can break them.
I see there’re apparently quite a few ways/paths to achieve my goal. Hence, any opinions, personal tastes and further guidance would be more than welcome.
If I understand correctly, you can choose either the sum up/mix of several overhauls or(and?) a myriad of less ambitious, smaller modules.
Some examples about the overhauls:
Project Q (it seems that his author is no longer satisfied/happy with modding, sadly)
Beamdog HD packs
Jasperre’s Overhaul project
CEP 2 has no impact on the OC. It contains no bug fixes or overrides. It’s a very large library of custom content used by many community module authors, required by players only when running those custom modules. Nevertheless, CEP 2 is by far the most commonly used mod for NWN.
Whether using CEP 2 or not, it’s in the custom adventure modules that you will find curated custom content, which is much more diverse than the OC, and better-looking in some cases.
Probably not your goal right now, but here’s a guide:
A very useful guide, indeed. Thanks for sharing that knowledge.
Speaking of which, I would love to read impressions about the mods I listed above or the preferable path/route to enhance the visual content of the game.
Quite a shame the smarter AI can potentially lead to conflcts with players custom adventures. It seems a very remarkable addition. And modular, too.
I see NIT can sort out some load order conflicts. Hope it could help with .2da clashes/issues as well.
I put Project Q IV in stasis pending what I see with Jasperre’s Overhaul and the progression of the Community version of the Beamdog HD pack. Yes, while I am a little jaded with modeling at the moment, more due to horrid internet issues that basically prevent me from uploading or downloading content for 3 weeks each month, I’ve never been one to stay away from the modding scene for very long.
In the way of visual enhancements, I would go with the following:
Project Overhaul Alpha (linked from the Vault Discord’s #Overhaul channel)
Project Q IV (haks 01, 02, 03, and 04 - hak 05 is new content you will see in the toolset or modules that use it).
Zwerkules Facelifts (iirc, some are already incorporated into the base game)
Beamdog HD Pack w/ Community Fixes
Dafena’s Fancy Stuff (has HD pbr mapping for all the OC tilesets - overwrite the Q pbr mapping for a more uniform style)
Bill Harper’s Content Overrides (overwrite the Q weapon overrides where desired)
The above list is pretty much what I use, dropping in new assets as they become available for use. I just dump it all into the /override folder, working my way down the list from top to bottom.
Wonderful news you’re still interested in modding! I’m gonna try the mods you suggest, plusTony K AI and perhaps Advanced Combat Animations at the very last of the load order. Let’s see how it goes.
Oh, a just a dumb question. Do you drop everything into the override directory, even Beamdog HD pack? The wiki states it’s easier to manage the userpatch version, which supposedly must go into Documents\Neverwinter Nights\patch and Documents\Neverwinter Nights.
I just drop it all in the /override folder as patch-haking can get a little messy with some of the content. You can certainly try it uing userpatch.ini, but some of it you’ll have to put into haks first. You’ll also want to invert the order, loading Project Overhaul first, then Q, then Zwerks’ facelifts, etc.
I also forgot to mention two other mods I use which are on the Steam Workshop under my username of Pstemarie.
Hmm, do you plan to release it early or can it take some time? Don’t worry, just asking to organize my free time.
By the way, I’m a bit confused about the load order instructions. Maybe I didn’t understand them properly or missed something, english is not my native language.
“…working my way down the list from top to bottom”
“You’ll also want to invert the order, loading Project Overhaul first, then Q, then Zwerks’ facelifts, etc.”
Is it not the same order? Agan, please forgive my lack of knowledge.
I have taken note of the icons modules too. First thing I noticed when playing vanilla is how bad/poorly items show in inventory when playing at 1440p (my monitor native resolution) and 1.9 zoom, but there’s indeed room enough to improve icons appearance as well.
If you use a patch hak setup (userpatch.ini) then the order gets inverted from how you would normally attach haks to a module. For example, if the HAK order for the content when attached to a module is:
patch001a
core002
core001
then the userpatch.ini will look like this:
patch0=core001
patch1=core002
patch2=patch001a
As for an early release of Qv4, I have some more testing to do and with the Holidays coming up, I doubt I’ll get much time until after Christmas. I also have to wait for my bandwidth to recharge before I can upload anything.
Hello again, folks, @Pstemarie , specially. I’m very grateful for the help and guidance you gave me last year. I played for months a virtually bug free modded game and had great fun through it. I think your devotion to NWN 1 modding, and your continual efforts towards improving players experience deserves way more recognition.
Now that 8193.35 official patch and FUBAR have been released, how do you recommend me to update my mods list configuration?
I used:
Project Overhaul Alpha (linked from the Vault Discord’s #Overhaul channel)
Project Q IV (haks 01, 02, 03, and 04 - hak 05 is new content you will see in the toolset or modules that use it).
Zwerkules Facelifts (iirc, some are already incorporated into the base game)
Beamdog HD Pack w/ Community Fixes
Dafena’s Fancy Stuff (has HD pbr mapping for all the OC tilesets - overwrite the Q pbr mapping for a more uniform style)
Bill Harper’s Content Overrides (overwrite the Q weapon overrides where desired)
, plus Tony K AI and Advanced Combat animations pack (wonderful)
FUBAR resides in the /override so it will overwrite anything loaded through userpatch.ini. What you could try is…
Install Fubar to a clean /override folder
Move all DDS textures with the TNO prefix from the /override folder to a /TEMP folder
Extract your current mods to the /override folder (overwrite any existing files) - Do NOT extract Project Q IV or TonyK AI as these are included in FUBAR.
Move the Fubar DDS textures back the /override folder (overwrite any existing files) - You might need to fix a few MTR files if some textures don’t show as its possible Dafena used slightly different names on some.
I’m a bit confused about what version of FUBAR should install. The one of your website “builders edition” is 1.3 whereas players edition 1.2 seems the Steam Workshop one. Should I go for the later despite being an older version?
How can I fix MTR files in a friendly for newbees way? (I have never dared to mess with NWN modding)
No worries, my internet has been broken for the past month. Anyways, the downloads from the Vault and my site are the same. You’ll need 1.2.1 plus the 1.3 patch file. I’ve fixed the description on my site so its more clear.
I’m a bit confused in the order of dumping into override. Should FUBAR be the first one to be overriden by the other projects, and if such is the case, should we start overriding from top to bottom of the list, or the other way around? I ask because Overhaul should override the Beamdog HD with fixes, no?
Hijacking this thread to ask: Is there any guidance as to which types of visual enhancements are compaitble with each other and which aren’t? I’ve always assumed they’re pretty much mutually exclusive, and have therefore only been running with Zwerkules’ facelifts and some other tilesets not covered by him. But @Pstemarie seems to be using them in conjunction with Dafena’s, e.g. - won’t they be overridden by that different retexture? Or is pbr mapping completely separate from Zwerkules’ facelift approach?
