Icewind Dale, Intro *actually* "Enhanced Edition"
Channel: bobsobol
Date: 2021-04-10

I've never been happy with the cut scenes in the Enhanced Edition of Icewind Dale. (didn't play HOW enough to know) It actually seems worse than it originally was... But then, the intro to Diablo feels way more crappy now than it used to on a fuzzy CRT and an early Pentium / Pentium Pro. So maybe it's just that.


Anyway, I do feel it should have been one of the easiest things to renew, so I had a few days off work that needed taking, and couldn't do much with with "the pandemic" and I made a stab at upscaling it.


It doesn't help that it seems to have to be a VP8 webm file, to play back. (and they don't compress with any real quality) If it could have been a VP9, that would have helped, and of course the x264 / x265 compress way more detail into tiny file sizes (about a third of equivalent quality VP9, from my test renders of this one) but come with a license that Beamdog would have had to have paid.


I'm not happy with the audio in this either... Seems to be clipping, and that's how it's read from the source... I'm _sure_ it didn't used to, and I still have the classic _original_ game, so now I know what needs doing, I may try to feed the upscale the original, or a cleaned version thereof. I believe it was a bink / smacker file, but I certainly _know_ that GemRB has open source code that can read it.