Custom Portrait - Weekend wasted

avinsin

Hi
To make it short. I have made a complete party with customized portraits. All the portraits I created showed up in the portrait selection during character creation. But when starting the game only two of them showed up to the right - the rest was blank.

I have been careful getting it right. I made the files into 210x330 24bit .bmp files and ended their names with capital L.

BUT!!! for some reason, I wasn't aware that I started the filenames of four of the portraits with capital letters and two of them with small letters.

All of the four portraits, where I started with capital letters, didn't show up at the right sidebar. I tried to look it up on the forum. I could see it was suggested to rename the files so that i didn't start out with a capital letter. I did that, but it did not work. Then I saw someone suggesting to make a copy of the file and rename it so it ended with M instead of L. So that there where to of each of the "problem files". It didn't work, and looking at it logically I don't see why it should since there are not copies ending with M of the files that are working.



I would really appreciate if anyone had a solution to this. I spend the better part of my weekend (and Monday afternoon/evening) to find the perfect character portraits, getting them just right, getting the image size etc. right, then trying a thousand solutions because I could not get the portraits to show up in the portrait selection part of the character creation part, and now this...
It was really supposed to be an enjoyable trip down memory lane and instead it's been a frustrating waste of time and my computer was lucky it didn't get to go on a trip out my window

Hope someone have an idea. Anything would be appreciated

JuliusBorisov

@avinsin Install and run the EE-Keeper, with it you will be able to easily fix your portrait problem.

Mirandel

Also, it looks like Medium and Small variations still might be needed, just try to add them too.

BillyYank

Have you made sure that the filenames are 8 characters or less, including the "L"?

ThacoBell

http://www.notra.fr/portrait.php
This webpage can help. Select the game, drop your file, and it will autoformat it for you.

Leokosta

Your best bet is to use EE-Keeper, like @JuliusBorisov pointed. Its easy, you will see

Grond0

avinsin said:

All of the four portraits, where I started with capital letters, didn't show up at the right sidebar. I tried to look it up on the forum. I could see it was suggested to rename the files so that i didn't start out with a capital letter. I did that, but it did not work. Then I saw someone suggesting to make a copy of the file and rename it so it ended with M instead of L. So that there where to of each of the "problem files". It didn't work, and looking at it logically I don't see why it should since there are not copies ending with M of the files that are working.

I suspect you may have just changed the file names (in Windows Explorer or equivalent) without altering the file location. When that happens I think BGEE doesn't treat them as new files and the changed name doesn't register. If you want to avoid using EEKeeper then actually move the portrait files to a new location, check that the file names are all lower case (you don't need a capital L or M at the end) and then move them back.

BillyYank

Grond0 said:

avinsin said:

All of the four portraits, where I started with capital letters, didn't show up at the right sidebar. I tried to look it up on the forum. I could see it was suggested to rename the files so that i didn't start out with a capital letter. I did that, but it did not work. Then I saw someone suggesting to make a copy of the file and rename it so it ended with M instead of L. So that there where to of each of the "problem files". It didn't work, and looking at it logically I don't see why it should since there are not copies ending with M of the files that are working.

I suspect you may have just changed the file names (in Windows Explorer or equivalent) without altering the file location. When that happens I think BGEE doesn't treat them as new files and the changed name doesn't register. If you want to avoid using EEKeeper then actually move the portrait files to a new location, check that the file names are all lower case (you don't need a capital L or M at the end) and then move them back.

I would also start the game in between. So, move the files, start the game so it sees they're gone, quit the game, then rename and move them back. You could also just change the name instead of only changing the case of the letters. Forex, instead of changing Fight01L to fight01L, change it to fghtr01L.

MonHo

I had the same problem. I got tired of using EE-Keeper to manually fix the portrait problem. So, I found the problem and then solution.

Problem: Contrary to the original BG, the picture for the sidebar is not the small version. It is the Medium picture that is used. Small is used for the dialog box.
Easy fix: have all three portrait versions. But, the problem showed up again occasionally. I checked file names and dimensions. They checked out. On a whim, I decided to move the medium and small pictures to the Override folder to see if they would override the Portraits folder. They did. Problem solved.

My final solution:
1. Have three pictures at 210x330 pixels labeled with L, M, or S at the end of one of each. (EE game auto resizes pictures as needed)
2. File names must be less than eight characters including LMS suffix.
3. Matching pictures must have matching file names excluding LMS suffix.
4. Capitalization matters. All of my custom portraits a renamed in all caps.
5. All custom portraits with the suffix L go in the Portraits folder. No others.
6. All custom portraits with the suffixes M or S go in the Override folder and not the Portraits folder. A copy of L can go there too as it makes no difference.

TL\DR: EE uses picture with suffix of M for sidebar. Move custom portraits with the suffixes M or S to the Override folder.

BillyYank

1. You don't need all three if they're all the same. Just use the L, and the game will resize it and use it for the other two. You don't need the S at all, one of the developers said on the forum that only the L and M are used.

4. I keep hearing that other people have problems with capitalization, but I've never had a problem with it. All my portraits are mixed caps.

5&6. I put all my portraits in override. There's no reason to split them.

Now here's the fun thing to do with your portraits:
1. Create a text file, name it "M_stuff.lua", where "stuff" is a name of your choice that's not more than 6 characters. Like portrait names, the name of this file must be 8 characters or less, and the first two must be "M_"
2. Put this in the file:

function addPortrait(name, gender)
	table.insert(portraits, {name, gender})
end
addPortrait('FDwCl01', 2)
addPortrait('FDwCl02', 2)
addPortrait('MHuWr01', 1)
addPortrait('MHuWr02', 1)

The part between the single quotes is the name of the portrait without the [LMS], and the number is a 1 for male or 2 for female.

Put this file in your override along with your portraits, and now your portraits will show up in the portrait picker under the correct gender.