Art Resources from Lionheart
Mordeus
Member Posts: 460
There was a thread over at Spellhold that talked about extracting the art resources from a game called Lionheart. It was concluded that it was extremely difficult to so and the idea of taking screenshots and stitching them together would be the best way about doing this.
I'm planning on recreating the art resources but I just need to know if this has already been done. Particularly how far the makers of the Classic Adventures mod got in doing this.
I just spent the last hour stitching together the "Barcelona Port District" map. I still have to recreate the north sections and remove the smokestacks but it looks like I got the bulk of it done. The area would be a perfect location for a Calimport map for the basis of a ToB expansion mod.
I'm planning on recreating the art resources but I just need to know if this has already been done. Particularly how far the makers of the Classic Adventures mod got in doing this.
I just spent the last hour stitching together the "Barcelona Port District" map. I still have to recreate the north sections and remove the smokestacks but it looks like I got the bulk of it done. The area would be a perfect location for a Calimport map for the basis of a ToB expansion mod.
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I also found an old game I haven't played in ages called Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood that has some really beautiful maps. Just did a quick stitching together of one of them, the only problem is the colours need to be desaturated somewhat. And that for the larger maps it takes ages to clear them of items and people.
I think this one might be a good candidate for The Way Inn located north of Baldur's Gate. Nearly fits the p&p description perfectly.
awesome idea, the shots look amazing.
Looks like it would make a great ToB map. Possibly a candidate for a Kara-Tur township. I could thrown in the concept of the Twisted Rune's portals to explain traveling to such a faraway land.
So if I was to make maps of every area in Lionheart, I'd have about three times the number of maps used in ToB. If anyone wants to collaborate on a ToB expansion mod, I could provide the visual resources.
I estimate there's around 30 major maps with under 20 interiors to be reconstructed.
I left the people in this time, because I think I can script them out along with the fountains, fire, smoke, etc... That would make things alot quicker than running around massacring them.
[edit] Interestingly in deleting the area effects, I've isolated the temple district map to a single building. So therefore I can make copies of the map objects themselves and build maps up from scratch. There's alot I can do with this.
You can further edit out the characters, fire, etc... from the map through erasing portions of the .zax file and then it's just a matter of taking screenshots and stitching them back together.
Left: Object placed on water tilemap.
Right: Object against white background.
Works pretty well, just a matter of going through every single one of them and creating a resource library. Then I can pretty much build entire cities and dungeons from the ground up. I could even build an entire region of the game from just these art resources, so it would come in handy when building up the area around Calimshan. Reuse the same building elements and swap a sand tilemap under it.
The bad news is that there are 4787 elements to isolate :S
Everything in Lionheart is pre-rendered instead of in BG, so the .zax file assigns the environment models co-ordinates, eventually building up a game map from bare building blocks. No art resource is fixed in Lionheart. So you can move the models around the map or delete them via some code.
What I've done to isolate the elements is create my own game map for testing. One that is completely empty aside from a surface made from an acid green tilemap (to emulate a green screen effect). I then assign one of the environment models to the center of the map, by using the background eraser tool I then erase the green screen tilemap from the screenshot taking all of that colour out. Most of the elements have a faded transparency effect (like the submerged foundations in the hut example) so the background eraser method is vital to retaining that.
As for doing complete screenshot stitched maps of existing areas, the "fog pusher" bit of code will reveal the entire map as if you had applied the ExploreArea() Cheat Console command in BG. Then it is just a matter of building up the perimeter of the map and filling in the center with screenshots. There isn't many background effects, water is largely stationary except for ripple and wave animations that are timed to come and go. The only tricky bits are the fire and smoke effects but you can remove them out of the .zax file that assigns them onto the map.
The format that stores the environment models is insanely hard to crack without the developer's tools. But at least none of the models are fixed and can be manipulated, so you can salvage them with accuracy. Compared to the old cut and paste method used in salvaging BG resources.
Great job! Isolated trees would be awesome!
I'm no fan of the Tethyr region but logically it makes the most sense to focus on. Particularly because ToB is underdeveloped and that the level cap gives way more room to move in. From looking through 2ed supplements the best candidate appears to be the location of Darromar. It has a population of 60,000 up to a peacetime size of 100,000 which for the purposes of the Bhaalspawn Saga makes it half the size of Athkatla (130,000-140,000) and just nearly double of Saradush (39,000). The other BG2 location of the Trademeet only comes in with a population of 6,000 within its' walls. So Darromar is completely doable, especially when the maps above are big enough if I was to use them as is.
Also there's a simple logic to the layout of Darromar. Could be constructed via four area maps to represent the city's quarters, each quarter has a central watchtower. The Royal Quarter is pretty much a royal palace, gardens a garrison similar to the Flaming Fist and the Dukes of Baldur's Gate. The Black Quarter is the working class area of the dockyards and the blacksmiths, like Athkatla's docks. The Temple Quarter is pretty much identical in tone to Athkatla's one. While the Caravan Quarter is like the Trademeet. So Darromar is all the past cities/towns rolled into one.
The only problem is the Ithal Bridge, it's supposed to fit 4 wagons at once but there's no bridge of that scale in Lionheart, so that will be the only resource I'm going to have to make from the ground up.
I'd suggest just grabbing Athkatlas bridge district and reimagining/reworking it to be an area unto itself, a 5th area..
Do you not require sleep?
If he was a college student I'd say he had deadlines looming and was trying to distract himself.
@Jarl I'll probably do just that. But only once I get enough resources to do it all in one go. I might release them in a wilderness and city package.
@Drugar It sounds like a big undertaking but I'm just going to make the map, while the quests and character interactions will be left up for someone else to use the areas. I figured that since BG2:EE is looming that I'd contribute what I can to expanding that and graphic work is what I'm best at. But this isn't going to happen overnight, the ETA of even one quarter of the map will probably be a month's time. I have around 8 hours of free time each week so I just use it to get some mod stuff done. I'm using this as a bit of a break from the FOF mod because I was finding that I needed to get some perspective back with it. I had been through so many of the spells that I lost a bit of my critical thinking. In the downtime of that I'll work on this because I've done pretty much all the graphic work for the FOF mod, so I can use those skills here.
@Eudaemonium Yeah I'm a college student but a pretty atypical one since I go to a design university. So that means largely no written assignments and no exams. Instead I just have to create design work that gets assessed, so when it comes to deadlines I can do all the work of a semester in the first week or so. Combine that with a part-time job and I have more free time than I probably should have.