BGII: Translucent Spell Effects like IWD?

[corvias]

I've been playing BG2 for years with a wide assortment of mods, including the Tweak Pack with IWD casting animations. Believe it or not, I've never actually played IWD, so I recently decided to try it out. I've never been impressed with BG2's spell animations -- even with this mod. They always seemed too opaque no matter the rendering mode or hardware. I was shocked at how much better the same spell effects look in IWD with the addition of translucency! Why isn't this in the BG2 engine? Or is it there but there's some line that has to be put into the config? Or is it something to do with how BG2 handles IWD's effects?

 

Here is an example of what I'm talking about. The shot below is of a mage in BG2 (modded with G3 Tweaks) casting Armor:

Notice that there is some slight transparency, but not enough for it to not look aliased and, well, like crap.

 

Now here is a shot of a mage in IWD casting the same spell:

See the difference? The IWD effect is using more transparency which looks much better in MHO.

 

Note that I kept the settings for both games as close as possible. 3d is on for both. The only difference is that IWD actually has a specific "Translucent Spell Effects" setting, but BG2 does not.

 

Can anyone share some insight?

[BigRob]

Hmm, I'm no expert (or journeyman, even) in the inner workings of the IE engine, but it might be that the improvement for translucency in BG2 was left out, perhaps for resource reasons back when the game was more cutting edge. Who knows, it might be activatable somewhere in the depths of the engine, but would probably be beyond WeiDU wizardry and may require an EXE hack. Of course, it might be possible to simply add a setting for it in the INI files.

[corvias]

Hmm, I'm no expert (or journeyman, even) in the inner workings of the IE engine, but it might be that the improvement for translucency in BG2 was left out, perhaps for resource reasons back when the game was more cutting edge. Who knows, it might be activatable somewhere in the depths of the engine, but would probably be beyond WeiDU wizardry and may require an EXE hack. Of course, it might be possible to simply add a setting for it in the INI files.

 

Yeah, I'm no modding guru either. I figured out which option in icewind.ini turns translucent spell effects on and off (Translucent Blts=0/1 in the [Game Options] section). I added this line into baldur.ini, but it had no effect.

 

I started doing some poking around in NE and found that there are .vvc's to control some aspects of spell visual effects, but not for the initial school-specific animations which display when you first cast a spell. I assume that means the parameters controlling how they appear are hardcoded into the exe. Interesting note: IWD dosen't use .vvc's at all. Setting different combinations of the translucency, transparency, and blending for various effect .vvc's didn't seem to do much either.

[devSin]

They're just handled differently. If you look at the BAMs, you'll notice that blending for the IWD visuals is done with black around everything that isn't straight transparent; BG2 doesn't display this the same way, so you end up with chunky looking visuals if you just drop them in (BioWare actually retooled all the IWD animations they stole to look good in BG2).

[corvias]

They're just handled differently. If you look at the BAMs, you'll notice that blending for the IWD visuals is done with black around everything that isn't straight transparent; BG2 doesn't display this the same way, so you end up with chunky looking visuals if you just drop them in (BioWare actually retooled all the IWD animations they stole to look good in BG2).

 

Could you give an example of one of these animations BW re-tooled and its IWD counterpart? I'm getting an idea for a mod here...

[devSin]

Editing BAMs is brutally annoying, but... look at most the spell animations (SPxxx.BAM). Just about anything ending in I or IC was ripped from IWD.

 

Basically, the black transfer is all gone, and everything is set on a background of transparent green (the first or second color index, which defines transparency). You'd have to not only remove the black surrounding the animation, but you'd have to remove the black that's overlayed by the translucent parts of the animation (the resultant color shouldn't be black+eerie spellcasting glow, but supergreen+glow). IIRC, this led to mostly removing all the glows and such (BG2 visuals are less "fuzzy" than IWD's).

[corvias]

Editing BAMs is brutally annoying, but... look at most the spell animations (SPxxx.BAM). Just about anything ending in I or IC was ripped from IWD.

 

Basically, the black transfer is all gone, and everything is set on a background of transparent green (the first or second color index, which defines transparency). You'd have to not only remove the black surrounding the animation, but you'd have to remove the black that's overlayed by the translucent parts of the animation (the resultant color shouldn't be black+eerie spellcasting glow, but supergreen+glow). IIRC, this led to mostly removing all the glows and such (BG2 visuals are less "fuzzy" than IWD's).

 

Hmmm. I wonder what their rationale was for doing that? They probably already had a bunch of BAM's done their way, and figured it was less work to just re-tool IWD's. I'm somewhat familiar with the annoying-ness of editing BAM's. I made some larger fonts for use in IE games last year. Fonts are particularly annoying since each character has to be inside of a one-frame animation sequence. It was brutal at first, but it forced me to write some very hackish tools to make the job a little easier, such as automating the process of creating the 254 single-frame animation sequences which comprise a font BAM.

 

I did the actual font characters in Photoshop and just made sure to export each one as BMP with an IE friendly color palate. BAMworkshop was able to slurp them right up. I imagine I could do a similar process here. Thanks, devSin. I think I'll try to tackle this.