King of Worms wrote: ↑Thu May 20, 2021 12:44 pm
And I very much doubt someone sane will redraw 6000 flats of mobs and 500 flats of commoners
It's not that unrealistic actually.
sebabdukeboss20 recently
told me that there are already over 1,000 models in the library from which he made sprites for characters in
Duke Nukem 3D mods/TCs (
Alien Armageddon,
Demon Throne and
AMC TC). The amount of actual sprites for each character made from these models is way more than that of course (some are static flats of one or several frames from one angle, others are full animated sprite sheers with rotations etc.). These were created in some very realistic time frames, too.
Of course I'm not suggesting to redraw character sprites from scratch by hand, although this approach also works to some extent. But making 3D models and rendering high-resolution sprites from them is not an impossible task for a skilled artist. Considering that most human NPCs were made from two models (male and female human) and share most animations, this could be even less work to do. Same goes for all skeleton based enemies (IIRC Mark Jones just took a prefab skeleton model that came with the 3D tool that was used in Bethesda, but don't quote me on this), orcs and daedric humanoids.
The problem with AI upscales is that most
Daggerfall sprite work is so low-detailed in the first place. Mark Jones' 3D characters had to be created on a very tight schedule, and since the target resolution was quite low, the original models were low-detailed as well. For example, no character has visible fingers save for vampires, and no AI model that has been used ever did anything to rectify this.
Also if this complete remastering approach were taken, it could address another issue, namely the art style inconsistency and the repetitive human NPC/enemy design. If you compare
Daggerfall to
Arena, it is all too noticeable how samey all the 3D rendered human enemies look with their green hoods and cloaks. They couldn't even implement the colour changing palette swap routine that was hinted at in the
preview. At the same time, these 3D rendered characters look very different from both the player character paperdoll and the hand-drawn NPC flats.
Conversely, in
Arena there is a much greater consistency in style between the paperdoll, static NPC flats and all enemies, and human adversaries also have very different, distinct appearances depending on their class (you can see some examples in
this video). Now that would probably more of a mod in itself, but if an artist of
sebabdukeboss20's calibre ever agreed to work on this we could perhaps see more diverse looking NPCs with yet more consistent, uniform style of art across the different varieties of them. Maybe rotations could be even added to static NPCs like
Alien Armageddon does for captured babes.
Also I'm almost certain that villagers in
Daggerfall were not originally intended to be one-hits and would attack them player of provoked, if only there was time to produce the necessary animation frames.
Of course, without a dedicated artist to actually do this it's all wishful thinking but still.
Here's a little comparison of the flats from
Demon Throne and the originals from
Daggerfall that inspired them. Quite a bit of artistic liberty was taken here but you can clearly see that although the new sprites are not even twice as large as the originals, they take each image to a completely different level of detail not to mention art style - something that no ESRGAN model that I tried was able to do.
- comparison2x.png (53.71 KiB) Viewed 1361 times