Neverwinter Nights OHS

I've recently found myself back in the mood to play Neverwinter Nights, and in returning to the game I've realized that I've never gotten around to posting more about it here despite the fact that it's one of my favorite games. I won't waste your time or mine doing a lengthy review of the game; it's been around long enough now and enjoyed enough popularity in its day that most gamers should already know what it is -- and if they don't, more info on this Dungeons & Dragons game can easily be found. In this post I want to instead focus upon what is perhaps my favorite mod for Neverwinter Nights.

Like many of my other favorite games, one of the things I love about NWN is that there's a modding community that has produced for it more custom content than you can shake a +1 Longsword at. However, it took me a while getting around to enjoying the game and its massive library of mods because I thought that it was exclusively a MMORPG. While I might enjoy playing such a game with a few of my close friends, our schedules and interests rarely align to make such things possible; aside from that handful of gamers, everyone else I've met on the internet has proven to have drastically different ideas about gaming and it's likely we'd be unable to cooperate long enough to play an entire chapter of NWN, let alone complete the entire story. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that NWN has a single-player mode in which one can complete the entire game!

But there was just one catch: while there is indeed a lot of single-player content for the game, many of NWN's most popular award-winning mods are designed for multiplayer gameplay and thus would be drastically imbalanced for a single player. If only there was a way to create a party of AI-controlled companions...

This is where the OHS Henchman System becomes invaluable to players like myself. While the default game limits the number of cohorts a player may have and restricts the player's level of interaction with said cohorts, OHS allows the creation of a party of as many custom cohorts as the player is willing to keep track of. Furthermore, no modding tools or knowledge are necessary to accomplish such a feat; everything is handled in-game through dialog that avoids breaking immersion as much as possible.

The mod comes with a variety of pre-made cohort characters that can be summoned from the start of (almost) any module, but I prefer to play with a party of characters of my own creation. The easiest way I've found to do this is to use OHS in conjunction with a character-creation module like PGC3 (and there are several others) to create player characters, save them in the local vault and then register them as henchmen which can be summoned whenever I need them. While these cohorts are not as advanced in AI or as varied in appearance as the companions we've created and enjoyed in many newer games, they are sufficient to fill any roster vacancies in one's adventuring party. Most importantly, the behavior, equipment and level progression of OHS companions can be controlled and managed entirely by their party leader (that's you). I've been so pleased with the performance of my OHS companions that since discovering the mod I've never again used any of NWN's provided cohorts. In fact, I've become so accustomed to adventuring with sisters Dolci and Danuta (a barbarian and a rogue, respectively) that at times I forget that they aren't a natural part of the game.

So if you need an adventuring party for Neverwinter Nights but all your friends are playing Modern Warfare, or if you're just tired of Tomi Undergallows and Boddyknock Glinckle, I highly recommend that you check out the OHS Henchman System. OldMansBeard has done an exceptional job with the mod and deserves all the praise he has received. I feel that OHS has added a new dimension to my NWN experience and I'd wager that you'll enjoy it as much as I have.

Neverwinter Nights Nexus

To whom it may concern: Robin Scott has yet again expanded his game modding site empire by adding the Neverwinter Nights Nexus, a site which hosts mods for both NWN1 and NWN2. At the moment it's not quite as well-populated as the NWN Vault, but from what I've heard a great many members of the community were in favor of having such a branch of the Nexus so hopefully it will indeed be popular. As you may note from the first link in this post, I've already uploaded my NWN Female Portrait Pack as my show of support.

My thanks go to Dark0ne for continuing to support the prolific modding of games both old and new, and also to my friend Druuler for bringing the new addition to my attention because I had no clue that the site even existed.

More Faces

This afternoon I finally got around to finishing the update to my Neverwinter Nights Female Portrait Pack and got it uploaded:

As you can see here, this time around I decided to keep my word and in an attempt to be politically correct included a pair of Orcs (or Half-Orcs if you wish) for those players who simply must have female Orcs. I hate to disappoint my critics, but this endeavor required a bit more work than simply copy/pasting a couple of images and then running them through a color filter. However, I think my "morphing" skills were up to the task and I succeeded in maintaining a delicate balance between traditionally Orcish features and feminine contours. It also took a bit of tweaking to get them just the right shade of Hulk-green. Having made that reference now, I should also mention that it was totally unintentional that the short-haired one ended up looking so much like Lou Ferrigno...

Speaking of political correctness, those of you who are familiar with my RR Scouts surely have noticed that in my projects I generally attempt to maintain a level of variety where ethnicity is concerned. However, in this case such an ethnic balance unfortunately is a bit more difficult through no immediate fault of my own. The sources of the images I've been using simply aren't as diverse (and yet I found several images of elves...) Perhaps I'll do a third portrait pack and attempt to rectify that situation then.

And just as proof to the naysayers, the portraits do indeed actually work in the game:

And with that, I suppose it's time to either get back to actually playing something or to start on that third portrait pack...

FACES

Recently I was doing some testing of a yet unreleased version of NCCS (for newcomers, that's the NOSCO Companion System for Fallout New Vegas), a mod with which I've been affiliated for some time now. While the latest version hasn't been released yet, I've probably done about as much field testing as I can at the moment until our beloved NosCo CEO either sends me an updated version of the mod or decides he's satisfied with his own work.

Now, you might think that this testing has renewed my interest in playing Fallout New Vegas on a regular basis. Such, however, is not the case (but is in no way the fault of the mod I was testing). Instead, running around with all those companions reminded me of another game in which I had an entire party of cohorts: Neverwinter Nights.

I haven't played NWN since January, I think, which was when I uploaded the Female Portrait Pack that I created after I discovered OHS, a mod that would allow me to, in a convoluted sort of way, create my own cohorts for use in the game. Now I'm feeling the mood to not just play the game again, but also to put together an update to my portrait pack.

The images I used in my first portrait pack were not of my own creation; they were images that I gathered from a few specific CG sites. (This should please all my DoomWorld fans who will gladly tell you that all I know how to do is copy & paste the works of others.) I could just as easily have used pictures of celebrities, but that's already been done and the game is CG after all, so I wanted to stick with CG images without swiping them from other games. If you're interested, here are the 30 images that were included in the first portrait pack:

I tried to include faces that seemed appropriate to all the races, classes and alignments but obviously must apologize to all you Orc fans. Sorry. Also, I have no plans to do any male portrait packs. Hey, I'm a Lesbian after all, and make no apologies for that. Besides, I think I forgot to give the blue-skinned ones red eyes after I ran them through the color filter, so they're not lore-correct anyway.

While I admit that there was indeed quite a bit of copy/pasting involved, the project actually required a few more skills and a lot more time and work. You see, the way that NWN utilizes these images requires that there actually be five different copies of each image, each being a different size and resolution. Thus, my pack of 30 female portraits actually consisted of a total of 150 TGA images.

I'm certain it wouldn't be any trouble to round up another 30 or more faces from my collection that I'd be happy with using in the game. The real question is whether or not I'll follow through with making all the extra copies necessary to make them usable in the game. Now that I think of it, though, I could probably run a few through a color filter to give them green or gray skin that would seem Orc-like (though they'd certainly have better dental work). But like I said, they're not designed to please the lore-mongers anyway.

Yeah... I think I'll go flip through some of my image files...