Cant save modifications to Tyrants OC with Aurora

Aragorn2001

First post on the forums here. Not sure if this is Modules or Builders question, and I'm not a builder per se...just a guy who wants a couple simple modifications. BUT...

Playing Tyrants of the Moonsea - first time through the campaign but with a prior legacy character. I want to change behavior of a couple of the stores - specifically their limited gold supplies. I don't want to just give myself money because I want to keep the feel of the game intact. I can change the file type from NWM to MOD and open in Aurora, and I can change the gold behavior just fine. But I have a couple big problems next--

1) I get an error message trying to save the file. "There is already an official NWN campaign module called TOTM....Please pick a different name". No option to ignore and save anyway.

2) If I pick a new name and save the module, I can't change the file type back to NWM. Or I can manually do so (click name, rename with the right extension type)...but it doesn't change the recognized file type in Windows explorer, which remains MOD

3) If I do manually rename the mod file type back and stick it back in the NWM folder, I open my save game and there's no character conversations. No dialogue pops up. Otherwise as far as I can tell everything behaves normally...but I can't sell anything without a dialogue box.

Can someone help please? I'm really enjoying the campaign except this really annoying behavior.

Proleric

As far as I know, once you copy an official campaign, all you can do is play your version (.mod) as a Community module, starting from the beginning.

Changes in the toolset have no effect on saved games, because a saved game contains its own copy of the original module information.

If you know what you're doing, it is possible to tweak a community module's saved game using NWHak and GFF Editor. The former will export and import selected game objects, the latter edits those objects at field level.

I don't know whether that works for official campaigns, but it might be worth trying.

Nothing should ever be changed in the Beamdog Library. Such changes generally don't work, and may be overwritten by new releases.

Aragorn2001

@Proleric Thanks man. I was unaware of those facts, but it makes sense. I wonder - is there a way to get into the copy of the saved game module info? I suppose that wouldn't work if I saved progress under a new name.

What makes me think is - when I did mess with things, the save game booted up normally and also ran normally, except for no dialogue. I would have thought it wouldn't run if I'd done something completely wrong.

I'll look into NWHak and GFF editor. I started looking into GFF but then decided to try the Aurora set first. Is there any particular documentation/tutorial on NWHak and GFF that you'd like? Cursory google seems to be...somewhat fragmented.

Proleric

GFF format is documented here:
https://nwn.wiki/display/NWN1/GFF

It might seem a little intimidating, but when you open a game file with GFF Editor you will see that the fields have meaningful names and that changing them is fairly intuitive.

There are more detailed formats for some resource types:
https://nwn.wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=327727

NWHak is easier - you open the .sav file, highlight a resource, choose export from the top menu. Edit the resource with GFF Editor. In NWHak, import the modified file and save (you may need to call the output x.sav then rename it to the original manually).

As always, take backups before editing.