Shadow Walk demo

[temnix]

"By a road obscure and lonely..."

Recently I found out how to transport the party from a place in one area to the same coordinates in another. This gave me the idea to create the Demiplane of Shadow, with a duplicate underlying every one of the existing areas. The Demiplane of Shadow is a place of worst-case scenarios and ruling entropy, where the colors are dark and muted, the sky is always overcast, villages, cities and castles appear as ruins and familiar people can be encountered, but they are bitter, silent, warped or defeated, or possibly shouting accusations at the party for abandoning them long ago. And there are shadows everywhere... I want to bring some of this to the screen. I tried different image adjustment tools, and I worked out a look and a sound. As for Shadow Walk, it is a 7th level wizard spell from the Player's Handbook for going there, and I have it working - in one area for now. Here comes the part that makes a difference. I could have put this shadow duplicate together by hand, and it started out that way, but later I worked out a method to process all existing areas and patch them to take advantage of their actors, ambient sounds and regions (@DavidW provided some encouragement). Instead of building up every area, I have the code now that will convert actors to their counterparts who are not exactly in the same places nor what they seem, replace ambients with those from my own set and substitute gloomwing haunts for floor regions such as traps and "reputation traps" in cities. The shadow areas will have no doors to open, no connections to other areas and no chests, barrels or other containers, nor special area-wide scripts or scripted encounters.

All of this can be done automatically, but I need some people willing to recolor the other areas' tile sets in the same style, applying my filters. This will not be difficult, but it will be pretty boring, routine work. Some people around here offer their help testing things. They can do better and work on duplicate areas. Although I could take this single prepared area and turn it into some kind of local quest, that's not my intention. This post is a call for those modders who want to step in and help make Shadow Walk a supremely useful spell. It will become that when every area has a shadow duplicate. The idea is simple: the party casts the spell and is transported to the same point on the demiplane, then marches in a straight line across a phantasmal landscape, over water, walls, roofs, mountain slopes, through the rocks of dungeons to the point where they want to reappear and use the spell's secondary ability to exit to the light world. In modding jargon, shadow areas have empty search maps. This is their first benefit. The second is being able to bypass traps (gloomwings are a nuisance, relatively speaking). The party can also surprise enemies. Like Dimension Door, this bypass can screw up prewritten scenarios and sequences, but - buyer beware.

In practice, since Shadow Walk is such a high-level spell, only areas in BG2 would need to be worked over. For this demo, though, I took an area from the first game - central Baldur's Gate, with the gardens, the wall, the fair and Oberon's manor. I only guarantee that it will work on an Enhanced Edition game for now. When you load a saved game in the first BG with this mod installed, the party will be taken to the southern part of this place and given a scroll that can be used twice. For demonstration the spell will need to be cast from the scroll. Have a wizard use it anywhere in the area to shift to the Demiplane of Shadow. The wall that cuts across this area is a good place to test the usefulness of this spell, but you can also just walk about. At first the instinct to stick to the streets will be strong.  When you get the gist and decide where you wish to exit, e.g. behind the backs of Marek and Lothander, use the scroll again. When the scroll is used either time, it will send through the caster and all party members in the fireball blast. I suggest loading a game with a fairly strong party, because the shadow world is not a safe place.

If you enjoy the experience enough to offer help, drop me a line or say so here.

Download

[lynx]

So I guess this is mostly to farm out more xp?

Unless you want unique areas, the recoloring can be automated as well, which would also make the mod nice and small, not in the 100M of size range, and work with mod-added areas. But I don't know if you care enough about the craft ...

[Endarire]

Remember, EET exists and being able to shadow walk to BG1/SoD areas and mod area would also help.

What tools exist to automate a grayscale image of an existing image?  I know MSPaint (Microsoft Paint) can do grayscale fairly easily, and I assume more sophisticated tools can too.

Edited October 3, 2021 by Endarire

[lynx]

Tons of them, the most famous open source one probably being imagemagick. But if it's just about simple transformations, it might be more convenient to do it all in weidu.

[temnix]

The recoloring is not simple here. It's OBVIOUSLY not grayscale either. I had to look quite a bit into how to get the right feel. And farming is not the point, although it's possible to earn some experience there. The purpose of the spell is to travel. OBVIOUSLY.

Those who are getting a crash trying this on the old engine or Tutu should try these file versions.

SWALK_#.SPL SW=_#.SPL

Edited October 7, 2021 by temnix

[Endarire]

How fares progress on this mod?

[temnix]

Bump. I am still not going to process the areas myself, but here is a reminder in case others enjoy sharpening pencils.