I've read somewhere (can't find it) that Westwood was using a special system to make their backgrounds colors look better.
Anybody knows anything about that? Was it some sort of prehistoric shader to make the colors look more vivid? The colors in Hand of Fate truly ARE beautiful and bright.
It looks like pretty standard digital painting to me, very conservative palette use, very clever palette use. The bright, vibrant colour is created by variances in hue between colour shades and contrasts when painting. No clever technology, but clever people.
I dug around, they did develop their own video codec:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.VQA
10fps 256 color. Might be useful for someone. Certainly useful for me, as Smacker still has it's patent.
IIRC there were rumours that the original Land of Lore graphics were run through a (for their time) highly advanced "contrast matcher" (or something), but that might as well be just another urban legend.
Hand of Fate had highly skilled artists and a lot of time spend on each location to adjust the colours. Clever people indeed, who knew their tools.
The Kyrandia games had (for their time) some of the most gorgeous artwork in a game (adventure or otherwise). They really complemented the story well.
-Bill
No no I'm specifically talking about some tool or filter that was making their backgrounds more beautiful. Maybe it was a better scanning software, or somethng that would saturate the colors, or prevent dithering, etc. -- I don't remember, but I've spotted that somewhere.