Understanding Portraits in EET (& Possible Mod Idea)

[Ulb]

25 minutes ago, jastey said:

Wait, I think I misunderstood. You meant if the NPCs are dead, whether the cameos are removed then? I do believe so, yes, but I am not sure about Coran&Safana etc. I think Xzar makes an appearance in all cases because he is a quest giver.

Most cameo NPCs have dialogue options that allow you to establish if they were killed in BG1 or not. Xzar, Edwin and Drizzt I am certain of, not sure about Coran & Safana though, as I rarely ever visit that area.

@4udr4n

AFAIK EET should by default change NPC portraits when you change campaigns. So BG1 to SoD (for NPCs that do have portraits for that campaign) and SoD to BG2 should happen the way you want. Having them changed when transitioning into ToB would probably require a new tweak since that was never a thing.

[4udr4n]

32 minutes ago, jastey said:

I think there's a misunderstanding here? EET does not spawn or "transports" any NPC into the next game that are not supposed to be there originally. You will not have one specimen of original NPC X in your group in Irenicus Dungeon because he was in the group at the end of SoD. This also means that no, EET does not remove any cameo appearances as they are the way the NPCs are meant to reappear in BGII.

Yeah, I understand it won't bring my party with me from one campaign to the next. But am I right in thinking that if I recruit a companion in BG, level them, make choices for them, dual them, rekit them or give them tomes etc, then they will keep those changes in SoD or BG2 as long as they would normally be a companion in the later campaign?

To help me understand this, is EET actually keeping a consistent .cre from first meeting the character and re-using it for all instances of the character throughout all campaigns?

29 minutes ago, jastey said:

Wait, I think I misunderstood. You meant if the NPCs are dead, whether the cameos are removed then? I do believe so, yes, but I am not sure about Coran&Safana etc. I think Xzar makes an appearance in all cases because he is a quest giver.

Correct, I'm asking if Tiax will still be found in Spellhold if he died (un)heroically in early BG.

36 minutes ago, jastey said:

ones that were written when the games were still separated work with different cre files for BG1 and BGII.

As I suspected, so mods that add a BG companion to BG2 will probably create a new .cre based on what the mod author thinks that companion should be like in BG2?

[4udr4n]

Just now, Ulb said:

Most cameo NPCs have dialogue options that allow you to establish if they were killed in BG1 or not. Xzar, Edwin and Drizzt I am certain of, not sure about Coran & Safana though, as I rarely ever visit that area.

Excellent, thanks. I don't think I've ever noticed that, though perhaps because I haven't actually played EET as far as SoD yet or played more than a handful of games with a PC imported from BG to BG2.

1 minute ago, Ulb said:

AFAIK EET should by default change NPC portraits when you change campaigns. So BG1 to SoD (for NPCs that do have portraits for that campaign) and SoD to BG2 should happen the way you want. Having them changed when transitioning into ToB would probably require a new tweak since that was never a thing.

That's great, and makes sense with what I've seen in messign about with this. The EET_Tweaks consistent portraits components presumably prevent this change.

[jastey]

1 hour ago, 4udr4n said:

But am I right in thinking that if I recruit a companion in BG, level them, make choices for them, dual them, rekit them or give them tomes etc, then they will keep those changes in SoD or BG2 as long as they would normally be a companion in the later campaign?

To help me understand this, is EET actually keeping a consistent .cre from first meeting the character and re-using it for all instances of the character throughout all campaigns?

Yes, that is what EET does.

1 hour ago, 4udr4n said:

As I suspected, so mods that add a BG companion to BG2 will probably create a new .cre based on what the mod author thinks that companion should be like in BG2?

They do, but mostly because they were coded before times of BGT and EET and "GlobalMove the cre from BG1" wasn't an option, and now we are stuck with different DeathVariables for BGII as well which make a quick change to continuous NPC handling impossible (including all crossmod content in other mods etcpp.)