*:EE: Re-rendering of play characters (avatars, ... i mean the ones with the circles around them?)

BelegCuthalion

i know original art files were lost, and that it was not possible to re-do those avatars back then when BG:EE was worked on. But in the new light of 2015, a BG2:EE, a IWD:EE, a decent patch level with the 1.3 patches, some financial success (i hope) and more games or materials coming obviously:

Is it within any consideration to just create new "original art files" (say: 3D models) and re-render them in high resolution, to make those avatars less pixelated and maybe with more animation frames?
– wish: for mainchar / joinable NPCs / and all those humanoid opponents (maybe that's possible?)
– wish²: for all the monsters and secondary characters too (likely too much work ...)

I'd pay for that if i had a crispy-crisp party traveling the beautiful background images ... the backgrounds scale very much okay when zooming, but the avatars right no just don't ... i think that would add much to the "enhanced" part and be an improvement for all the :EE-games together.

BelegCuthalion

secondary idea: maybe create the technical possibility to make that happen (highres, highframe support), and give the tools and examples to the community to let them do the hard work, based on some good licensing model?

elminster

Yea I'm pretty sure the graphics/arts department at Bioware was fairly large. You really only have to look at the credits of the original BG1 or BG2 to see this. I'm not sure how feasible it would be for a smaller company to address something like this.

BelegCuthalion

that's understandable of course ... just wanted to spark the idea, maybe it's falling on some fertile ground sooner or later.

Just thought of this last night again: standard zoom is totally okay in fact, but when zooming in to see a fight in more detail, there is just no more detail to see.

argent77

Another option to increase the visual quality could be accomplished by implementing a more sophisticated zoom algorithm. The calculations are done by the graphics hardware anyway, so it shouldn't have any noticeable impact on performance (at least on desktop systems).