The World of Avlis

This is perhaps a touch off topic, since it doesn't relate directly to scripting, but I wanted to make sure it got addressed by folks with some experience with the NWN back end and, perhaps, not waste the time of those that aren't by using the general forums.

My question is at once simplistic and complicated:

How the hell does the override directory work?

I had a ton of stuff in my override directory, none of it put there manually, I might add. When I used the installer for Avlis' hak packs it moved everything to override_bak/ and now there's only one file in override/, classes.2da.

Now, from what I've gathered thus far, there's no dummies on the staff with Avlis that would allow something to get publicly released with their name on it that would damage the game's file structures or content, which leads me to believe that all the crap that was in my override directory was either uncessary or redundant somehow... So I wanna know what the override directory is really for, and how it's used. Are the files there resources extracted from hak paks? Do resources there get incorporated in to other files somewhere? Should I put all that stuff back in, barring the classes.2da file which should be replaced? Etc...

Thanks in advance.

The Avlis custom content installers don't do that, Bioware's patch program does.

See, I would have thought that, except that I looked at the override directory right before running the installer to decide whether to compress the stuff there or not... Everything that was in it was relocated after teh installer ran to the override_bak directory. Could have been something else, I imagine, but I don't think I even ran the game between those two times.

I'll try to reproduce it.

What exactly should I have in my overide directory. I keep seeing people with no heads and missing body parts. So somthing must be missing.

Well, my original question was how the directory works in the first place... I'm just so damn wordy about things that it was lost in the shuffle.

My theory is that various resources get extracted from haks as modules use them and placed in the override directory. So the gaming I did with a module that I downloaded and its corresponding hak pak resulted in my override directory getting populated. I could swear that after installing NWN, then SoU, then updating both, the override directory was completely empty. I may uninstall and reinstall just to see.

Can someone fill in this gap for me, regardless? How does the override directory get populated? What types of resources can go in there? How do those resources interract with the retail packaged resources and what are they given in terms of priority with hak pak stuff that might overwrite them?