Portraits.

How does one access the portraits available in the game? I was a) thinking of uploading Doc Roberts and a few others to our gallery b) make one of the half-elf portraits available to elven characters, because I want to. But how to do it?

 

I undatted arcanum3.dat and found the portraits folder there.

However, it seems that if I name the portrait I want to use "ANY01.bmp" or somesuch and make a corresponding entry in the userport.mes file:

{1}{ANY01}

Then the portrait doesn't show up on character creation. Of course, there's always the option to name it ELM1, but then it will replace one of the regular elven portraits, which isn't a biggie but the perfectionist in me wants that ANY prefix to work.

Naming the file ELM2, ELM3 and ELM4 simply replaces another elven portrait and ELM5 won't show up at all. Appears to be a cap of 4 portraits per specific race/gender combination.

 

Heh, it seems that I simply hadn't properly changed the file extension of the .mes file. Turns out I had a file called userport.mes.txt in the portrait folder.

Remember kids, always set Windows to show the file extension of known files!

 

Mind you, I'm still puzzled as to why it worked the first time around, when it replaced the default elf portrait. :?

Computers are scary.