Graphics, Baldur's Gate 1 Original

Baldur's Gate 1 Original Graphics

As in the other Infinity Engine games, the original Baldur's Gate 1 graphics are two-dimensional in both presentation and function. Designed and coded to run in a native resolution of 640x480 at an aspect ratio of 4:3, Baldur's Gate's isometric background graphics and sprites are 3D in origin but are displayed in-game as 2D prerenders. That is, models were constructed in a 3D program, rendered out as raw 2D images and then modified for game-engine employment.

Here is the Baldur's Gate 1 main menu in its original aspect ratio and resolution:

The world of Baldur's Gate consists of 10,000 individual screens prerendered in 24 bit color at a viewport resolution of 512x384; the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion (TotSC, 1999: Durlag's Tower & Werewolf Island) adds even more. Each wilderness area is 10x10 screens: huge.

Here is the Baldur's Gate 1 viewport (one of 10,000 screens) in its original aspect ratio and resolution; it is the first screen that players see:

In 1999, this prerendered world was one of the biggest in the cRPG genre, the sum-total of areas (ARs) standing at a whopping 482.

• Icewind Dale 2: 115
• Icewind Dale 1: 173
• Planescape: Torment: 202
• Baldur's Gate 2: 396 (and BG2 recycled many of BG1's ARs)

Note that Jagged Alliance 2 came out in 1999. It featured 201 contiguously explorable surface sectors that featured seamless transition between indoors and outdoors as well as more environmental interaction than Baldur's Gate, including proper gameplay verticality and destructibility. If its many buildings were NOT seamlessly transitionable (that is, the game loaded a new area just for entering a building, like Baldur's Gate has to do) the area count of JA2 would have been comparable to the Baldur's Gate area count. And yet JA2 came on 1 CD, Baldur's Gate 6 (see next section for the reason).

Baldur's Gate Tileset Files

Baldur's Gate backdrop image data is packed into uncompressed TIS files or tileset files. Though imperceptible to the player on modern hardware, the engine loads the tileset blocks into memory as the screen scrolls. Back in the day, this caused slowdown of framerate as the image data was loaded into RAM during scrolling.

(Baldur's Gate employs 8-way avatar-anchorless screen-scrolling.)

To be clear, the image data is loaded into RAM at intervals due to the size of the prerendered maps (5120x3850; ~30 megabytes). This is the prime reason BG1 was distributed on 5x CDs (+1 CD for TotSC).

Area appearances are affected by dynamic lightning and weather effects such as rain, snow and lightning strikes; moreover, many zones feature height-mapped terrain.

In addition, tinting can be applied to the tileset depending on weather and time of day. Eagles and vultures circle overhead and butterflies flit about, too.

Tile-Rigged Area Design the Undisputed King

In-game, the Infinity Engine forms its screens from TIS blocks drawn from prerendered backdrops or "paintings", meaning that Baldur's Gate environments are not made up of standardized, discrete and player-perceptible tiles (as they are in Jagged Alliance 2, Fallout 1, Diablo 1, and X-COM UFO Defense).

Tile-rigged area design is superior because:

