Why do all the talk portraits in the HiRes KQ6 have red skin?

Anakin Skywalker

Why does every character in KQ6, in their talk portrait in the High Res version, have reddish toned skin? I mean I would've thought they could've gotten more realistic colors for the skin tone, even if it was 1992. I mean in the close up cinematic scenes the characters have normal skin tones....So what gives with the talk portraits?
For example:

doom saber

It might be la lack of tan tones when compared to red tones. At the time, computers can display up to 256 colors - if I am not mistaken. A lot of Sierra VGA games have characters with red skin. For example, KQ5 and SQ4.

However, they are games that use tan skin Like the qf games. However, the portraits tend to be bigger. It might be the size of the portraits

BagginsKQ

Can the conditions and type of the video card used to take the screenshots affect the color as well? Based on how the video card displays the colors, and how windows captures the screen shot?

On a related note, the above screenshots don't exactly appear overly 'red' to me on this particular computer. Maybe a salmon.

MusicallyInspired

It's a limited palette. Sprites have a completely different palette of colours available to them apart from backgrounds. Sprites (like the dialogue boxes) reserve only 64 colours, I believe, out of the 256 limit and the rest of the 192 go to the backgrounds. Each background and sprite has their own palettes, but sprites only have 64 possible colour slots to fit in its palette which means that if you want a lot of colour you're going to have to sacrifice shades. Or sacrifice colours for more shades of the same colours. That's also why some sprites are more obvious as interactable objects than static ones that were drawn into the background sometimes and look overly cartoony compared to the background.

Yes, some of those backgrounds have animated faces, as with the last picture you posted there with the mirror and the genie, but those sprites are much smaller and don't require as many colours, while dialogue portraits are larger and require more colours for all that detail. It's a balancing give and take thing. My guess is that the original artwork they drew looked much better (as is evident by the quality of the portraits used in MOE) but due to colour limitations, had to come out looking like that.

doom saber

MusicallyInspired wrote: »

It's a limited palette. Sprites have a completely different palette of colours available to them apart from backgrounds. Sprites (like the dialogue boxes) reserve only 64 colours, I believe, out of the 256 limit and the rest of the 192 go to the backgrounds. Each background and sprite has their own palettes, but sprites only have 64 possible colour slots to fit in its palette which means that if you want a lot of colour you're going to have to sacrifice shades. Or sacrifice colours for more shades of the same colours. That's also why some sprites are more obvious as interactable objects than static ones that were drawn into the background sometimes and look overly cartoony compared to the background.

Yes, some of those backgrounds have animated faces, as with the last picture you posted there with the mirror and the genie, but those sprites are much smaller and don't require as many colours, while dialogue portraits are larger and require more colours for all that detail. It's a balancing give and take thing. My guess is that the original artwork they drew looked much better (as is evident by the quality of the portraits used in MOE) but due to colour limitations, had to come out looking like that.

Make sense. I had a feeling it had to do with the portrait size. Didn't realized it was a sprite. LOL

It also explains why the QFG glory games aren't affected with the "red skin" disease; part 1 and 3 have bigger dialogue boxes and part 4 are giant sprites.

BagginsKQ

Hey Anakin, not to put a damper on the discussion, but isn't this question fairly minor enough that you could have asked it in your other KQ6 HiRes threads?

Like maybe your first one even?
http://www.telltalegames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27817

I think it all three discussions could easily enough be merged, without destroying the flow of any one of the discussions, since they are all pretty much about "hires" artwork and technical issues (which is all about the same topic anyways)... As opposed to a topic covering another topic about KQ6 altogether.

As per GuruGuru's thread policy;

First off, please make sure a similar thread doesn't already exist. This forum isn't that large yet, so this shouldn't be too difficult, and we do have a search function. We mods have to track down and merge duplicate threads, so not only does not posting duplicate threads keep the forums less cluttered and running more smoothly, it makes it much easier for us to keep track of things

Chyron8472

Okay, now you're just being bitter, Baggins.

We get it. Anakin said you should consolidate the same topic to the one thread, when he himself has had topics which were similar spread over multiple threads. So you're saying he's a hypocrite. Yes. We get it. But you don't have to be a jerk and beat him repeatedly about the head and shoulders over it.

Play nice. Sheesh.


We're supposed to have friendly discussion around here, and being intransigent, rude and repeatedly posting huge walls of text to prove your point doesn't help to foster friendly conversation about King's Quest.

exo

Ah yes, because you have been a paragon of good manners Chryon8472.... *rolls eyes*.

Don't you have a golden bridle to go find?