Beamdog's BG Remake and further speculation

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There. Looks 200% enhanced!

And without further ado:

That's more like it!

My fucking ass it is. There's no way bad jpg compression blurs IN SELECT PLACES only. Personal opinion? They loaded background files in PS, used a pinch tool to give it a 3D appearance, thought it looked 'good enough lol' and came up with some bullshit.

They really don't know what they're doing. Keep in mind Oster was lead for NWN. The best things about NWN were the toolset and multiplayer, aspects he had nothing to do with. The worst things were the plot, the dialog, the music, the plot, the characters, the retarded graphics, and the plot. They did a good job of implenting 3e, but 3e was far more crpg-friendly (tiered, linear) than 2e.

Unless they release new tools, and considering how much they're relying on existing mods and active modders to help make this game, I don't see that as likely.

You should do this everywhere and make a BG:EE:EE.

Very skillful work, J_C. If you don't mind, I've expanded upon your original concept and envisioned what the final version of the game might look like, with new ENHANCED touch-friendly interface:

That's brilliant.

it's missing the facebook/twitter button

'Lol, smeared that bouty hunter'
Though maybe Beamdog already has achievements infrastructure? They serve the same purpose for people who dislike composing text.

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)

Am I the only one who thinks the character sprites look better now? I'm trying to imagine them on top of the original unfiltered backgrounds. Shame about the rest of the graphics though.

Eh, I'm sure there's many people who think otherwise but I personally prefer the comforting clarity of being able to distinguish every individual pixel in a sprite from having a blurry, unfocused blob of colors on the screen. Makes me feel as though I'm running at a lower resolution or something.

I doubt backgrounds there are the only thing that is shit. Judging by how they want to sell us an arena quest for $20, backgrounds may be the most beautiful thing about this milkage.

And don't forget - they are planning on milking this with DLCs even further.


So I heard you think that old games can be raped with sequels only?

Pixelation is only an issue if running the game at small resolutions like 640x480 which I think original vanilla BG1 uses.

Great work! I'm glad that you remainded faithfull to the source material.

why do the backgrounds look so low res?

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.

*Phone & Tablet Edition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.