Why don't they just make 2d in hi-res?

[UODevTracker]

Original Thread

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[Supreem]

Interesting bit of trivia: There are over 16,000 pieces of tileart in the current game.

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

Well yeah, basically everything stays the same, it is just a far higher resolution.. This is the change all UO players want, we don't want anymore "GRAPHICS OVERHAUL" We just want a higher resolution..

So there's a couple of things about the same, just higher resolution world art:

1) It would all have to be hand painted, and although our artists are capable, we're talking about hand painting thousands of pieces of artwork. The scope is huge- especially given the fact that the art team is tasked up to our eyeballs on any given day.
2) The Legacy client doesn't have a means of scaling tileart assets. Meaning that the resolution you create the art at is how it shows up in the world. So if you doubled the resolution of a cactus, in game you get a cactus that's twice as big!

One thing that we've learned from UOKR world art creation is that we have to make 3D art from a 2D art perspective. This isn't as easy as this sounds. You see, modern game artists are used to doing things to scale with the world environment. For example, if they wanted to make a brick wall, you would want to make sure that the bricks in the texture are sized correctly in relationship to the player. This is because in more modern 3D games, not scaling things properly makes them look ... well, stupid. But when you are creating 2D art, you paint them so that the texture can be interpreted correctly, not so that it's necessarily to scale. There's also the disconnect between things looking correct in 3D, and once they've been rendered out in the UO perspective, they look odd due to UO's military orthographic perspective. So the result is that you end up having to make some things look "wrong" in 3D so that they look "right" in an orthographic perspective.


... oh, that's where I left my can of worms. I wonder what's inside???

-GO

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

Oh and by the way, if you're wondering "So what if it isn't "true pixel art" anymore, isn't the main thing that it looks good?". Well it's more complicated than that. For instance the palette system in UO which colors various assets in different shades. From what I understand, the original graphic is grayscale and the palette has been assigned to replace certain shades of gray with the new color. So it's looking for an exact RGB value to replace. And so when you bring the anti-alias "melting" of two colors into each other as in your algorithm example, suddenly there are thousands of new colors to deal with which the engine was not built to handle.

Everything get's palettized prior to the game having to deal with it, so it's not so much an client issue. Some of the graphics are greyscale, some are full color, and some are both. As far as hueing, the client finds a value in the hue nearest to the value of the pixel, and assigns that color to the pixel. You are correct in that it could introduce artifacts into the graphic in the form of "static" or, and most likely, patches where lots of pixels get assigned the same value, thus creating patches of flat color. But this would obviously only affect world art that's hued.

An additional problem, as JC mentioned, is of course the fact that more colors = more for the computer and network to load, which would already be stressed by the larger dimensions of upscaled graphics as is.

Well, since it's palettized, it'll be the same number of colors, but since there would be twice as many pixels, it does increase the workload.



-GO

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

Thanks GO. I learned a new word today.

Would the orthographic disconnect have anything to do with the fact that the angle of isometric view seems different by a few degrees betwixt the EC and legacy clients.

Not trying to be an ass, just asking.

Actually, and I'll have to check, but that might have more to do with Isometric Vs. Military Isometric perspectives. I haven't been envolved a lot in the world art part of UO (although now my pipeline objectives are including world art processing), so I'm not totally certain.


.. and no, it's to perilous.

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

16,000 tiles (landscape, housing, trees, etc.)
10-15 frames for each creatures/players (only 108?)
Clothing items (hue overlays a grey object)
Special event artwork (the jack-o-lanterns are awesome!)

Uhh - a little off there:

Legacy:
Creatures (averaged): ~500 frames of animation each.
Animals: ~250-300 frames each
Players/Clothing/Weapons :~1500 frames each.
Tileart Count > 20,000

-GO

 

[TheGrimmOmen]

Hmmm... hmm... I just found this article in Gamasutra, published last month:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25703



I wonder if it would be worth pursuing more experimentations with these upscales after all...?

I think Tim's quote here was to capture the spirit of what we want to do, but not define our actual goals or methods.

As for continuing, I like to see threads like this, so I can't think of a reason not.

-GO