New entries for 2das and utcs

[Archonon]

Hello, seeking a little help on something I find a bit confusing.

 

I read in a recent thread that you cannot add new columns to the majority of 2das, as the game doesn't recognize new entries and has a set number (Specifically speaking, appearance.2da).

 

Yet I have seen the old MECK appearance.2das have over a dozen new entries (Such as the Jabba's Palace, Clonetroopers, etc) and of course these do work ingame. So I'm confused as to why these are there and they work, if appearance.2da cannot have above the vanilla 508 lines (The MECK one has 521). Other mods such as Brotherhood of Shadow also have addtional lines above the 508 so why can't the game recognize any new ones I enter?

 

I'm trying to merge 2 mods, both have new entries in the appearance.2da. While the merged entries are saved in my custom 2da, the game doesn't recognize the 2 mod's additional lines.

 

I examined one of the npcs that's supposed to use the 2nd mod's entries and in the utc it is set to use a line higher than 508 (Meaning one of that mod's new lines). Of course since I'm merging 2 mods, those lines are further down in my merged 2da and the npc instead uses the appearance of the first mod which makes him look wrong.

 

In the general npc tab the appearance dropdown menu doesn't even recognize entries above vanilla. But if I open the npc as text I see the custom number of 511 or whatever. Yet when I try to change this to 525 and save, Kotor tool crashes.

 

So does anyone know what is going on here? I appreciate any insight that could be provided.

[Inyri]

I read in a recent thread that you cannot add new columns to the majority of 2das, as the game doesn't recognize new entries and has a set number (Specifically speaking, appearance.2da).

You may want to brush up on the difference between rows and columns. They're not the same

[Stream]

Also never edit a KoTOR or TSL file with notepad/wordpad etc (with the exception of .nss script files) as they won't save right and cause the crashing you mention, always use KoTOR Tool or K-GFF.

 

--Stream

[Archonon]

That's what I figured Inyri, but wanted to be absolutely sure.

 

Deadly Stream, I use Kotor Tool's own text editor option which resembles something like wordpad or notepad (The option that reads open as text when the file is in Kotor tool). Still it crashes nonetheless.

 

No one got any clues why the dropdown in an npc utc doesn't read higher than vanilla rows or why I can't change one custom row number for another in the kotor tool text editor?