How do I add my portrait?

I bet there's a very detailed instruction at www.terra-arcanum.com in a setion with custom portraits. Search for your answer there.

 

Mmm...nope, can't find it.

 

I checked and couldn't find it either even though I'm sure I read it there. I'll look for it tomorrow and if I succeed I'll give you a link.

 

Assuming you're talking about character portraits, you might check HERE.

 

I see that due to Luchaire some of my info is obsolete. Anyway the same instruction, and many others, are in World Ed manual too. You should have this manual if you have 1074 patch. It may come in handy when you want to tinker with arcanum.


On second thought I decided to copy/paste the instruction in case someone had the same question in the future and wanted to use the search engine. (and besides we can't allow people to leave us for DoA).

Portraits (userport.mes):
Userport.mes allows the mod builder to make custom portraits available to the player.
Each portrait is a 256 color BMP file that is 64 x 64 pixels. Its name should have a three letter
prefix which is 2 letters for race and one letter for gender. This prefix defines which race-gender
combination of a PC or NPC can use this portrait.
The race prefixes are
HU - human
DW - dwarf
EL - elf
HE - half elf
GN - gnome
HA - halfling
HO - half orc
HG - half ogre
The gender prefixes are
M - male
F - female
Special prefixes
NPC - this portrait is useable only by NPC's, regardless of race or gender
ANY - anyone (PC or NPC of any race or gender) can use this portrait
Examples:
{1}{ELM1} means there is a portrait named data/portrait/ELM1.bmp which is
only available to elf males
{2}{ANYpretty} means there is a portrait named data/portrait/ANYpretty.bmp
which is useable by anyone
{3}{NPCbob} means there is a portrait named data/portrait/NPCbob.bmp that is
available to any NPC but not to PC's
For the larger versions of the portraits you can create a 128x128 BMP and append "_b" to its
name. So if you have a regular portrait file called ELM1.bmp you can create another called
ELM1_b.bmp to be used for the bigger portrait. This does not have to be added to the
userport.mes file, the game will automatically detect and use it. If the _b file does not exist, the
game will simply scale up the smaller version.

 

Ah, thanks a lot.
Now, a slightly different problem. The game accepts 256 colors. And most 16/24/32-bit photos look crap when turned 256. Anyone know a good way to do this?

 

When it comes to editing graphics you could contact (pm them for example) nbrosz or Milo. Perhaps they know of a way.