[request/suggestion]Vanilla face revamp

[daggerdude]

Well this is also a simple question/request.

has anyone every really just decided to redo vanilla faces in vanilla styling?
EDIT: i think others may have in other mods... but heres a compilation of the faces arranged from 0-9 in their files, just so we can have a discussion on which faces are good and which need to go.
Also, if anyone feels like doing faces other than me.

[numidium3rd]

I'm pretty sure DREAM has all the faces redrawn along with many other graphical enhancements.
https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/5

[Jagget]

I'm pretty sure DREAM has all the faces redrawn along with many other graphical enhancements.
https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/5

DREAM is too smooth and fancy. I think they're talking about pixel art.

[daggerdude]

yes, I was thinking someone simply redoing the faces that are in daggerfall to be more consistent.
Heres another question, does anyone have the face texture exports just lying around? was thinking of toying with it myself.

[Jagget]

yes, I was thinking someone simply redoing the faces that are in daggerfall to be more consistent.
Heres another question, does anyone have the face texture exports just lying around? was thinking of toying with it myself.

Here https://www.dfworkshop.net/downloads/daggerfall-imaging/

And here https://www.dfworkshop.net/static_files/DaggerfallImaging2Manual.pdf

[daggerdude]

Thank you! i'll be sure to post stuff if i come up with anything.

[daggerdude]

So, i've made a sprite sheet line up of 0-9 so we can see all of them and talk about them.
For starters, which numbers do you all use? Which set feels the most complete? Is there any others that i've overlooked?
honestly, for me, female faces arent the problem, so i wont focus on them at the moment.

[harbinger451]

So ... are the playable faces limited to just 20 for each race, 10 for each gender? Once problematic faces are replaced with better ones, is there scope for adding more faces?

[Jagget]

Does the engine support more faces? Is this a dynamic thing?

[daggerdude]

Does the engine support more faces? Is this a dynamic thing?

So ... are the playable faces limited to just 20 for each race, 10 for each gender? Once problematic faces are replaced with better ones, is there scope for adding more faces?

I'm not really a programmer but theoretically the difficulty isn't in the engine capacity or capability, it's in the design of the interpretation of files from the core game.
Kind of like Doom, all images are formatted and the engine merely reads from those formatted files.
There's nothing to say that A mod couldn't be written to select images from a folder in the mod package instead of the arena 2 game files and I don't even know if the format would necessarily matter as long as the engine can interpret it and render it properly and it's the right size.

I think the difficulty is that the graphics were created in such small pixel sizes there really isn't any room for detail in the original sizes, and so then you get into resizing images and some such stuff that really makes everything so difficult.

There was a game made around the same time and it was called meridian 59 https://www.meridian59.com/
This game allow you to change features such as the nose and chin and eyes and hair and skin color of your avatar featuring left and right buttons in Windows 95 like Window interface.

It would have been nice if that such an important part of daggerfall would have been given better treatment but there was limitation at the time about upsizing and filtering and all the stuff that we have now, simply didn't exist back then.

Because I don't really know how to program or anything the best I would be able to do is upsize and then downsize again with better features and hope it looks good. It's also possible to cut out certain features like faces from hair, mouths, eyebrows, and kind of shift them around and blend them in different combinations, which probably would be what I would be going for.

From the art style used it looks like Mark jones, lead designer of daggerfall art, utilized such a style and simply did pallets swaps for the different races and different hair and parts where he could put things together with the restrictions that he had.

In an interview he had he explained how he had much bigger images and had to really shrink everything down and butcher it to make it work with the engine, which is a sad shame. Some of his best work can be seen actually in battlespire, which is not a very good game but shows off a lot of his texture work... The level designers and programmers didn't do as well as he did.