Uglified wild/war/moon dog avatars

[Ghreyfain]

Just recently Galactygon was wondering how to get the Greater Basilisk animation to work in BG2, and devSin told him (and me, indirectly) about the mblah.bmp files.

 

So, the problem/bug: Wild, War, and Moon dogs look funky in BG2. I mean really, really ugly. A comparison between the first two from BG1 and BG2 indicates that there is in fact a problem.

 

The solution: Copy the mdog_wa.bmp and mdog_wi.bmp files from BG1 to use in BG2. For the moon dog, we could just rgb shift one of the others so it looks ghostly white/blue.

 

I'd attach stuff, but that's not permitted, and I don't feel like uploading/linking until people agree that this is a bug.

[SimDing0]

Is bug.

[Caedwyr]

Bug

[SimDing0]

hey, i heard bioware PURPOSELY changed the bg2 dogs to be ugly because bg1 was getting bad reviews, people said it was TOO good graphics!! so they changed it in bg2 to balance it out and not draw attention so much, and because of that they were going to call the dogs lahl but that got cut so UB anyone?

[Kish]

It's something to fix, for certain.

[icelus]

plz to not give spoilers of future UB content kthxbye

[Caedwyr]

Could the funky .bmp's be the cause behind the neon gnolls in Tutu?

[devSin]

we could just rgb shift one of the others so it looks ghostly white/blue

This is the version I'm using locally. Download it, try it, and decide if it should be included in the fix pack (it's not quite what you had in mind, but I'm really wary of making it too light).

 

MDOG_MO.gz (Gzip, 4K)

 

Could the funky .bmp's be the cause behind the neon gnolls in Tutu?

No.

[Ghreyfain]

There are neon gnolls in Tutu? Heh.

 

And wow, that's a quite blue dog. I want to tinker around a bit with it. Shame the shadow gets lightened, too.

[devSin]

And wow, that's a quite blue dog. I want to tinker around a bit with it. Shame the shadow gets lightened, too.

A limitation of the method used to fake the color variations. Note also that color glows and similar effects will also affect the shadow at certain points (unavoidable; I really hate the ToB dragons because of this), and the shadow will occasionally lose its transparency.

 

I tried making a lighter version locally, but it really didn't appeal to me. As it is now, the dog should appear dark blue (might-as-well-be-black blue; because we're reaching the range of the spectrum, some people might see purple instead). Cerebus has a color glow effect, and he'll glow from the dark blue to a much lighter blue (so he does indeed look magical). I'm not sure if the moon dog in Watcher's Keep has a color glow or not (if not, the dark blue looks way better than a lighter blue).

 

You have to be really careful: if the variation is too wild, it will just look plain stupid in-game (see the multicolor dragon or, for an extreme case, the unused Yaga-Shura animation to see what happens if the colors aren't just-right). I also have no idea how the table is ordered (obviously, it chooses a different index for the various parts of the animation, but I don't know what the magic order is). It's either a generic algorithm (applied the same way, but will look different for each animation) or a specialized one (it's hard-coded so that color x will be drawn at point n on the specific animation). Whatever the case, you can't mix and match them (if you use a table from a different animation, the colors won't be applied as expected, and if you try to use one of the existing tables that's already screwy, it won't look any better, no matter what colors you give it).

 

Worst case scenario, you can just give it the standard war dog or wild dog colors and then use a permanent character color effect to alter the color (it won't be as precise, but it will allow for some variation).

[devSin]

But make sure to let us know how it turns out.

[Ghreyfain]

Oh, oops, I forgot about this entirely. I tinkered a bit and actually managed to find something I considered pretty decent in-game, and looks kind of light (since the originally funky one was light, too, I figure that's what they intended).

 

Let me get a screenshot up.

 

[devSin]

Can you post the BMP anywhere? I want to compare to see which version I want to use locally (or rather, whether I should go back to the drawing board or leave it alone).

[hlidskialf]

FRom the screenshot it looks quite good. *Crosses Fingers*

[SimDing0]

Can you not add a bit of transparency or something?