Baldur's Gate Beamdog's Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 Enhanced Editions

[zerotol]

why do the backgrounds look so low res?

 

[MetalCraze]

That's DX10 effect not present in original BG due to technological limitations of the past with its evil publishers demanding quality from poor devs before the game goes on sale.

 

[sser]

*Phone & Tablet Edition.

 

[Ion Prothon II]

The blurriness is either texture filtering or anti aliasing being applied. It's a lazy way of removing the pixelation from BG's old art assets, rather than re-rendering the old backgrounds/character art. (which probably don't exist anymore)

Assuming the background components aren't just drawn as blurry, its' like they rendered the game screen in lower resolution (the original one ?) ... and then upscaled it to the screen size, using one of the standard texture filters. Which would be an extreme from their side, if true. I believe anyone who's been playing with DirectxX / OpenGL more than 5 minutes will agree with this.

At this moment, thanks to the presented efforts of Trent's team, I doubt they preserved any old assets, besides those hacked out from the released game.

 

[Gord]

Well, if you are stuck with/keeping the old low-res artwork, when moving to higher resolutions, you have two possibilities:
1) Show a larger area, with smaller chars/enemies on it, or
2) Scale them up artificially, which will look very pixelated. To mask that you can use some filters, but they will introduce blur.

I guess they might try to "fix" it now that they got called out for it by applying some more filters (e.g. unsharp masking), but there's not really any way to prevent it as long as they have only low-res sources and are not willing to redo them from scratch.

It's pretty similar to all the fake high-res texture packs that do nothing more than scaling up the original textures, blur/sharpen them a bit, adjust contrast and add some grain effect - at first sight it might look a bit better, but it's really just the same.

 

[Ion Prothon II]

What I meant was, it seems they didn't use option 2). Instead, they rendered first *everything* to a lowres image, and then scaled it up to the size of screen, applying therefore the blur to the *entire* image. The image quality is then far worse than after scaling and antyaliasing every sprite and background component separately.
In geek language: rendering to the texture and stretching it to fill the screen, using inefficient texture filtering (bilinear? ) .
And it's fucking wrong. Only a complete idiot would do it.
...
But hey, I bet nobody will complain when seeing this on the miscroscopic tablet screen.

 

[MMXI]

Believe it or not, all of the outdoor areas in Baldur's Gate actually fit together graphically, even though they are meant to be individual locations with hours of travel between them. I discovered this when I linked Beregost together with High Hedge in Photoshop. They link up perfectly, even connecting two halves of the same tree together. Not a pixel wrong along that entire border.

I then tried connecting a bunch of other areas to these two, all the way up to the zone north of Friendly Arm Inn (with the Ankhegs). While there are noticable borders between these other areas (between Beregost and the crossroads north of it), there are very distinct markings that do line up perfectly such as the roads and paths entering and exiting each area. It became obvious that the key graphical differences between each area were a result of messing with the brightness/saturation of each area post-render, meaning that the entire game world was probably created in one single continuous 3D scene at one stage.

So I went to work making a little OpenGL application that displays all of the areas connected together, with full zooming and panning. Each area was a texture mapped rectangle. Even that looked way better than these screenshots.

 

[Infinitron]

Believe it or not, all of the outdoor areas in Baldur's Gate actually fit together graphically, even though they are meant to be individual locations with hours of travel between them. I discovered this when I linked Beregost together with High Hedge in Photoshop. They link up perfectly, even connecting two halves of the same tree together. Not a pixel wrong along that entire border.

I think "perfectly" is a bit of an exaggeration, but yeah, I sort of posted about this on the cities thread:

Hmm...
http://baldursgategame.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Areas

 

[MMXI]

I think "perfectly" is a bit of an exaggeration, but yeah, I sort of posted about this on the cities thread:

Yeah, there is a very slight difference in ground colour in the centre of that border, but there are many trees that are connected up perfectly if you join those two areas, including a large one to the top of the border. It's pretty amazing and it shocked me when I discovered it.

Hmm...
http://baldursgategame.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Areas

Ah, looks like someone else has discovered this too then. It goes a little bit weird when you try to join up Baldur's Gate to the rest of the map though. Those areas that make up the city seem to overlap somewhat.

 

[GarfunkeL]

The city itself was always known to have been done that way. It would be so sweet if all the main areas of Baldur's Gate could be joined together to form one massive area. With the widescreen mod, it would look gorgeous.

 

[MMXI]

The city itself was always known to have been done that way.

Yeah, I know. It's obvious when you play the game. It's just that the Baldur's Gate maps don't connect with the rest of the maps nicely, which probably explains why they aren't connected in Infinitron's link. If I remember correctly, they are rendered slightly closer than the rest of the maps, and also have small overlaps so that if you try lining them up in the north western 3x3 space it all looks out of place.

It would be so sweet if all the main areas of Baldur's Gate could be joined together to form one massive area. With the widescreen mod, it would look gorgeous.

