urknighterrant: Do you REALLY want me to do this? Do you REALLY want me to showcase your complete lack of knowledge in a public forum?
MagicalMaster: Go for it.
...
Let's look at this thread in particular (can look at others, but given that this is a GoG thread it may been seen as more palatable):
http://www.gog.com/forum/neverwinter_nights_series/silver_skin_characters_cannot_start_game The original poster with the problem said the critical rebuild fixed the issue they had and marked it as the solution.
...
OK, Fine. Make it easy for me.
I have no intention of taking your entire position apart point for point because I have... well... a life... and it would take DAYS to explain it all to you, so lets just take a closer look at this particular link. This is like the third time you've cited it and it really does stand tall as a monument to the epic scope of your wrongness.
Perhaps I should preface this with some accreditation. You have probably never heard of me, but my community name is "Urk". I am known in the CC community as a minor dabbler. I am not a hall of famer or anything like that. In fact that's not even the kind of work I do. I don't do the kind of work that gets mass downloads. I do the kind of small but helpful jobs that
those guys use. For example... back when the CCP was a thing I fixed several of their broken or inadequate textures with "Urk's CCP reskins". All were adopted into the CCP and most have survived to be incorporated into the CEP since they absorbed that project. I mention this, of course, because in order to do this I actually had to learn how the graphics worked in-game which bears directly on the "silver skins" issue .
Other contributions of Note are "Urk's DM tools" some of which I believe have been merged into the last version of DMFI, "Urk's Random NPC conversations" which have been adopted by a number of mod builders and PWs, "Urks 1.69 Horse Stable" which has been adopted by a number of builders (notably including Lord of Worms' "Arbor Falls" PW).
I may not be the best of the best.... those folks mostly still hang out on the Bioware forums... but I'm one of the most knowledgeable people you are likely to find frequenting the GoG boards.
Now... Silver skins...
This is kinda lost knowledge since the old bio forums went off-line, so most people don't know this, but when Bio released NWN every creature model had TWO skins. One was a basic texture, and the other had a much higher resolution. I don't remember the exact formats (I stopped doing reskins almost a decade ago) but I'm pretty sure the basic textures were rendered in .PNG and the high rez textures in .TGA.
When you start up NWN it checks your graphics card to see if it's powerful enough to support it's high rez textures. The problem is that while every graphics card currently in production is powerful enough to support these skins, some (for a variety of reasons) can't actually display them. The result is a glitch. When a creature actually spawns it appears to be pure white or silver because the graphics card is not able to display the texture that the game is trying to use. It has NOTHING to with GoG or the way the game is "patched". It's just the way the game works in conjunction with some modern graphics cards. You would have exactly the same problem if you had purchased the game on disc.
The opposite problem has also been known to occur when early custom content creators uploaded creatures that only had high rez textures. It didn't take us long to figure out that this was a bad idea, though.
Anyway...
When the critical rebuild was first created Bioware made a conscious decision to keep the file size small by not including the high resolution textures (they're fricken' huge compared to the basic skins). Because it replaces all the games critical files the end result is that the critical rebuild strips the high resolution skins out of the game completely. This means that after a critical rebuild the game is forced to display the basic skins regardless of your rigs native graphic card. This just happened to fix the "white skins" problem when it began appearing with newer graphics cards. White skins became silver when even newer cards began handling lighting differently.
Keep this in mind next time you say running the critical rebuild "doesn't hurt anything" because some players might consider stripping the high rez creature skins out of the game to be "hurting something". This is why I recommend only running the critical rebuild if you
need to.
GoG is a retro gaming site. Getting old games to run on newer machines is always problematic. GoG does an excellent job making these games compatible with modern machines, but they cannot be reasonably expected to test their games on every possible graphics card and hardware configuration. Some people are not cut out for overcoming the issues of retro gaming, and those people can get pretty loud on the forums. But just because the games don't run perfectly right out of the box on every machine does not mean GoG made a mistake or did anything wrong. They have been as responsive as humanly possible with compatibility issues, and I for one would rather thank them for their reasonable efforts in keeping these games alive rather than unreasonably and unfairly criticize them for perceived "failures".
