List of portraits presented on character generation - possible to change?

polymorphedsquirrel

So,
I know I can override the portrait files themselves, as well as of course add custom portraits.
One problem is that I can't see any way of enabling filtering those custom portraits by gender, and thus have to scroll through all installed female portraits before reaching males even when I specified the gender as the latter.
Second is that I see all portraits of existing NPCs first, which I don't want to pick and would rather skip entirely.

Is the list of those MAN1..HVLN etc files hardcoded, or can a mod actually change that aspect, ideally solving also problem no. 1?

The only solution I see ATM is to override all portrait files listed on character creation - including NPCs! - with custom PC portraits and override .CRE files referencing those portraits to reference renamed files with their real portraits. This feels like a hack which might break much easier - and doesn't fully address problem one (albeit first dozen or so portraits would be always of correct sex).

argent77

Filtering portraits by gender can be done by making some modifications to the game files.

Make sure your portrait filenames conform to the naming scheme that is already required for custom portraits (i.e. portrait name plus suffix L for large and M for medium portrait). Filename length must not exceed 8 characters.

Open the file BGEE.LUA with Near Infinity and look for a structure starting with

portraits =
{
	{'MAN1', 1},

Add new entries to the structure which refer to your portraits. Each entry consists of two elements, the portrait filename without extension and L/M suffix as well as gender (1 for male, 2 for female portraits).

Example that adds a male portrait (MALE1L.BMP and MALE1M.BMP) as well as a female portrait (FEMALE1L.BMP and FEMALE1M.BMP) to the list:

1. Create a new folder "override" in the user directory of the game and place the BMP files into the folder. That way you don't have to deal with duplicate portraits, that were automatically added to the list by the game.

2. Expand the "portraits" structure in BGEE.LUA by two entries

portraits =
{
	{'MALE1', 1},
	{'FEMALE1', 2},
	{'MAN1', 1},

and save the changes.

And that's it.

polymorphedsquirrel

I don't have any simmilar file. In all three games I have only engine.lua in the game directory (which simply sets the flag as to which game is running) and Baldur.lua in my home directory with a bunch of 'SetPrivatePropertyString' storing my option settings.

I looked at Windows and iOS versions, all v2.5. Is it biffed? Inconceivable!

argent77

You need a resource editor, such as Near Infinity, to access the file.

polymorphedsquirrel

Or weidu That's even better, as I feared a lose config file couldn't be modified on iOS. It looks like it's packed completely in text json and thus trivial to patch with a script. Thanks, you saved me quite a bit of unnecessary hacking!

lefreut

You can also edit the UI.menu file if you want to do more complex change (hide some portraits for example).

You can also find a few UI tweaks that improve the portrait picker.

Or full UI mods, for example in my mods (among a lot of other changes) portraits are automatically detected as male or female based on the prefix (m# or f#) so you don't have to manually add all your portraits in BGEE.LUA.

polymorphedsquirrel

I have also a follow up question which answer should be probably obvious as it's been beaten all the time: what exactly refers to the *S.bmp files? Not creature files which in EE seem all to link to *M and *L images. Is it hard coded somewhere in the ui based on the name of the other files? I kind of hope they'll be done away with eventually, as on high dpi PC screens the party portraits are baraly higher than windows title bar...

lefreut

The enhanced edition no longer uses *S.bmp for portraits.