• Tilesets and placeable positions can be randomized or semi-randomized (X-COM, Diablo 1), thereby modifying dungeon and wilderness area layouts for each playthrough conducted (auto-generated areas and Wave Function Collapse procedurally-generated terrain).
• Perspective (angles) are always 100% isometric: there can be no post-prerender touch-ups that contradict the perspective or compromise background visual quality consistency. Likewise, placeables and interactables are always positioned correctly and accurately.
• Tiles can be flipped, grouped as assemblies or ordered into facades to add graphical variability and uniqueness to terrain and structures (buildings).
• Individual tiles or tile-groups can be assigned variables (terrain type, destructibility, tints, sounds).
• Verticality can be employed. I'm talking about proper gameplay verticality not just visual verticality or the representation of height and depth for aesthetic or other token purposes. X-COM had isometrically projected undulating terrain in 1994 -- Populous Amiga had it in 1989. In comparison, the polygon-assigned height-maps in Baldur's Gate are a laughing stock even though they allowed for terrain advantage or avenue of approach limitation (which X-COM was also big on).
• Facilitation of seamless transition between indoors and outdoors is a huge contributor to sustained immersion in cRPG worlds, from which X-COM, Fallout 1 and Jagged Alliance 2 benefit because their areas are TILED.
• Low fidelity tile-based graphics are clearer than high fidelity TIS backdrops. We can easily make out the edges of objects and other boundaries in tile-rigged zones.
• Isometric tiles that obscure detail can be set to fade or disappear from view (a precursor to 3D keyholing).
• Movement and positioning is precise; there is never a question as to where a combat unit currently is or where it is going (again, due to tiles being player-perceptible through mouse-over bounding boxes).
• Memory and data storage management is more efficient. Discrete copy-pasted tiles consume less RAM than prerendered backdrops made up of millions of unique pixels at high color depth. Which means BG1 areas could have been much larger and yet seamlessly transitionable. Tiles also compress better than prerenders. In short, Baldur's Gate could have come on 2 CDs, not 6.
• Characters and creatures actually look like they are walking on the ground, not floating over it. Just compare X-COM, Fallout 1, Diablo 1 and JA2 sprite movement with BG1 sprite movement. In BG1, the sprites glide over the playing field and the footstep sounds don't match the steps they take. In Jagged Alliance 2, every step is measured and heard. Every. Single. Step. That is precision.
• Creation of new areas / environments is made much easier for devs and end-users (modders). Even without an officially bundled toolset, this could have resulted in a cRPG modding revolution before NWN came out [cf. Criticism of NWN 3D in NWN1 vs NWN2.]
• There are 100s of NWN modules based on official TSR/WotC campaign settings and custom campaign settings. Imagine if Baldur's Gate had 100s of modules...

Here you can clearly see the difference between ¾ top-down isometric TIS backgrounds (Baldur's Gate: left) and proper tile-rigged trimetric area design (Fallout 1: right).

Baldur's Gate eschewed the above bullet-listed potentiality in favor of painted backdrops. Thus, its design went with visual fidelity (graphical detail of prerenders) over the increased clarity, accuracy, interactability and functionality that discrete tilesets bring to the table.

This is the primary reason Baldur's Gate was penalized in cRPG Design; in terms of world-engine it is nowhere near as ambitious as its contemporary, Jagged Alliance 2.

Over the past 20 years, starting from when Baldur's Gate went Gold, a big deal has been made of its painterly backdrops. Yes, they are "nice and colorful". But clearly, TIS backdrops are inferior to tile-rigged area design, which is the undisputed KING of 2D playing field design.

At this point, an attentive reader may wonder how the Infinity Engine makes certain parts of static backgrounds interactable. Answer: separate area structure data files contain coordinates that apply invisible polygons to the playing field.

Baldur's Gate Sprites & Animation Cycles

There are over 100,000 frames of sprite animation in the game though many of those would be duplicates and mirrorings. As with the backdrops, these are prerendered in 3D but represented two-dimensionally, in-game. There is no doubt, no doubt at all, that Baldur's Gate sprites were heavily influenced by Diablo 1 sprites, yet BioWare's sprites are inferior to Blizzard's older spritework.

The 25-strong Baldur's Gate companion pool, showing the main human and demi-human sprites:

There are approximately 60 basic sprite templates for creatures in Baldur's Gate, and these are animated with walk and attack cycles from three different angles. To be clear, the total of 60 is for templates. I've not included recolorings, resizings or differences in AI/stats, which do indeed constitute separate sprites and creatures (of which there are hundreds).