Do you mean the city of Baldur's Gate or the whole game world? If you mean the city then yeah, I agree, as there's no travel time between its maps. One thing you would lose is the ability to use the map edges to "fast travel" to different areas of the city, but this was always annoying when trying to get to the north eastern section of the city with that dividing wall through the middle. You'd end up on the wrong side every time.

If you mean the whole game world then nah. It'd make the game world seem really small in my opinion, though I'd probably pay money to give it a try.

 

[GarfunkeL]

No, not the whole world. Just the city. Agree with the rest of the world.

 

[Gord]

What I meant was, it seems they didn't use option 2). Instead, they rendered first *everything* to a lowres image, and then scaled it up to the size of screen, applying therefore the blur to the *entire* image.

Considering that they (BD) said that Bioware deleted all the original assets and they didn't have access to it, it's unlikely that they re-rendered anything.
What they have is therefore mostly what came with the games.
It's also highly unlikely that they first scaled it down, to then scale it up again. Or rather, it wouldn't make sense.

I think (but of course I might be wrong) that it's simply due to blowing the original artwork up to "modern" resolutions and trying to mask it with filtering.
IMHO, the degradation in image quality is in line with what you get when filtering a bit too generously.

 

[Ion Prothon II]

Considering that they (BD) said that Bioware deleted all the original assets and they didn't have access to it, it's unlikely that they re-rendered anything.........

I'm writing about method of drawing shit on the monitor (yeah, that's what 'rendering' means), not fucking assets!

It's also highly unlikely that they first scaled it down, to then scale it up again. Or rather, it wouldn't make sense.

Nobody understands me!

 

[Turjan]

Nobody understands me!

Oh, I understood what you meant. That's how I, as a complete amateur in that field, make larger images from small ones, and while the result doesn't look completely horrible, it will always be somewhat blurry.

 

[Ion Prothon II]

Yeah, it's something like that

 

[Gord]

Nobody understands me!

Ah, got you. You had me confused by your usage of "rendered".
Ultimately the difference isn't that big (although the qualtiy will be even lower indeed) - even when doing the upscaling in Photoshop you will get blurry pictures.

 

[Turjan]

Yeah, it's something like that

I render stuff at work, but not for games. What I meant is creating larger images from small ones where you don't have a source and getting rid of the pixels by alternating up and down scaling with non-integer multipliers. For some game-related stuff, I made this image from this original. Of course, it's blurry. No idea how to do this professionally.

 

[Surf Solar]

It's nice that they reinforced my post several pages ago that I as a random internet retard can make crisper looking backdrops than those incompetent hacks.

So the codex needed 47 pages to realize this "enhanced edition" is shit? :D

 

[Volourn]

Nah. It'll need to play it 7 times before realizing that.

 

[waywardOne]

I'm still waiting to see what the engine fixes are. Asc64/ToBEx is a godsend, but there's still miracles to be had (maybe).

 

[groke]

Since this is a designed-for-tablets remake, shouldn't it go in the console forum?

 

[Pein]

Well no, you don't say. What amazing enhancements Trent Oster!

NOT!

Seriously, they didn't touch graphics ( LOL at native widescreen resolution BLUR), old npcs, they put new npcs with ROMANCES to overshadow the old ones, and didn't touch the story.

They also added an ARENA to BALDUR'S GATE, and we all excitedly wait to see the mysterious adventure Y that they will implement as well, along with any other additions.

They are implementing 1pp with BG:EE...

1pp? Seriously? Ok there are some things i don't get.

1) Some people didn't like 1pp, why force them to use it? Why implement it in THE GAME and not just make it compatible with BG:EE and recommend players to download it?

2) Why the fuck are they using mod stuff to alter even the tiniest part of graphics such as sprite tweaking that 1pp does, why not use THEIR OWN DAMN WORK FOR IT?

You don't alter graphics after 14 fucking years, you keep the same stuff and upscale it in a blurry mess, you use 1pp and call it a day?

What the fuck are you doing, Oster? What the fuck seriously.

There are still people that defend this piece of shit excuse for an enhancement after 14 fucking YEARS, nice.

 

[Ion Prothon II]

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Features

New Cinematics
All of the Baldur's Gate cinematics have been replaced with beautifully hand painted animated cinematics, directed by Nat Jones.

This is just ridduculous.
The animations in BG1 weren't bad and don't look awkward today. Back then, BW had enough IQ to not use the 3D for things it was unsuitable for, unlike the first NWN.

So, they want to replace this:


With something looking like this? That's the first thing I thought of, while readin 'hand painted animated cinematics'.

Or this, but with few fade effects, to pretend to be 'animated'


Who is this guy anyway?
http://www.baldursgate.com/news/2012/04/19/announcing-nat-jones-as-overhaul-games-art-director/
As for someone involved in graphics for fantasy RPG, he drew suspiciously few images with lesbian SM and that's not a good sign.

 

[waywardOne]

Jesus fuck. All this NWN revival shit is giving me cancer. Please let me just forget.