co8 modpack 7.8.0 portraits

No, I didn't really look into it any further ... might just be bits/bytes issue or something. I'll try to upload a similar .rar later and see what happens.

As to the portraits problem, I haven't figured it out yet. Looks nebulous. On one hand, it appears that we may have finally reached a portrait ceiling with the addition of all the new ones in 7.8, because I was able to get the IWD pack to work with only 7 portraits from it enumerated in portraits.mes, but if I went beyond that it would fail. And if I took one away from somewhere else (like NPCs or monsters), I could add another IWD number. However, this seems weird for a few reasons. One, the structure of portraits.mes does not indicate any limitations less than 1000, because there are slots available up to that number (400 NPC, 250 monster, and 350 PC). Those are nowhere near all used up yet, even with the largest packs (Royo and IWD). I think those use in the 600s or so. I topped out at something like 643 with IWD, which is a very odd number to have as a limit. Two, the Baldur's Gate pack works flawlessly, and it has more portraits than the IWD pack I trimmed down and is not subject to the same strange limitations. e.g., I can add even more portraits to the BG pack and it still works. So that's directly contradictory to my original theory.

Not quite sure what to do about this though. If I find some obvious flaw that is causing it to bug out, fine, but there are actually not a lot of differences between the packs. The monster and NPC sections are identical to the regular modpack version (which works), for example, which implies that the fault lies in the PC section. However there are no obvious flaws with the PC section either, as they are identical to the PC sections from earlier iterations. (That section never changes in portrait packs - only the NPC/monster sections get updated for compatibility.)

So anyway we could probably get them all to work just by removing the normal PC portraits from each portrait pack, which would cut down the number of portraits again but would also make the packs very strictly themed - e.g. Icewind Dale portraits and nothing else for your PCs. I also don't like the idea of not really knowing what's wrong. But hey, this is ToEE ... :no:

At any rate the other packs besides BG will have to stay offline for the time being.

 

I tested HB and all seems to be working well on my end. (Except that Krunch has the wrong portrait.) But if there is something fishy going on here, there may be spotty appearances of portraits anywhere. Has anyone else seen the white mouse pointers or other non-portraits in portrait boxes?

 

Okay, I found and fixed the issue, when came down to a single bad digit in a single line of a single portrait entry in the monsters field. I'm not sure why that hung up only 4 out of 6 instances of portraits.mes (with BG and the modpack version working), but regardless, they all work now as expected. Must be that portraits.mes is read by the game ... inconsistently. Whatever.

At any rate, I'm glad because it means that ToEE abided by some sort of logic at least this one time. No voodoo "the magic number limit is 643! 643!" coding.

I would be nice if we could get some independent verification that all the packs are working. They are all back up in the portrait packs download thread.

~

Incidentally, the error may have caused other unexpected snafus with the display of portraits like that which sirchet reported (random mouse pointers in HB, IIRC), since it seems like the error might manifest depending on what portraits have and have not been read. e.g., if I tested it by going straight to HB it works fine, but maybe not if you encounter lots of other NPCs before doing that.