Home For Players CEP Community Expansion Pack v1.52 Update

Community Expansion Pack v1.52 Update

Update by Kephisto

If I may be so bold as to quote Jay Watamaniuk, BioWare's Community Manager,

"Thanks to their hours of finger-breaking and eye-straining labor, strong commitment to detail and quality, and focused vision, the CEP is an exceptional NWN must-have add-on. It is the culmination of two years' of community development, experimentation, and contribution. The CEP is the best of the best. It provides you with a single, integrated source of high-quality custom content for Neverwinter Nights."

If you haven't tried CEP, now is the best time to jump in and join the fun.

Once you download the CEP you can use it to run all CEP-compatible modules and PWs. The CEP does not affect your NWN game installation. It's simple, takes minutes to install, and greatly enhances the look and feel of your game. Whether or not you have other expansion packs, such as Shadows of Undrentide or Hordes of the Underdark, in all cases CEP works. Plus, just in case no one has had a chance to tell you - CEP is free.

Where can I get the new CEP v1.52 update?

• Get it from the Neverwinter Vault CEP Download page.
• The Players Guide (PDF, 515 KB) contains installation and patch instructions.
• There is also a Community Expansion Pack website.

How do I install this update?

It's relatively easy to install this update of CEP. Our new Players Guide (PDF, 515 KB) gives step by step instructions on how to bring any previous version of CEP up to v1.52. In short, its downloading the patch, unzip it, then picking a folder from it that best matches the latest expansion of NWN that you have installed. Copy what's in that folder into another folder in your NWN directory and you're done. It should only take a few minutes.

One of the advantages of CEP is that it does not affect your NWN game installation. It is perfectly safe to install it without risking anything with your other games and resources.

Builders have a few more steps after this but those details are also in our new Players Guide, which we highly suggest you take a look at. As we see it, it doesn't hurt to look.

Is there anything that a fan of the CEP needs to know about this update?

CEP Fans should know that the CEP Team really appreciates their using CEP and all the patience and support and suggestions they give us. We thank all of you for enjoying CEP.

Although its taken us longer than ever before to patch CEP, the newest version of the Community Expansion Pack is now available for download. This version includes all the features of previous releases and is fully compatible with NWN v1.66.

With a very special thanks to Lisa of the DLA team, CEP v1.52 includes 71 fixed human female heads. This is a vital feature for those using the CEP as recent changes that BioWare made to improve NWN caused virtually all community made custom heads for human females to look strange. It wasn't intentional. CEP v1.52 has the fixes though.

Here's an explanation straight from Lisa:

"In NWN Patch 1.66, there is a bug fix for human female heads that will allow helms and glowing monk eyes to work correctly - finally :)

In case you never noticed - human fems when wearing helms have the helm jammed down clipping into their torso like they have no neck and the monk eye glow was inside their cheeks instead of their eyes. Of course this ruins the look of all your military fems and lots of other outfits.

Side Effect: The fix alters the supermodel for female humans and will result in community made custom heads for human females to appear incorrectly situated."

In short, updating to v1.52 ensures that you get all the latest features of both Neverwinter Nights and CEP. The CEP Team is working on another patch to add more great content.

Will using this patch affect previous modules I have created using the CEP?

Using this patch will not affect your NWN game installation and won't hurt previous CEP modules that you have created. This ensures that those using v1.52 can play all the modules built with it as well as all modules built using previous versions of CEP.

This patch is a fix for the custom heads and updating the 2da files so nothing bad will happen to the modules you are working on. We humbly suggest that you read our new Players Guide, included in this new release, which gives more details for both Players and Builders to install and patch CEP.

Is there still talk of tilesets being added to the CEP or is another group doing a tileset pack?

I'm glad you asked. There's good news and great news. The good news is that I'm not working on tilesets - mostly because they're very large, complex, and make my brain hurt when it forces me to worry about technical jargon like geometry and patch nodes.

So while I really enjoy custom tilesets and know how much they enhance the game, I know I'm not personally working on them. However, I will be able to have fun with all the amazing tilesets that others have the talent to make. Which brings up the great news.

The great news is that there's a very special group called CTP, which stands for the Community Tileset Pack. They are working on creating an awesome collection of custom made tilesets which I hope becomes as much a standard for the community as CEP.

We're very excited about the work that the CTP is doing and can't wait to see their initial release. Tilesets are known to be very large and complex, but they're still making great progress and their future looks bright.

So while tilesets are not in CEP and CTP is a separate team from CEP, I'm proud to say CTP will work flawlessly with CEP. When CTP is released then everyone can enjoy both at the same time. They'll work together!

That's right, everyone! You heard it here first! The upcoming tilesets in CTP will work flawlessly with the great content in CEP! CEP and CTP - an awesome combination!

Like an insane evil genius working on a master plan to rule the world, let's all rub our hands together and say aloud - muhahahaha!

The CTP Team is still hard at work getting their tilesets ready for public release and will likely make a news announcement in the near future. I highly suggest that you keep an eye open for news on their site.

If you are interested in seeing some of the types of tilesets that will be released, take a look at their gallery.

I'd like to help the CEP. Who do I contact?

There are plenty of people that want to help improve CEP and there are countless ways to do so. To this end we have created a guild called the "CEP Alliance". This official extension of the CEP Team will give people an avenue to contribute to the overall advancement of CEP without committing to it full time. Members can freely work on specific fixes and improvements as their talents and personal zots allow. By directing and combining their progress with other members this collectively moves the entire project forward.

Due to the extensive size and scope of CEP there are numerous ways for members to participate, ranging from spell checking or translating documents and item descriptions to creating or improving new custom content. Other activities include updating 2da and tlk files, being active in the CEP Forum or answering CEP Support email, and just about everything else in-between.

We're still working on the details so we're not yet recruiting members but we will soon.

Taking a pretty big risk of drowning in Private Messages (PM), those willing to help CEP may send a PM to me - Kephisto. It may take some time for us to finish setting everything up but its one of the many things we're working on - making CEP better.

On behalf of the CEP Team, I thank BioWare for their incredible help and support which has made CEP a success. We also thank all the great custom content creators that made all the wondrous items in CEP. Without their generous contributions to the community CEP would not have been possible.

We are very proud of CEP and are working hard to improve it. We hope you enjoy it!

~ The CEP Team

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