Weapon changes hands based on which way the character is facing

jlarose23

I didn't notice this until years later, and this probably isn't a bug at all, but let's say my character is holding a weapon in his right hand while facing south. Whenever I move him to face north he might be holding his weapon in his left hand. Next time you play, if you haven't noticed this, look very closely.

sarevok57

are you playing vanilla or ee? because in vanilla they will do that if your settings are set to low because it makes it easier on your hardware I've heard, and if you are playing ee, then maybe its just a setting that just stayed coded into the game and they didn't take it out?

TJ_Hooker

I'm pretty sure that's due to something called sprite mirroring. Basically, the image of the character when facing right is just a mirror image of the character when facing left. This results in some issues with weapons switching hands when you turn one way or the other. It's more obvious with a shield; the shield will always be held on the side that closest to you (i.e. the side that you can see). I don't think it was like this in vanilla BG1, but is a side effect of moving to the BG2 engine.

CamDawg

Yeah, BG sprites aren't mirrored i.e. the weapon is always in the correct hand. However, since they don't support dual-wielding animations we have to use the BG2 models. Without the original source, updating the BG sprites would be hand-editing several thousands of frames of animations.

jlarose23

Yeah I'm playing EE. This occurred with a scimitar/shield and a longbow. It's not a big deal but I do laugh everytime I see it.

AendaeronBluescale

The original Icewind Dale shows the same behaviour by the way.

Badmass

The whole hand swapping thing still happens as far as I can tell. Bothersome to those with extreme attention to detail but it doesn't effect the game play so no worries.