This article has broken links. DFL July 2013. The Community Expansion Pack is what it says; a collection of packaged changes, they are used in a number of mods. It’s an omnibus package. This page documents my notes on how to install it. There are two versions of the CEP named, One & Two.

The version point names are not so easy to understand. I asked advice at http://forums.rpgdungeon.net on a thread called Community Expansion Pack V1. Now gone.

Installing CEP V1

I said

…requires the CEP.

Further investigation shows it requires amongst other things “cep1patch.hak” & “cep1patch150.hak”. I have found the CEP Index Page, together with the cep forums site.

The index talks about a bunch of patches and full installs at a version level. The current CEP V1 version seems to be NWN 1.68 which is what I require; that is the version of the game I have. I have installed the patch but given the error log, believe I need the base product. I am also a bit concerned that there is no V150 on the index page. Any ideas how I can proceed? Do I need to install a full version (i.e. 1.51) and then patch for .52, .53 amd .69? This probably won’t give me the *150.hak anyway?

And with help from Rastor, concluded,

The Full Install v151 contains v150 patches.

I downloaded a .rar, uncompressed, copied as appropriate, the cep.tlk had the same meta data (timestamps etc) as the v168 so I left it alone. The .rar has a sub directory for the OC, SoU and HotU. Since I have HoTU installed, I used contents of the HoTU sub directory and copied them to the ./hak directory in the neverwinternights folder.

This all works. Obviously the module I am testing requires V1 not V2 as I tested it with V2 and the game wouldn’t boot. nor create a log file.

I am assuming that the patches are cumulative, actually they seem not to be patches, in that they don’t overwrite installed files. They sit beside, or at least 168 does.

The CEP forums were at http//cepteam.dyndns.org/forums/index.php which seems to have gone away, I might check on the wayback machine some time.

CEP 2.3

There are two version of the CEP, they are not forward compatible. The current version at the time of writing is v2.3 which has an updater, so it’ll be easier next time. The package unpacks into a folder/directory and the test program est doesn’t work on 32 bit file names. There is a link/shortcut which should be used.

Making Games CEP 2 compliant

The Pretty Good Character Generator has a CEP 2 merchant, who only sells CEP 2 stuff. This means that characters that visit this merchant can’t be used in games compiled without CEP2 libaries and haks. This can be fixed by using the module maker kit. It’s quite easy to include the CEP 2 into a game. Next time I do it, I’ll document how, but you need a list of the hak packs which you can get from the disk folder and include them using one of the wizards. As I said, I’ll document it better next time I do it. This seems to work with “Journey of 1000 Miles” triology.

keywords: “Neverwinter Nights”, neverwinternights, nwn, cep, “Community Expansion Pack”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.