Zero visual improvements?
Arsene_Lupin
Member Posts: 181
One of the main reasons--THE main reason, actually--I had interest in this enhanced edition was the promise of improved visuals. I remember some old Trent Oster tweets about improving the visuals, and the only worrisome thing was that he said they were applying filters to make the old art look better at higher-resolution, because the original artwork had disappeared.
But, looking at the revamped site, it doesn't appear that there is ANY improvement. At all. The screenshots are low-resolution (1280 x 720) at a width that, IIRC, was manageable by the infinity engine itself. Where are the 1080p screens? And even more worrisome, the backgrounds appear identical. Worst of all, the character sprites ARE identical and look awful due to the fact that they're merely enlarged versions of the original sprites. And if that basic stuff isn't getting improved... at all... it's a fair bet none of the visual (i.e. magic) effects have been improved, either.
So, is there legimiate cause for disappointment here, or is this (yet another) case of the BGEE folks posting screens of an unfinished version of the game? Because $20 is a pretty steep asking price for the kind of content (quests, BG2 enhancements, etc.) that's been readily available in the mod community for more than a decade.
But, looking at the revamped site, it doesn't appear that there is ANY improvement. At all. The screenshots are low-resolution (1280 x 720) at a width that, IIRC, was manageable by the infinity engine itself. Where are the 1080p screens? And even more worrisome, the backgrounds appear identical. Worst of all, the character sprites ARE identical and look awful due to the fact that they're merely enlarged versions of the original sprites. And if that basic stuff isn't getting improved... at all... it's a fair bet none of the visual (i.e. magic) effects have been improved, either.
So, is there legimiate cause for disappointment here, or is this (yet another) case of the BGEE folks posting screens of an unfinished version of the game? Because $20 is a pretty steep asking price for the kind of content (quests, BG2 enhancements, etc.) that's been readily available in the mod community for more than a decade.
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Comments
There are limits to what filters can accomplish to improve the original areas, so the only big improvement you'll see in that area will be the ability to zoom so you don't have to play with smaller avatars on higher resolutions.
At the very least, will it be mod-friendly? Considering that, IIRC, we could mod the IE games to add/replace backgrounds and sprites, it would be nice if it would at least be possible to give modders the opportunity to re-create everything in high-resolution.
And no matter what resolution you play at, shouldn't the avatars be the same size? Otherwise, how would this EE version be any better than current HD mods? 'Cause right now, playing an IE game at high-resolution without getting a "zoomed out" image is quite literally the ONLY draw.
That's why I mentioned the zoom function.
As for modability. Some of the current modder tools need to be updated to work on BGEE, but the mod-friendliness of the originals shouldn't change much (though from what I've seen, its not that the BG games were particularly mod friendly, but that modders managed to overcome the limitations of the Infinity Engine).
http://www.beamdog.com/products/baldurs-gate-enhanced-edition
The character sprites, to me, look very crisp and improved. So unless they applied some type of Photoshopping to the photos to just pretty them up, there does seem to be some improvement. It looks like the character sprites have been anti-aliased in software.
Also @Arsene_Lupin, the new adventures were designed in 3D so all new areas should look pretty good. I admit the snow covered areas look boring but the new wilderness scenes look very good to me.
To me the professionally done characters, quests, class, etc. are all just icing on the cake.
To begin with, we haven't even seen the new UI, so at this point we don't even know if it really is new at all, let alone better than the old UI. Pathfinding was hardly an issue at all in ToB/TuTu. Load times are already lightning-quick on modern PCs and the game, or at least the GOG version, already runs perfectly fine on 64-bit operating systems (Vista and Win7).
So what does BGEE offer?
Well, new content. I'll admit it, I'm quite interested in the new stuff. But paid-DLC? Not so much. Not so much by a longshot.
And then there's the new UI... which we haven't seen... with a zoom-feature, which while kind of nice, is purely aesthetic--it won't change gameplay, nor will it improve gameplay due to the basic fog-of-war and line-of-sight mechanics at play.
And finally, the promise of being able to play the game normally at high resolutions. But the thing is, while every thing else on the screen--even the filtered backgrounds--will be able, ostensibly, to display at resolution close to at least 1600p (assuming Beamdog is being honest), the actual sprites will be locked in at the original resolution.
Which was very, very small.
Just how bad is it?
Well, the original Baldur's Gate displayed at a resolution of 640x480. No more. A (human) character sprite was approximately 55 pixels tall (from head to foot). That makes the sprite around 11% as tall as the screen's height.
So, great. But what does that mean for BGEE?
