Game shuffling portraits to avoid a doppelganger effect on meeting npc's?

BelgarathMTH

Hi, when I met Garrick, I happened to be using his portrait on my PC, and he turned up with Abdel's (Canderous') portrait.

Then, when I met Edwin, I had switched to his portrait for my PC, and he was using the male human portrait with the green hat and the sideburns.

If this is an intended feature, I find it very interesting. If not intended, then Garrick and Edwin are both bugged.

It's not really a good solution, though, since neither alternate portrait works for Garrick or Edwin. What we really need are a lot more PC portraits than were included, and just let the player decide if they want a doppelganger or not, and then switch out their own portrait if needed.

In fairness, the doppelganger problem has been there since the original release of the game.

If this was intentional, it is a very creative solution, even though I don't really think it works out very well as implemented.

Syntia13

It is intentional and it is as old as BG itself.

Dee

It's intended. There's a .2da that lists each portrait as well as an alternate that will be displayed if the primary is in use by the player.

Unfortunately, that table wasn't updated to account for the addition of BG2 portraits.

Unzip this into your override folder, and it should replace them more intelligently. (Note: only the NPCs with BG2 counterparts are adjusted.)

BelgarathMTH

@Syntia13, I don't remember the original disc BG1 doing that, but I know for a fact that the unmodded gog.com BG1 doesn't do that. If you choose an npc's portrait, when you meet them, you are going to meet your doppelganger.

BelgarathMTH

@Aosaw, thanks again, you're so nice to be so helpful and to spend so much of your time finding solutions for things.

It's not a problem for me yet, since I am not using either Edwin or Garrick, and those are the two portraits I keep wanting to use for my PC.

Eventually, I guess I'll just have to learn to create a portrait folder and start recollecting portraits. (I had hundreds of them in my collection from the old dimensions. )

But still, kudos to the devs for creating a program subroutine that might avoid immersion-breaking for any new players who might not know what all the original npc's looked like.

Dee

Gah, I should have updated Dorn to use the half-orc portrait, too. ( @Quartz should appreciate this) Here:

Syntia13

Oh? I can tell you for sure that this worked in vanilla BG2. I think it worked in vanilla BG1 as well. I recall someone mentioned on the forum that they were always using Jaheira's portrait in BG1, and Jaheira always had a portrait called 'woman2' (the one with the sword). When that person started playing BG2, they were very confused by Jaheira suddenly looking completely different.
Possibly it was GOG who broke the mechanic?
I can test this later, as I have a vanilla BG1 installed. I'll start a game with Imoens picture and see how she looks.

BelgarathMTH

Hmm, maybe I just have been sub-consciously choosing non-npc portraits for so many years, I just forgot that this feature was in the original program.

I then would only have just become aware of it, because of the lack of (good) new PC selections which forced me to choose old npc portraits for my new PC.