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Orc Paper dolls "Again"

I was making a half orc character when i realized the inventory doll is not the same as the in game doll, which buged me majorly, so, like many others before me, i googled it and found many Discussions from the past on this very topic. All of them seemed to be left in the dark at the end of them. So, i made a account just to ask the same thing,

Is there any way.. we can get the inventory dolls for half orcs working for the in-game ones for these of us that "Enjoy" the old half orc look.. please?

Comments

  • TwistedfangTwistedfang Member Posts: 2


    Cause to some people, the fact that it don't look orc enough, it bugs them majorly.
  • dibdib Member Posts: 384
    edited December 2016
    It's highly unlikely that Beamdog will ever make any new sprite animations for BG.
    Gallowglass
  • GallowglassGallowglass Member Posts: 3,356
    Agreed, @dib. A full sprite animation set requires thousands of frames to be drawn, it's very labour-intensive, and therefore very expensive. It's asking too much, they won't do it.
  • qwerty123456qwerty123456 Member Posts: 67

    Agreed, @dib. A full sprite animation set requires thousands of frames to be drawn, it's very labour-intensive, and therefore very expensive. It's asking too much, they won't do it.

    You don't think Bioware had drawn hundreds of thousands of frames, do you?
  • SkatanSkatan Member, Moderator Posts: 5,352

    Agreed, @dib. A full sprite animation set requires thousands of frames to be drawn, it's very labour-intensive, and therefore very expensive. It's asking too much, they won't do it.

    You don't think Bioware had drawn hundreds of thousands of frames, do you?
    Beamdog is not Bioware. Personally I prefer the old notion of halforcs being quite hard to distinguish from a human (it even said so in the descriptions), rather than the newer depictions of halforcs more akin to the warcraft/warhammer versions and/or with elf ears, huge tusks etc.
  • qwerty123456qwerty123456 Member Posts: 67
    Skatan said:


    Beamdog is not Bioware. Personally I prefer the old notion of halforcs being quite hard to distinguish from a human (it even said so in the descriptions), rather than the newer depictions of halforcs more akin to the warcraft/warhammer versions and/or with elf ears, huge tusks etc.

    Sorry, what does that have to do with my comment?
  • SkatanSkatan Member, Moderator Posts: 5,352
    The first comment was in reply to yours, the second part was a general reply to the OT. The latter one doesn't really add anything though, it was just my personal opinion.
  • GallowglassGallowglass Member Posts: 3,356

    You don't think Bioware had drawn hundreds of thousands of frames, do you?

    Tens of thousands, yes, although perhaps not "hundreds" of thousands. Animating the sprites was a major effort for them, and their team was bigger than Beamdog.
  • RelSundanRelSundan Member Posts: 918
    What do you think it should look like? The paper dolls in-game is not very detail rich. So, are you looking for tusks? Horns? Bigger teeth? Those are the small details that is left out of the in-game animations. This game is not a "graphic game." May I recommend Skyrim for ya?

    But hey, I agree. I would really love a really long beard. I would love to change haircut, maybe shave on the sides? Or bald? I would also like to make the rings visible on my character. Oh, don't forget the necklace!

    All that would be cool, but I wouldn't want to see someone do that labor job when more important features could be implemented, such as new patches, eventually a new game.
  • qwerty123456qwerty123456 Member Posts: 67

    Tens of thousands, yes, although perhaps not "hundreds" of thousands. Animating the sprites was a major effort for them, and their team was bigger than Beamdog.

    Well, arithmetics don't quite add up. You said a full sprite animation requires thousands of frames. A few tens of thousands will then result in maybe 20 full animations. Which is not the case in the game, obviously.

    My point being that I find it almost impossible to believe that it was all drawn by hand, without any kind of 3d modeling. To me it seems not a major effort, but an insane one.
    And even if that was the case, there's no reason why nowadays new models can't be created in 3d first.

    But yeah, I agree that Beamdog most likely won't work in this direction, anyway.
  • inethineth Member Posts: 707
    Bioware surely used some kind of 3D modeling to render the sprites.
    However, that doesn't mean it would be easy to create more of them now.

    They must have set up a work pipeline with all the necessary tools configured just right to output sprites in the way the game engine expects them, and spent a lot of time teaching their artists to work with that pipeline.

    This initial effort was worth it for them, seeing as they had hundreds of creature types to create sprites for.

    But it would hardly be worth it for Beamdog to re-create this pipeline and train new artists to work with it, just to change the sprites of one creature type.
  • GallowglassGallowglass Member Posts: 3,356

    Well, arithmetics don't quite add up. You said a full sprite animation requires thousands of frames. A few tens of thousands will then result in maybe 20 full animations. Which is not the case in the game, obviously.

    You only need a full animation set for playable races, which have to be animated for all possible movements, all weapon types, spell-casting actions, etc. - thousands of frames.

    For non-playable creatures, a subset will suffice, and often quite a small subset. For example, for an animal or monster which uses no artificial weapons and casts no spells, you don't need any of the casting frames, nor combat frames for small swords, large swords, blunt weapons, bows, etc., etc., which are a large proportion of a full animation set, so animals are very much easier to make - maybe even less than a hundred frames, instead of thousands.
  • KamigoroshiKamigoroshi Member Posts: 5,870
    The ingame sprites never quite matched the shown paperdolls. That was the case even in original, non-EE Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn. And it is still the case with the One Pixel Productions sprites/paperdolls within the EE's.

    That being said @Twistedfang it is possible to restore the original look of the Half-Orc sprite and paperdoll. All you have to do is to extract the sprite and paperdoll files with DLTCEP from the original BGII:SoA and place them into your EE override folder. The detailed process and further instructions can be found here. @lunar even provided an archive with *all* paperdoll files already extracted there, which could be used as-is. Although I'm not sure if you'd still need to find the sprites or if they're already included within that .rar file.
    JuliusBorisovThacoBelllunar
  • KamigoroshiKamigoroshi Member Posts: 5,870
    Indeed, it is expensive and time consuming to redo everything at this point from scratch. Especially for a small company such as Beamdog.

    To be fair, this discussion would have been more productive in Bioware's planning phase of BGII: SoA. Maybe then Baldur's Gate II wouldn't been known as the game with the 6th worst character customization system.


    ( 04:34 #6: Baldur's Gate II: Shadow of Amn )
    CrevsDaakSkatan
  • lunarlunar Member Posts: 3,460
    edited December 2016
    Err, the paperdolls in my archive does not work for te 2.0+ version of the game, sadly. Something in 2.0 patch and up broke them. They cause ugly green blocks around the inventory image, for some reason. They work for 1.3 just fine, if you want a more beastly half orc inventory look. I still use them in my Ipad 1.3 game.

    And, just to avoid confusion, paperdoll is the inventory icon that you dress up with armors and weapons/shields. Avatar is the walking/fighting image in the main game. Funnily enough, bg1 and ee paperdolls perfectly resemble the avatar in looks, but original bg2 paperdolls are a bit weird and different than the in-game look. They have more detail but look impractical and goofy a bit. I love them for their weirdness, awkvard look and the nostalgia.
    RelSundan
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