Well, take me, for example. I would be running BGEE on a 1080p monitor. That means a resolution of 1900x1080. Roughly 3 times the resolution the game was intended to run at. With BGTuTu and a widescreen mod, this results in zooming the camera out 3 times further than it ought to be, making the game unplayable (or, rather, unplayable as it was meant to be played).
But played as it's meant to be played, the 55px sprite will have to be enlarged to take up 11% of that screen.... which is about 124 pixels. So, basically, in BGEE sprites will be displayed at less than half the resolution of the background images and UI!
Which is, I think, precisely the reason why Beamdog has ONLY released very low-resolution screenshots.
As far as i understood, they won't just appear smaller.
To my knowledge, the procedure is to upscale them and then clear pixelation.
If anything they should appear crisper at the end product.
The zooming will be pretty deep so there would be no point to zoom up close to see a pixelated nightmare.
I believe for the money they ask it's fine, indeed a visual makeover would be sweet though.
Off topic, a question if anyone can answer. Are the art assets to Icewind Dale 2 available? Because, since they use the same art practically, if it existed they could use those assets to improve the graphics in BG ( in the future and if they get their hands on that).
In other words, if you touch Icewind Dale, please make sure the assets are there :P
wait till around September before the publish any more screen shots. Remember a Dev has to have everything approved before it can be seen by the public for the game they are working on.
There should be some ways to spice up the eye candy.
You're saying that Oster would publicly declare photoshopping the image to add anti-aliasing so it looks better than it would in game?
If he did that and then people discovered the truth by playing the game, wouldn't it be... well, disastrous?
I don't think he meant that. I think he meant big HD screens of today (like 27' 30' etc), not screenshots.
It would be an in-game feature, i can't imagine them adding anti-aliasing through photoshop in the screenshot.
Unless i understood what you meant wrong, and you mean they clipped the image with photoshop.
-Re-doing the art assets is something that seems simple, but is in reality a prohibitively large amount of work. There has been nothing that has stopped the community from re-doing any of the backgrounds, sprites, even the UI assets up until this point in the infinity engine AFAIK except for how much work it is.
-new UI is new, not just a colour-swapped/re-skinned BG2 UI. Alls I can say right now is, "You'll see".
-loading feels absolutely glacial on the old game compared to BG:EE... seriously. I'm on a Core i7 with a solid 7200rpm HDD and 16 gigs of ram. Every time I have to fire up the old game for reference, it's jarring how much slower it is.
-if you're buying the game on PC/Mac, you're getting the new characters and the black pits up front - the current extra content is only extra on iOS/Android. I realize "DLC" has negative connotations because it feels like nickel-and-diming and all the bad taste left in peoples' mouths by the big publishers, but, I think you ought to read some of the commentary Trent's provided with regard to how the industry has treated DLC before you offhandedly dismiss what we're doing.
-the game is very mod friendly - moreso than the original, I believe - and will continue to be so as we'll provide on-going support and are in close contact with most of the modders on the scene. So far things are great and of course we'll keep working with them to keep it that way. Supporting us with this is, I think, increasing the possibilities of what the modders can do to keep bringing the community more/better things, and futureproofing BG and BG2. Right now, existing mods should have minimal issues integrating with BG:EE - there may come a point down the line where a BG:EE mod will not be backwards compatible with BG2 due to various changes we've been able to make within the engine structure.
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So... yeah. If you're disappointed that there aren't more visual improvements in store, I totally feel your pain because that was one of the first things we wanted to do when taking on this project - a true "HD" version. With the source art gone, well... so much for that.
The bottom line for me here is that if you don't think the visual improvements are enough - cool, feedback received, thank you for expressing your opinion in a calm, collected way, and I totally respect that. I wish we could do more, and we'll keep working on improvements that make sense.
If you're here for reassurance, then, I can honestly assure you that we're doing what we can to make the game look great at every resolution we can. Will it be perfect? Of course not, we're working with 14 year old material.
If you're here to say you're not going to support us, well, alright! That's totally your choice, and I hope you change your mind later once you've had a chance to see what we've accomplished in action.
edit: formatting
Are the ingame art assets somehow hard coded or "packed" or in some way resistant to modification so that a visual rework is just way to impractical (time consuming) without the source material or what?
These 3D files that were the "source art" or "art assets", are usually stored somewhere, but Bioware lost them.
If you have the 3D files, you can change them, improve them, etc, and then make them into animations files again (BAM files).
Since the 3D files were lost, they can't improve the 2D images, they need to recreate them from scratch as new 3D files and re-BAM them.
Or something like that.
It basically works one way, doing the reverse is too much work for the end result.