no, it wouldn’t be a comment. it’s a string literal embedded in the exe. having looked at the code linked above, my guess is it’s the same string literal that’s a member of the keyword array, which would imply the version in the git repo still has this bug. but if all this does is allow windows to light up at night [which, admittedly, is kinda cool… 
] and it can be [and has been] handled otherwise in the past, maybe this isn’t such a big issue ? or, put another way, if we fixed it, would compiling w/the fixed version allow us to see noticeable improvements in render performance, decreased judder and @Jedijax’s ‘micro-stutter’ any better than we can get now by compiling w/the version everyone has ?
@xorbaxian My TR’s Glows, Rainbow Rats V 2.0, TR’s Runes and TR’s Arcane Circles all use it as well as the stained glass windows I made for a ccc too. I had to do a fix for the latest patch 'cos they all lst their colour and showed as white with the new lighting system. Apart from mine, my guess is that anything that glows in the dark uses that particular instruction.
TR
I have a tester hak for people who are into testing. I have taken 30 something community content creatures and cleaned and fixed them to best of my ability. I reduced some texture sizes to see if that helps too. They all have been compiled with NWNMDLCOMP with no errors. What I want people to do is test for the microstutter, lag, long loading times, spawning times to see if fixed models compiled, improves all these problems. If does, its not a problem with the COMP program but all the errors in the models. This ties into something grumpyold goat said that if a model does not show in explorer there is probably some bad errors in that model. All the models I did render in NWN Explorer. There are only models and textures in the hak, you will have to do the 2DA work and UTC’s although some will override already Bioware standard creatures. Let the testing begin.
I also compiled a bunch of animation super for some of these creatures after I went through and fixed them as well. They do not render in NWN Explorer but thats because I wanted it that way.
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If I can get some people to test these and the animations aren’t broken by the COMP program and the game performance is improved, I plan to go ahead and fix many, many creatures, with eventual plan of moving them to EE.
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@Tarot_Redhand good news ! before i dived into downloading and building that source tree, i checked around to see if there were any nwnmdlcomp newer than mine. it turns out mine is the old one 
…and the one here on the vault has the bugfix already. so if you’ve got that one, you should be set [at least as far as setfillumcolor/selfillumcolor goes].
so much ado about nothing.
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Well I see three people have downloaded the Hak but does this mean I have three people testing or do I have three people that just wanted to see what was in the hak. Please let me know if you are testing and if you would please post your findings here. Thanks to any who are testing.
@cervantes i d/l’d, plan to test, won’t be able to get to it until this weekend. thanks for your work on this.
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@xorbaxian Glad to here someone is going to test the creatures out, even thou a little later in the week. I believe these fixes will hopefully make a have a big improvement in how custon content creatures act in game. I would check more myself but i’m in a working at a remote location, and all I have is a lousy laptop with 1 Gen I5 processor and windows 7. I can’t even run a program like blender, luckily my 3DS 7 still works on it.
I have fixed alot of skins and animations that where probably causing nwnmdlcomp to fail at compiling some of the models, and the game, I would imagine didn’t like the errors in the uncompiled models either. Thanks again glad to see that somebody cares as I would like to fix many, many models and be able to get them into EE in the end and have them work well.
I have run thru at least another 20 models so far its looking good.
You can try to fix animations for the Giant Ant Larva npc from CEP. Its walking animation is totally broken.
When I say fix animations. I mean animations that won’t fire because of parsing or animations that contain data the engine won’t recognize as part of the animations or maybe orientaion position key adjustments, but looking quickly at the ant larva, all the animations are there and are working correctly.
So I am guessing you want a new set of walk animations different from whats in model because they look a little inch wormish.
I have also only took the quick look in Max, haven’t actually looked at in game.
Yeah you need to try in game to see whats wrong with it. Eitherway I misunderstood, this is definitely out of the scope of your current fixes then.
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That’s okay Shadooow when I get the creature errors fixed. I want to try my hand at animations and that model maybe a good one to try and learn on.
