Telltale needs to hire these guys.
Some guys remade a bunch of Blood Island backgrounds and characters in 3d, and their work is stunning. Now this is Monkey Island.
More artwork here.
More artwork here.
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Then I was all like
And after some :rolleyes:
I am still
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Their environment designs are pretty great, and they match Tiller's layout & painting style. Whether that's a good or bad for Tiller, I don't know, but it's pretty cool none the less.
Well, as long as you're aware of it.
haha! indeed.
I love Curse.
However good the background art is in this 3D rendering, the character models are bad. Stan, the Voodoo Lady, Elaine-turned-to-gold, and Goodsoup all look awful. Also when I look at Elaine's gold statue, the shadowing on her body makes her breasts stand out. Literally. Kudos to the background artist, but whoever did the characters needs to keep their day job.
Can't be bothered to see all pics in the link, but I would say I would prefer the old CMI style look.
It's not perfect, but I'm a little more willing to see what can be done with it.
Re-scan the art, make it high-res, and, if you reallyyyy have to, add new models for the characters so that shadows grow when they stand under trees, etc. Smooth out some of the animation (the bit where Guybrush sighs at the opening has always been a little clunky). Maybe get the original guys to extend the epilogue. Maybe.
Otherwise, leave it alone. Don't even make the clouds move. Leave. It. Alone.
Pretty much this and have the audio at 48Khz for Vocals and SFX and 44.1Khz for Music, and not have it compressed like Tales (no offence to Telltale but I can see why they do it), that's all Curse needs if it were to be updated, just rescanned at a higher resolution and better colour depth and higher frequency uncompressed audio.
This is what I've been saying for months. However, to get there we need MI2 Special Edition first, so hopefully LucasArts won't divert its attention from us Monkey Island fans too soon.
Tales is currently uncompressed in the new versions.
I doubt that, it may be LESS compressed, but that does not equal Uncompressed like curse used back in 1997!
I'm not sure, but I'd be incredibly surprised if it was uncompressed. Uncompressed audio is huge (think - one hour of uncompressed, CD-quality sound would fill...one CD), and if I recall CMI was only about 600MB. The soundtrack alone is over 4 hours of audio, and I'm sure the speech is significantly more than that.
Maybe you meant compressed, but with a lossless codec? Citation?
Except these have atmosphere and don't suck. They remind me a lot of Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island fittingly enough.
CMI does have uncompressed audio in a sense, it's set at 22.05Khz instead of 44.1Khz. The bit rate for each track is 705kbps, each track is then heavily "zipped" with it's iMuse cues into an .IMX file, which is then placed into the bundle file. The game simply reads the iMuse cues to know which tracks to cache and playback as Wave through the sound card.
The difference between this and lossless is that it's the games engine doing the compression rather than the actual tracks being compressed into a readable lossless file.
The engine really was a genius bit of work, this method was used in other games such as Sam & Max Hit the Road and Full Throttle but with lower quality Wave files.
Here's a quick example of the size differences of a track that's 2:21 long:
1103-W~1.IMX = 5.12MB
1103-W~1.WAV = 11.8MB
Interesting. I don't see the point of this, though? Why is unzipping the file at runtime better than using a codec to, well, decode compressed audio? And don't the numbers above just imply that the codec itself is compressing inefficiently?
If it's zipped I assume that means that an entire range of data would need to be uncompressed at once before playback of the sound can begin, which has performance implications.
Seems like it'd be both simpler and less overhead to simply use an efficient codec.
It is, and that's why it's done and that's why the quality now is nowhere near as good! The iMuse engine way of dealing with Wav files was as close to a lossless codec at the time, the only reason I don't class it as a lossless codec is because the IMX file contains other data for the game rather than just the audio file on its own.