22 replies to this topic

[Aranthys]

Hey,

I love your mod, but I was wondering :
Have you ever thought about changing your new abilities icons to match the regular "BGII" icons ?

While beautiful, the new icons used are very different from the regular BGII icons, and ... well, kinda break immersion to me, kinda like a big "THIS IS MODDED CONTENT" flashy sign.

Anyone else has this feeling ?
Has anyone started some kind of project to create new icons for these new abilities added to bards / thieves ?

Oh, and, of course, the mod is great. Just pondering if i'm the only one with this kind of feeling

[aVENGER]

Hi and thanks for the kind words.

I've heard that other people find the new icons a bit immersion breaking too. However, I personally prefer the IWD/NWN style icons, so the main mod package is definitively not going to change. On the other hand, I am willing to include an alternate set of icons which are closer to the original BG2 art as an optional component, if someone is willing to provide them.

[Aranthys]

Do you happen to know how many icons are added by your mod ?
Maybe we could try to get each of them be "BGII-ified" one at a time by different artists.

I do agree that IWD / NWN style icons are gorgeous, but... well, it's either one or the other.
Mixing both makes my head hurt, unfortunately.

And since I don't think there's a mod that updates all of the BGII icons to have an IWD / NWN style.. I guess it's easier to create BGII-style versions of your icons

[cbarchuk]

I agree, it would be cool to make the icons more inline with the rest of the BG2 icons. It's not a game breaker for me but, aesthetically, it would be pretty nice.

[Enkida]

Huh, has nobody ever answered this? Because I will make those icons if someone can tell me what file type they are and where to find them in RR.

[Miloch]

Like all IE icons, they're BAM files (Blackisle/Bioware AniMations or something) and in the bam folders in the various rr subfolders.

Item icon BAMs are composed of basically two bitmaps - a larger one with shadows for when you pick it up (of various sizes up to 64x64 max but few game icons are that size) and a smaller one when it's sitting in your inventory (up to 32x32 max). There's some other specs e.g. in BAM Batcher's readme (should be in my signature).

[Enkida]

Thanks Miloch. BAM batcher is cool, I owe you a bottle of scotch apparently. I extracted and did a test run with original on the left, and converted on the right:



If that looks right to anyone who has actually played a SoA rogue with RR installed (I haven't yet, shamefully), I'll go ahead and convert the rest. If I got something terribly wrong (like, "That's the wrong menu background!") let me know.

[aVENGER]

Thinking back, I think Daulmakan was working on something like this.

I'll double check with him and maybe he can post some screenshots here.

[Aranthys]

AWESOME

[Enkida]

Thinking back, I think Daulmakan was working on something like this.

I'll double check with him and maybe he can post some screenshots here.

Yes, please! Less work is always more fun!

[Miloch]

Thanks Miloch. BAM batcher is cool, I owe you a bottle of scotch apparently. I extracted and did a test run with original on the left, and converted on the right:

I can't really tell on this monitor whether it matches the BG2 spell icons. Did you use the spell BAM palettes in BAM Batcher? The readme should describe those too (see e.g. bambatch/tools/splb-red.bmp etc.).

[Enkida]

No, actually... I screencapped in-game abilities in vanilla BG2 and used my colour picker (eyedrop tool) to match shades exactly. It's not going to be an exact colour for a couple of reasons I noticed, though:

- the original icons are either solid block colours (pink, blue, white) or solid block colours with a white texture from the bg1 interface over them
- the new IWF icons use bloom and gradient in the colours rather than edges and lines to make detail

There's no way to make a 1:1 conversion and not lose important detail on the IWD icons, so I'm just eyeballing it next to the originals, like I usually do.

As for the background, I just snagged the detect trap icon and painted over the four triangles to mock up a seamless blank BG2 background. Which I can share if it's needed, of course.

[Daulmakan]

Here's a sample:

[Enkida]

Looks great to me. Are there any you haven't done yet that you want me to cover, or are you going to release a complete icon set soon? :-)

[Daulmakan]

I have a few more done, I'll do a check on them and see if I'm missing something when I return home.

[Andrea C.]

They look really good!

[William Imm]

Well, I can swap the colors of the Berserker - just the fact that I do not have the source image handy is keeping me from doing so.

[Aranthys]

Hi ! Small bump
What's the status on these icons ?

[Wisp]

AFAIK, what's already in the mod is the latest.