After making some tests I think that the portrait.2da does not work with the portrait folder but with the override folder (or a hak). Also I wasn’t able to sort the portraits by race (only by gender).
This is the portrait.2da I used in my tests:
2DA V2.0
It has one portrait for all the player races and gender plus the hu_f_girl_ portrait for female humans. The portraits folder is empty. The po_hu_f_girl_?.tga files are in the override folder.
However when I create a new char regardless of race I can always select 10 portraits for male chars and 11 portraits for female chars. These portraits are the 6 male / 7 female portraits from portrait.2da plus 4 other portraits that are not in my portrait.2da and that are the same for both male and female. The order however depends on the selected race - I always get the portrait(s) matching the selected race first.
In the toolset I can only select the portrait(s) matching the race/gender of the NPC (if the checkboxes are marked of course).
Perhaps there’s a switch somewhere that allows selecting portraits regardless of race but I haven’t found it.
I have tried putting the portrait 2da in the override folder to see if that worked…nope it did not.
Hmm…I wonder if putting all the portraits in my override folder will work with the 2da portrait like you suggested. This is just stupid…you think the developers would have made it so like other 2das it would just select what the line gives in the 2da. I’m hoping someone else has a solution before I go through all the trouble of naming conventions again. I have like 1100 portraits…that’s a lot of work. It would be really nice to separate them into race and sex. Thanks for your attempt though…much appreciated.
Why does it say to put “po_” at the beginning when the 2da for the hard coded portraits for the game do not have that prefix?
This link does not say if a capital “P” will read as a small case “p” …i.e. case sensitive…what if you go through all that work and then it is case sensitive. It does not mention that in this link. In link above the example is: po_dw_f_01_h.tga. But, in the “racial types 2da” which it references it uses this “Dw” instead of the example of “dw” for dwarf…same for the rest of the races…all of them start with a capital instead of a small case letter.
As for case sensitive above - the “gender 2da” also uses the capital “F” for female but in the hardcoded game examples in the portraits 2da it uses lower case “f” (dw_f_01_) which is it? Same goes for the sizes (H, L, M, S, T) when in the hardcoded (NWN) portraits it uses the naming convention in lower cases (h,l,m,s,t)…so which is it?
It uses “or” as the naming convention for the half-orc (or_m_01_) but in the “racial type” 2da it uses “ho” for half-orc.
Nowhere in the actual portrait 2da for the game does it use the “He” for half-elf…yet in game you have the half-elf portaits…so does it use the “hu” for both human and half-elf then? The article does not state this.
They need a better detailed article AND CONSISTENCY between the portrait 2da and the raciatype 2da and the gender 2da and they need it for portrait sizes (case sensitive or not?) and they need to explain why the “po_” is NOT used for the game resource portraits but are required for our own portraits.
I’m sorry you’re having so much difficulty understanding this. What you just said isn’t right at all.
Take a step back and reread this thread and that link. See the Custom Content Guide for further examples.
For a given portrait name, the po_ prefix is required for the .tga images but is omitted from portraits.2da. This is just how it is. Every portrait has to follow that rule.
The portrait name has no meaning. Bioware may have used names like dw_f_01_ but to the game that’s just a meaningless string. The race and gender are determined by the numerical fields in portrait.2da.
Focus on that, do all your new entries in lower case and all will be well.
Forget about other 2da files. They were designed long ago and don’t always follow the same rules. That’s just how it is.
In short, use the standard naming convention for the images.
Put the images into your documents/neverwinter nights/portraits folder
add and entry into portraits.2da. In that entry specify the gender and race with numbers in the right columns. The names in the portraits.2da don’t need the po_ or the _h (or other sizes), or the file type.
Put the saved/modified portraits.2da into you documents/neverwinter nights/override folder. Give it a try.
Just try with one portrait (which is 5 different sized images of course).
Good luck!
Thanks for the answer Proleric…I will need to do the “po_” and the sizes “h,l,m.s,t” in small case too on my portraits. I will leave out those out of the portraits 2da.
So then after all is done…you are saying the races and sexes will then be filtered for character creation…correct?..I’m not talking about for the toolset…I want them to be filtered for when you create a character. I hope this works this next time around. Thanks man.
Hi JFK…thanks for your answer too. I will try what you recommend. I hope it works. I did try one pic with all lower cases for the portrait and it was for human male…but it still showed up for female and other races…sigh…will see what I did wrong. Cross your fingers.
You can do it. I just tried with a single portrait I downloaded. All I did was put the 5 different sized images in my portraits folder. Then I opened my portraits.2da, copied a whole line (single entry) for a human male, and pasted it farther down over a “UserXX” entry. I changed the number to be the right line number. Then I copied the part of the image file name between the po_ and the _h, and pasted that into my entry over the original name.
I saved the portraits.2da onto desktop so it wouldn’t mess up the original, then I moved it to my override folder. I started the game and tried creating a female human, and couldn’t see the new portrait. I backed up and tried a human male, and there it was. So, it should work.
Don’t give up.
So you guys are saying this above entry on my portrait (TGA) should be thus:
po_attila_h
(and the other pic sizes also in small case for the same portrait)
And then my Portrait 2da should be thus:
1348 _ attila _ 0 6 **** 0 ****
(small case)
Is that correct?
If not…please just show me a sample of your 2da with the corresponding portrait names for that segment you post. Sorry to be such a pest…just want this figured out…shouldn’t be this freaking hard for me…lol…sheesh…but dam this has made me feel stupid.
Finally…examples are the best…I see now thanks JFK :)…and all you others for helping…much much appreciated.
And after doing this naming convention…this should filter them into their proper sex and race on character creation…so no more seeing all the portraits mixed.