Here are the keyframes for Sarevok BG1 attack:

That is only the front-on swing. The animator then has to "draw" the swing from behind as well from the side (which is then mirrored for the other side). All up, about 50 frames need to be drawn for Sarevok's attack swing alone. (In total, there are 616 frames of animation just for Sarevok.)

Rinse and repeat for 60 templates. On top of that, recolor and resize hundreds more for variations on the same theme.

Somewhat oddly, there are no goblins or orcs in Baldur's Gate. Instead, there are tasloi, gibberlings, kobolds and xvarts. We had to wait for Icewind Dale 1 to slay such classic mooks.

cf. IWD goblins, IWD Orcs.

While the Sarevok sprite is impressive for the time, most of the sprites in Baldur's Gate lack detail because they are quite small. Exceptions include the Wyvern and Aec'Letec which, due to their size, had to be rendered in parts and then put together by the engine for display, in-game.

Here is another unique sprite:

It is of Centeol [Centeol dialogue, Centeol dialogue]

As can be seen here, the engine can render many sprites on-screen, simultaneously:

There is NO slowdown whatsoever on my system.

Overall, when evaluating such a technical achievement, we must bear in mind that Baldur's Gate was playable on PCs installed with Windows 95/DirectX 5.0 and powered by Pentium 120 processors, 16 megabytes of RAM and 2 megabytes of vRAM.

Chunking Gibs Effect

Worth mentioning as well, is the chunking "gibs" effect, which comes from Doom 1993. This happens when the victim takes damage that reduces their HPs to -10, aka they get gibbed. Everyone loves blasting enemies into chunks because blood and guts is cool. However, player characters and companions can be chunked, too. If companions get chunked, their portrait is removed from the portrait bar and they cannot be resurrected.

Here, a thief critically backstabs an unsuspecting victim:

Sprites can also be blown into rocky chunks by petrification gaze (Basilisks), and shattered by freezing cold attacks. cf. Vorpal. Note that exploded and shattered enemies yield no loot.

Compared to Fallout 1 [sprite], Diablo [sprite] and Jagged Alliance 2 [sprite], Baldur's Gate spritework and sprite animation cycles are clearly inferior. For subsequent IE games, sprite sizes were increased to allow for giants, golems, elementals and dragons. However, spritework in BG2 remained inferior to the above.

Flipping through Icewind Dale 1 Walkthrough shows Infinity Engine spritework at its best.

SFX Sprites

The original Baldur's Gate employed DirectDraw for its various spellcasting effects, which include fireballs, plumes of noxious gas, lightning bolts (see above), and of course, magic missiles:

Shimmering transparency effects were also implemented before the advent of Direct3D and OpenGL on the Infinity Engine. For example, through protection spells:

And smoke trails:

There are animated fountains and waterfalls, though bodies of water only shimmer through color cycling (there was no proper rippling water effect until Icewind Dale 1).

Full Motion Video (FMV)

Not counting the unimplemented Elfsong Tavern FMV, there are 23 prerendered cutscenes that fire over the course of the campaign. These are rendered in 16 bit color. As can be seen, even though prerendered they still lack detail in terms of texture and geometry, but they do employ professional cinematics and use of lighting, and so they hold up well enough.

Baldur's Gate Icons

The hundreds of icons are neatly drawn and exhibit a degree of artistry that is not found often. Here are a few weapon icons as they appear when being moved about in the UI:

They are much clearer and better drawn than the ones in BG2 [cf. BG2 Icons].

And here are a few armor icons as they appear when set into the inventory:

The only problem with the icons is that they don't vary in size: a halberd takes up as much space in the inventory as a dagger (33 x 33px). Sorry, but that is not an example of elite UI design in cRPGs. I mean, even Diablo 1 featured icons of varying sizes!

The Baldur's Gate portraits speak for themselves:

cf. Baldur's Gate companions for more on portraits.

Next up: Baldur's Gate User Interface!

Baldur's Gate 1 Original (Index) | Baldur's Gate 1 Review (Index).