The reason it is so painful to implement new sprites is precisely because of the reason that sprites are a pig, a real disgusting pig to work with. Anyone who has ever tried both ways will agree with me.
Every single sequence has to be carefully rendered, checked, sequenced and stored by hand, and in the case of the Baldur's Gate games, stored in the ancient and decrepit bam format, for which I am not aware of any tools for that are not horrible to work with. From start to finish it is a painstaking and unforgiving process which sucks hours and days out of your life in exchange for results that are in this day and age hardly worth it to look at. You want a new monster? Well you need to render 1000+ images and put them all where they belong and every single one has to look nice and god forbid if they also need to be paletted, you have even more of a headache...
Creating a 3d model on the other hand, is in comparison an absolutely pleasurable experience. The tools to create them are refined, mature, stable and powerful, and the results generally look as good in the game as they did in the editing environment they were created in. As long as your renderer understands the information your 3d art package exports, you can create practically whatever you want to and see it in the game instantly. The only limit to speak of is how passionate and dedicated the artist is.
I don't think I can say it strongly enough, the difference between working with sprites and models is like the difference between a dream and a nightmare. There is a bloody good reason that Beamdog/Overhaul don't want to create any new sprites, and I am fully on their side, I wouldn't wish that torture on anyone. But at the same time, _they_ have the source code to the renderer, _they_ brought it back into this decade, they should _know_ what the logical next step is, especially after seeing how well it has worked for the spiritual successor to these games.
They can stay away from sprites all they want, i'm with them, but they said that even creating new models and using them is impossible due to expenses, visual inconsistency etc.
What can i say?
Maybe when they actually decide to create something new visually.
Personally, I have zero interest in upgraded graphics, but I guess I'm just a sucker for nostalgia.
This is a valid concern. If you do too much to alter the visuals, you risk alienating people who like the game's visuals just fine the way they are, the people who kickstarted the original BGEE. There are some of us who have been playing these games for 17 years, where any change is heavily scrutinized. It would be really bad if they put all that effort into 'updating' the graphics to have the response of 'why did you do that? I liked it the way it was'.
They could do it Monkey Island:SE style and provide two renderers: the existing method with 2D low res sprites, and a modern 3D renderer or 2D high res sprites.
Since none of this is ever going to be done by the devs, we may as well put forward the best ideas =D
Comments
The reason it is so painful to implement new sprites is precisely because of the reason that sprites are a pig, a real disgusting pig to work with. Anyone who has ever tried both ways will agree with me.
Every single sequence has to be carefully rendered, checked, sequenced and stored by hand, and in the case of the Baldur's Gate games, stored in the ancient and decrepit bam format, for which I am not aware of any tools for that are not horrible to work with. From start to finish it is a painstaking and unforgiving process which sucks hours and days out of your life in exchange for results that are in this day and age hardly worth it to look at. You want a new monster? Well you need to render 1000+ images and put them all where they belong and every single one has to look nice and god forbid if they also need to be paletted, you have even more of a headache...
Creating a 3d model on the other hand, is in comparison an absolutely pleasurable experience. The tools to create them are refined, mature, stable and powerful, and the results generally look as good in the game as they did in the editing environment they were created in. As long as your renderer understands the information your 3d art package exports, you can create practically whatever you want to and see it in the game instantly. The only limit to speak of is how passionate and dedicated the artist is.
I don't think I can say it strongly enough, the difference between working with sprites and models is like the difference between a dream and a nightmare. There is a bloody good reason that Beamdog/Overhaul don't want to create any new sprites, and I am fully on their side, I wouldn't wish that torture on anyone. But at the same time, _they_ have the source code to the renderer, _they_ brought it back into this decade, they should _know_ what the logical next step is, especially after seeing how well it has worked for the spiritual successor to these games.
What can i say?
Maybe when they actually decide to create something new visually.
Since none of this is ever going to be done by the devs, we may as well put forward the best ideas =D