Using Project Q Deer with CEP

Neverwinter Nights 1 Custom Content
1

Hello, folks.

Due to a recent move I had to take a leave of absence from here for a little while, but now that my husband and I are settled I have found myself bitten by the NWN Toolset bug and want to get back to module creation. I recently looked over the most recent releases of CEP and Project Q and decided to use CEP for my next project.

Unfortunately there are a couple of creatures from Project Q that I don’t have access to with CEP : a small selection of deer that use an updated model. Along with a plain brown buck and doe, there are also deer that have a “whitetail” skin, and some spotted deer that can be scaled down and used as fawns.

In CEP there is only a brown buck that uses the updated model. All of the other deer options use the old model which doesn’t look near as nice. It was disappointing to see that even the white stag uses the old Bioware model in CEP.

I’ve done a bit of hak editing in the past, so I’m familiar with exporting resources and placing them in a new hak, but I’m not entirely clear on how I can make the “Pretty Deer hak” play nicely with CEP. Could someone here who is more knowledgeable on the subject point me in the right direction?

Thank you in advance. :slightly_smiling_face:

2

In general, to use Q (or any other) creature models with CEP,

  • Add a custom hak to your module containing the new models and their textures

  • Add a custom top hak (one with higher priority than any other) containing a merged version of appearance.2da

The model names can be determined from the corresponding lines in the source appearance.2da.

The textures are found by searching the ASCII models for bitmap directives.

The merged appearance.2da is a copy of the file found in the CEP top hak, in which some of the lines not in use for CEP are modified to make new appearances with the new models. The appearance.2da lines in the source hak will be a good template for these new lines, with the exception of the line number, which has to be one that CEP is not already using.

If the new model names happen to be the same as the Bioware / CEP models, you don’t need to edit appearance.2da, just ensure that the source hak has higher priority than everything except the CEP top hak.

For more detail, see Custom Content Guide.

P.S. I can’t find a hak called “Pretty Deer” but the principals are the same.

3

Thank you for taking the time to explain it. I knew it could be done, but I knew it wasn’t as simple as just associating both CEP and Q to a module.