[Bug] Multi-part area BAM animations show visible lines

[Sam.]

[Bug] Multi-part area BAM animations show visible lines between the sections

What is currently happening
Multi-part area animations show visible lines between the sections

What should be happening
Multi-part area animations should not show visible lines between the sections

Steps to reproduce the bug

1. Start a new IWDEE game with default characters
2. Using the console, move to area AR1105
3. Click through the dialogue until the cutscene plays and the portal animation is activated
4. Notice the visible lines between the sections of the portal animation, particularly the left and right portions of the top half.

If available, a fix
Place the attached BAMs in the override folder, as appropriate for each game
See that the visible lines are gone

Notes

• Because the EEs allow BAM frame dimensions larger than 255x255 px, this issue can be fixed by recombining the split animations into the top left section's BAM and blanking the BAM frames for the other sections.  Fixing the issue in that way does not require an engine fix or modifying the area files.
• This should cover all of BGEE, SoD, BG2EE, and PSTEE except for AM3017[A-D] and AM6200[A-D]. Those are the Lum the Mad (which I don't think should be combined) and Melissan replenish (I don't understand the mechanisms of how/when these are played). Note that these have received minimal testing.  Let me know if I've missed anything.

SplitAnimationsCombined_20210501.zip

[Sam.]

This also definitively fixes all multi-part area animation desynchronization issues.

 

[CamDawg]

These are in.

[Guest The_sextein]

Looks like the spinning crystal in the high hedge still has a crease through it.

[argent77]

9 hours ago, Guest The_sextein said:

Looks like the spinning crystal in the high hedge still has a crease through it.

The spinning crystal is not a BAM animation. It's realized as an animated tileset instead. This is a rarely used feature of the game engine (outside of water animations) which is (afaik) only used for this crystal animation and the spinning wheels in circus and carnival tents. It can probably be fixed by rearranging the tiles in the associated PVRZ file. But that's a tedious task if done by hand.

[Sam.]

5 hours ago, argent77 said:

This is a rarely used feature of the game engine (outside of water animations) which is (afaik) only used for this crystal animation and the spinning wheels in circus and carnival tents.

And fireplaces in houses.

 

The way to eliminate these graphical artifacts is to go back to the palette-based original and take each overlay tile (including for doors) and each animation tile at the end of a tileset and surround it with the tiles that would surround it when it is rendered inline in the tileset.  Only then do you convert it to PVRZ.  Like argent77 says, this is a very tedious task to do by hand, especially for areas with lots of doors.

[Guest the_sextein]

Ah, I was unaware.  I've used Near Infinity to align backdrops in the past and it is indeed, highly annoying to get a fire place to align just the way it needs to be.  Tipun's Icewind Dale in EET has a massive amount of misaligned backdrops and I've been considering the idea of pulling Icewind Dale EE's backdrops out of the game and renaming them to match Icewind Dale in EET and then dropping them in the override folder to see if it would work.  Beamdog did a pretty good job of fixing all of the alignment issues in Baldur's Gate but they must have overlooked that crystal.  It allays annoys me when I see it lol.  

[Sam.]

33 minutes ago, Guest the_sextein said:

Ah, I was unaware.  I've used Near Infinity to align backdrops in the past and it is indeed, highly annoying to get a fire place to align just the way it needs to be.  Tipun's Icewind Dale in EET has a massive amount of misaligned backdrops and I've been considering the idea of pulling Icewind Dale EE's backdrops out of the game and renaming them to match Icewind Dale in EET and then dropping them in the override folder to see if it would work.  Beamdog did a pretty good job of fixing all of the alignment issues in Baldur's Gate but they must have overlooked that crystal.  It allays annoys me when I see it lol.  

It's not so much an alignment issue as it is an artifact of the compression algorithms used in the PVRZ format.  I started a topic about this type of graphical issue here.  Feel free to start listing specific occurrences there.

[Guest The_sextein]

I'll keep an eye out next time I run through the game.  From what I remember, Baldur's Gate is in pretty good shape these days. Beamdog had a whole slew of issues with smokestacks and doors being all wacked out but they fixed all of it other than the high hedge crystal I think.   IWDEE is also solid but I'll keep an eye out and stop by if I find anything to report.  I'm curious why Tipun's IWD in EET is so littered with problems when IWD EE is in near perfect shape.  He must have used an old non EE version of the game or something.  That is what got me thinking about this stuff and then I saw this post and I must say thank you for your work. 

Seeing dragons without creases in their wings is very nice.  Beamdog has publicly stated that they know how to fix this and have not done so after 7 years or more of waiting.  Considering the original games didn't have this problem and they broke it on the "Enhanced Edition" is silly and should have been fixed long ago in my opinion.  Another thing I noticed is they have a "grey scale on pause" option enabled by default in the graphics options but if you don't turn it off, it will cause lakes, rivers and oceans to flicker.  I couldn't stand it and didn't know what was causing it but after hours of trying everything under the sun, the grey scale option ended up being the culprit.  It was so annoying considering they made the effect and enabled it by default.  I get that people make mistakes but it really should have been spotted before release and at the least, it should have been fixed promptly after I reported to them years ago.  Oh well, they have done alot of good for the game as well so I'm not a hater but I would like to see this game return to the original quality that it was released with when it comes to animations.  It's very close now and in some ways, it's better than before thanks to the latest technologies.

One thing I have noticed is you can set your desktop resolution to a DLDSR resolution of 2.5 and it will actually render the entire game at 6K and use AI downscaling to native 4k.  Since this game doesn't have many moving objects you can drop the smoothness bar to 0 and the backdrops look native 4k.  Seriously better than the original.  The AI scaling at 6K is much better than normal 8K downscaling.  I was spending weaks AI upscaling all of the backdrops with Topaz Studio and once I noticed what Nvidia had delivered I dropped the project altogether.  Combine that with the pixel smoothing on the sprites from Beamdog and the Infinity UI from Pecca....You have a real nice looking game.  Especially now that you have fixed the remaining annoyance that I had with the creases showing up  in large animated objects.  I'm pretty happy with the current state of the game actually.  If that crease disappears from high hedge I will be finished criticizing BGEE I think.