Baldur's Gate 2 - Enhanced Edition in 2013

Really? I'm somewhat of a graphics whore myself, but I think the IE games have aged very well.

Seems to be a problem with a lot of people with the IE games. I always thought the character sprites were pretty amazing. I really can't remember any games that had 2-D sprites that looked better than them.
 
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Yeah, they look fine. Just small. So... small.
 
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With a widescreen mod? That's why I don't play with those mods. Pixel hunting is tedious enough already. Hopefully the devs can scale up the sprites without them looking ugly.
 
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I generally don't use mods to increase resolution when I play IE games, as I honestly don't see the need. The UI works great, and the games look good even today.

I see the need to update such things when porting it to tablets and what not, but on the PC? No, not really.
 
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I always felt like the backgrounds of Baldur's Gate seemed blurry, even when I tried to tackle the game when it was originally released. It always made it difficult for me to figure out where I was and where I was going (simple things like finding a staircase can frustrate). I've made some headway through it in the BG trilogy setup and still have the same problem. Torment also seems a little blurry to me, but the more zoomed in camera helps a bit.
 
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I generally don't use mods to increase resolution when I play IE games, as I honestly don't see the need. The UI works great, and the games look good even today.

I see the need to update such things when porting it to tablets and what not, but on the PC? No, not really.

You're still using a CRT display? Most people use LCD's nowadays and if you arent using its native resolution the picture quality won't be very good. I think it's great they're doing a remake, not everyone is willing to go through the hassle of installing several mods for UI and resolution.. on the whole i think people using mods is quite small, nice for those people to get a release they dont need to mess with for hours before they can play with good picture quality.

@ rossrjensen: Blurry? I dont agree.. If this picture also is blurry i'd say you should change your screen: http://www.gamerdna.com/uimage/full/bgmain_2011-04-03_17-55-03-06-jpg.jpg
 
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@ rossrjensen: Blurry? I dont agree.. If this picture also is blurry i'd say you should change your screen: http://www.gamerdna.com/uimage/full/bgmain_2011-04-03_17-55-03-06-jpg.jpg

I have the game installed with all of the necessary mods and I would say it looks about like that screenshot does (though that screen seems slightly more detailed, is that a mod or not?). I think it's just a matter of the "painted backgrounds", the angle, the detail, or the colors in the the IE just not being very clear to me. Blurry is perhaps not the best way to describe it, but something has always felt unclear to me about it.
 
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Thats how it looks for me as well. I'm stunned folks find fault with it... but its the internet!
 
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That's zoomed too far out for my taste. I like to be able to see the characters better than that. What res is that, Vurt?

That's the beauty of the EE version though, or at least one of the things they're claiming. We'll be able to crank up the resolution without having it automatically zoomed out, but we'll be able to zoom in or out at will.
 
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That's the beauty of the EE version though, or at least one of the things they're claiming. We'll be able to crank up the resolution without having it automatically zoomed out, but we'll be able to zoom in or out at will.

Wait, wouldn't they need to remake all the sprites to pull off something like that though? With the actual 3d models, that were used as a source to render the sprites it wouldn't be much of a problem, but afair they said, that all the source art is lost.
 
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Wait, wouldn't they need to remake all the sprites to pull off something like that though? With the actual 3d models, that were used as a source to render the sprites it wouldn't be much of a problem, but afair they said, that all the source art is lost.

Good question… they're a little vague about how they're doing it, but here's a statement from Trent Oster regarding the graphics…


The first major improvement is going to be the user interface. The old Baldur's Gate interface was created around 640x480 resolution. Even with BG2 the user interface still had elements which were locked to 640x480. We are going in and re-writing the UI system to work for multiple larger resolutions and we are using the iPad 3 (at 2048x1536) as one of our target resolutions so the new UI is going to look amazing. One of our other major improvements was to convert the graphics completely over to OpenGL. By using the hardware present in all devices, we can run BG at higher resolutions and run it faster and smoother that it ever could before.

Our third major enhancement is the addition of the ability to zoom in and out dynamically during gameplay. Zooming out allows the player to be more tactical in the positioning of their party. Zooming in allows the player to search the environment in detail and have greater precision with actions. With regards to the background art and character art, we are limited in what we can do from a purely graphical context as the original art assets were lost. Since we have no 3D models or textures from the original games to go from we have to make the best of what is available.

We are currently researching a few upscaling algorithms to try and improve the quality of the existing assets. We are still experimenting with the game and testing out various ideas on how we can further improve the existing content, but we also took the feedback from MDK2 HD to heart and are focusing our content creation efforts on creating new content, not just prettying up content you have already played through.


On a side note.. how the hell do the art assets from a title like Baldur's Gate get "lost".
 
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@ JDR13: 1920x1200.. just something i found on google. the jpg compression makes it looka bit worse.

Yeah too bad the art is missing, but wouldnt surprise me at all if the resolution of the original art was quite low in the first place, that seems to be the case with many games, even today..
 
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I don't get that "art is missing" comment. In the past I've used the tools from the mod community to browse the character files, which have dozens of iterations of images to support the animations. Its all there. Maybe he's referring to something else. I don't know. I played BGTutu at 1366x768 which at first was distressing that everything was so small, but I quickly adjusted. I don't recall having any issues finding pixels.
 
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I don't get that "art is missing" comment. In the past I've used the tools from the mod community to browse the character files, which have dozens of iterations of images to support the animations. Its all there. Maybe he's referring to something else. I don't know. I played BGTutu at 1366x768 which at first was distressing that everything was so small, but I quickly adjusted. I don't recall having any issues finding pixels.

The character and monster sprites, and a lot of other art in Infinity Engine games (And Fallouts and many similar games of the era) were made by rendering low detail 3D models into 2d images. With the tools that the mod community has you can only look at the final files that contain 2d images. The original 3D models and animations used to render the images are lost. Some Fallout modders have actually managed to make new sprites by looking at existing sprites and animations and simply drawing new ones. Needless to say, that this process is very time consuming, because to make say a new character this way takes literally tens of thousands of frames of animation. Not to mention it's incredibly hard to make something that looks similar to the originals. Making new sprites this way takes a shitload of time.
 
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Tens of thousands of animations?? I really doubt that. The animations are quite choppy, its noticeable that not too many frames were used.
Well, i don't know the exact amount of frames needed for a single character in such a game, but it must be a lot if you add all the directions the sprites can face, variations of weapons and armor they can use, all their movement animations, idle animations, death animations (Fallouts for example had a lot of these) etc for every single combination of those weapons and armor and so on. Even making a character with a new haircut fur such a game must be a nightmare, because you can't simply use a tool to batch recolour a single colour for example. You must touch every single frame.
 
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It's not like those are individual animations though, they're recycled many thousands of times for each individual clothing / armor combination.. If a character has a new armor it needs a new sprite.. Must've been hell, it's easy to understand how superior 3D really is when thinking about this hassle heh
 
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