Colonels Bequest

[cosmicr]

Hello All.

I'm not making another remake or anything like that. Just stuffing around. I wrote a program that can convert an SCI picture to VGA by averaging the colours used. I suspect that this may be how Sierra made the images and they were then converted to EGA.

Here are a couple of screenshots, normal and converted.





as you can see, it doesnt work perfectly.  But I see it could have the potential to assist many of those out there considering doing a point and click remake or even a new remake. I'd love to see what sort of paintovers people could do with these. Let me know what you think!

if anyone has any requests for a picture converted, let me know and I'll see what I can do!

(and lastly, the code aint perferct, but if anyone's interested in seeing it I can clean it up and upload it).

[Gilbert]

Interesting!

So what it's doing is actually converting all the dithered fills in the image renderer to solid colours, right?

I think it'd be useful if people making SCI interpreters will incorporate this, or people would create non-dithered images for trace-overs, etc.

Though some of the colours don't match exactly like the ditherings I think they look nice enough already in the current stage.

[Jakerpot]

what game is this? Great backgrounds btw!

[Gilbert]

As the subject of this thread suggests, this is from the original Colonel's Bequest.

[Snarky]

as you can see, it doesnt work perfectly.

Looks pretty perfect to me! I'm actually really surprised that it's possible to do this and not get all kinds of weird artifacts around edges and so on. Very cool!

The only place I see a difference is in the bottom right corner of the first image, where the shadows have suddenly become continuous lines. Did your program actually do that, or did you retouch it?

[zabnat]

The only place I see a difference is in the bottom right corner of the first image, where the shadows have suddenly become continuous lines. Did your program actually do that, or did you retouch it?

Weren't the Sierra backgrounds vector images at the time ? That's how the shadows can become continuous lines. Also probably that's why there are no weird artifacts near the edges.

[GarageGothic]

Yeah, Sierra backgrounds are vector based and drawn at runtime, which is why their games could store so many rooms on just a couple of floppys. Just out of curiosity, shouldn't it be possible to render the backgrounds in hi-res, getting a crisper, more Flash-like look?

[zabnat]

Just out of curiosity, shouldn't it be possible to render the backgrounds in hi-res, getting a crisper, more Flash-like look?

Looks like freesci does this (and it has flatshading option which is pretty much same as this). Problem is ofcourse that characters are still lowres sprites. But hires could be ideal for overpainting.