christinetooley wrote...
I'm newly returning from a long stay at NWN 2 and am planning on using NWN1 as a 3d virtual table top for mapping. I can see all the appearances in the toolset but 80% of them are not available on the palette without manually adding them. Am I missing something? Is there a base mod with appearances already added to palette?
Thanks for suffering a re-learning noob!
The full answer is that NO, not all appearances are available at all. The reason behind this is the 16k max total that the game engine can handle. When you log into a PW especially, as a DM, there are hundreds more pallette entries that are required. If everything had a pallette entry, the total count would well exceed 64k, which is more than double what it takes to make the game and/or server crash.
This has been a problem for a LONG time. We, users, dm's, builders, cc artists etc, have begged and begged for that number to be expanded but according to Bioware (before they completely dropped support) it was not possible without a complete re-write of the main engine to use 64 bit addressing. That would have eliminated well over half the users at the time who at that time were struggling with Vista, and could not yet get XP64 to work correctlly.
Anyway, what it all means is that you are stuck with a max of just under the 16k limit 16*1024 == 16384 - 1 I think so 16,383. The number may actually be a bit lower than that, and it may be possible to find that answer using the way-back-machine to search the old forums for discussions about the 16k limit on the pallette.
Basically, if you don't have a specific requirement and need for that specific pallette entry, then don't add it. Believe me, we are all frustrated by those issues.