Well, I guess I didn’t get any more testers xorbaxian, so I wouldn’t worry about testing the creatures. I am going to nix this project due to lack of interest by the community guess they don’t want better working creatures, there happy with what they have.
I support your efforts in this regards, but I have my own projects and I am too busy with them now to help you test it. Sorry.
well, i decided to do this anyway. …although i’m not sure you’ll like the results [but not for the reason you might think. 
]
first of all, let me say i’m really impressed with your work ! not being a modeler, i have no idea how long it takes to do this kind of thing, but even i can see that you’ve got some really beautiful models here, much better than the bioware models of the same creatures.
so, on to the tests you asked my to carry out. my approach was to write two identical modules that would allow the ‘player’ to generate a number of creatures at once ; one creates creatures using the standard bioware models, and the second does the same but with your models. of course, the module demonstrating your models has more creatures, because you’ve created some models of creatures that don’t exist in the bioware release. the modules can be downloaded here : modeltest.7z.
the results of the tests were somewhat surprising to me. you’d think that a large number of creatures created at once would create a small ‘hiccup’ [judder, micro-stutter, …]. [un]fortunately that wasn’t the case, for either module ; although you can tell in-game that it takes time to render the creatures, there were no lag artifacts, even w/my character running around at the same time. using my marvelous ‘20/20 hindsight’, i think that’s to be expected ; the most intensive operation won’t necessarily be the rendering, which can be farmed out to video hardware ; it would be fetching the templates or handling the pre-rendering activities required on an encounter or generic trigger, especially in a larger module.
one more result that’s even worse. the tests i devised have all creatures report their spawn times to the nearest millisecond as they spawn in. unfortunately, all spawn times were reported as identical, even though visually they quite obviously were not. in other words, as far as a script is concerned, everything happened all at once, immediately, so it’s not going to be so easy to determine how long rendering actually takes – at least w/o something like nwnx or some sort of external app that might allow monitoring w/finer-grained handling of times.
so to sum up, i think the tests have succeeded in proving that you’ve made some nice models that work well in-game, but they’ve failed to prove that the models you’ve made are any higher-performance than those out-of-the-box. but i’d suggest that you d/l the modules and run the tests yourself, on a machine that doesn’t have an ssd [as mine does] and has a run-of-the-mill graphics card – although tbh i think you’ll be hard pressed to prove any noticeable lag due to a few polygon errors in the models.
on other fronts, some of the models didn’t display as expected. for some reason all of the models beginning with ‘a_’ are missing textures ; they are rendered solid white or black. did i make a mistake here ? are these not supposed to be ‘renderable’ ? please check the appearance.2da in my hak and make any modifications you think should be there.
one final note. don’t be disheartened by people’s apparent ‘disinterest’ ! most people here are fairly involved in that bizarre thing, ‘real life’, so i’m sure it isn’t due to disinterest in your work, but rather the obligations of life that keep us from volunteering as frequently as we’d like to. keep working on this if you enjoy it, you seem very talented.
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Thanks for doing this Xorbaxian, but you did make my point on a bunch of these models. They performed poorly prior to fixing and cleaning with the inability to even compile some of them. They were not meant to perform better than the original bioware models but at least be on the standard as all the normal Bioware models.
Before fixing and cleaning these models some of them suffered from all the afflications stated above. This is why some people did not want to use them. I just wanted to improve all the custom content creatures so they would play as well as any Bioware model.
The A-prefixed models are animation supers and the where intenionally blacked out they are not used on the pallette but they nest the animatons for some of the models. I am doing this mainly so people will not shy away from the hard work that the original modelers put into these beautiful models, my hat is off to the all of them.
The ones that where not on the original bioware palette creatures, mainly the Couatl, Spirit Naga and Dark Naga I stuck in hoping they would also test good. They are for a follow up project of adding all kinds of new creature models to the palette.
The rest will override the standard Bioware models and will be released in there clean state in version two of my Bioware creature override.
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