Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition Continuity Project

Prince_of_Lies

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition Continuity Project
A Project by Prince_of_Lies

The purpose of this mod is to allow players to have access to additional content (portraits and soundsets) for player characters and to allow the player to use the original BG portraits for certain NPCs. Additional content will be added later. However, for now, this is all.

CONTENTS
Installation
-Override
-Portraits
-Sounds
Tools Used
Future Plans
Legal

INSTALLATION
OVERRIDE
The contents of this folder contain the BG portraits of Edwin, Imoen, Jaheira, Minsc, and Viconia. Simply copy and paste the portraits you would like to use to your "C:\Program Files (x86)\Baldur's Gate II Enhanced Edition\Data\00783\override" folder.

PORTRAITS
The contents of this folder contain the bonus portraits added by the Enhanced Edition of the original BG. Simply copy the portraits and place them in your "C:\Users\[USER]\Documents\Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition\portraits" folder.

SOUNDS
The contents of this folder contain the default character sounds from the original BG, simply copy the sounds and place them in your "C:\Users\[USER]\Documents\Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition\sounds" folder.

TOOLS USED
Dragon Lance Total Converion Editor Pro
Notepad

FUTURE PLANS
Currently, I am working to add a functionality that will search the "final save.sav" to see which NPCs are alive, and which ones are dead, and have BG2 reflect this. I am also looking to possibly have an alternate start where, instead of Minsc and Jaheira in Irenicus' dungeon, they are replaced by Montaron and Xzar.

LEGAL
All content presented within is unaltered from its original form, and is owned by Wizards of The Coast (C).

[Deleted User]

While I don't envy you the task of trying to fix the continuity between BG1 and BG2, I do appreciate the portrait folder. It bugged me that my Cleric/Thief that used one of the new BGEE portraits couldn't import with the same portrait before.

Dee

@Prince_of_Lies‌
I've removed the attachment; posting the new portraits in bulk like this isn't an acceptable way to "mod". (This is primarily because the new portraits and sound sets are DLC content on the mobile versions of the game.)

The conventional method is to either instruct users on how to extract these things for themselves, or handling it with a WeiDU installer/extractor that does it for them.

Dee

Incidentally, the BG:EE portraits for the NPCs you mentioned already exist in the game's resources; you can write a WeiDU patch to update the cre files for each of them to use the BG:EE portraits, and that wouldn't require posting raw assets on the forums.

Prince_of_Lies

Sorry, wasn't aware of that. However, plenty of others may not have the patience to do this, hence why I posted the files. Besides, this is essentially just a override version of a WeiDU mod. I just haven't had time lately to compile an installer (typing this from work)

Dee

Totally understandable; but the override version allows someone who doesn't actually own the content to get access to it, which isn't something we can allow. I believe @Erg came up with a WeiDU solution for @Quartz recently, they could probably help.

Prince_of_Lies

Ah, that makes sense now. I can work with that. I have basic modding knowledge (just from goofing around with the game files with various tools), I'll take a look at WeiDU, any help is appreciated. However, that brings to question the sounds and extra portraits, technically even with an installer anyone could get access to that content...

Erg

Prince_of_Lies said:

Ah, that makes sense now. I can work with that. I have basic modding knowledge (just from goofing around with the game files with various tools), I'll take a look at WeiDU, any help is appreciated.

@Prince_of_Lies, first of all, feel free to use my code. You'll find it here. However, it will require changes in your case. For example, my code only extracts the large portraits, but you'll need also the medium and small ones. Also, my code extracts only the .bmp files in the appropriate dimension range, because the purpose was to extract all portraits not just the NPC's ones, but in your case it would be preferable to use the information in PORTRAIT.2DA instead of checking for dimension on disk.

Prince_of_Lies said:

However, that brings to question the sounds and extra portraits, technically even with an installer anyone could get access to that content...

No, the WeiDU installer doesn't contain the actual portraits, just the means to extract them from the copy of the game owned by the user.

Prince_of_Lies

Thanks! Muchly appreciated, still have the issue with the soundsets and non-npc portraits, though.

Erg

Prince_of_Lies said:

Thanks! Muchly appreciated, still have the issue with the soundsets and non-npc portraits, though.

If you need also the non-npc portraits, you can use two different approaches:

1) use the dimension on disk to filter the portraits as in my mod. Basically what I did was to extract all bmp files with names ending with L, but because some of those weren't portraits, I've discarded images that are either too small or too large in terms of bytes on disk. However I'm not sure a similar approach will work for the medium and small portraits too. So I recommend:

2) provide to the WeiDU script a comprehensive list of file names for the BMP files to be extracted. It will be what's in PORTRAIT.2DA plus other file names like MANLEY0L, MANLEY0M, MANLEY0S, MANLEY1L, MANLEY1M, MANLEY1S, etc. You can find all the names in NI or DLTCEP.

For soundsets, maybe, you can use an approach similar to 2) above and provide a list of file names for the WAV files to be extracted.

You'll have to make mods in pairs, for example a mod for BG:EE to extract resources from BG:EE, and a second mod for BGII :EE to install on BGII:EE the resources extracted by the first mod and vice versa. It's not ideal, but I think it's the only way to avoid legal problems.

Blades

Adding Monty and Xzar to CI would be awesome. They, along with Minsc, we're IMHO the most entertaining NPCs in the series.