King?s Quest 6 - New Hires Portrait hack (prototype)

[deckarep]

Hello friends,

Awhile back ago I posted a quick and dirty script written in Go to extract the RAVE file format file images from the King?s Quest 6 Hires portrait files which I posted in the forum.

All that did was allow one to view the raw image PNG files which is nice but don't do much.

Well can we go in the opposite direction and come up with a way to encode all new character portraits?

Can we change, modify or enrich the palettes of these portraits?

Can we introduce all the necessary voice graphics to represent character talking animations?

Here's the beginnings of a proof-of-concept to answer this question.

Much more details in the YouTube description.

Cheers,

-deckarep

I'll likely open source whatever hacked together tools I come up with.

[deckarep]

Not sure if I'm doing something wrong but can a moderator review the original message and approve the link in it so it shows up. Thank you!

[Kawa]

It's not a matter of moderator review, it's Youtube embeds being silly. Use the full URL, not the youtu.be link

[deckarep]

Ah, thank you @Kawa and thanks for adjusting the link.

[deckarep]

As of this afternoon, I now have a fully working script that can fully re-encode an entirely new/fresh talking animated character with all the relevant mouth movements that is fully lip-synced.

I need to create an example that actually looks good now.

To be continued?

[deckarep]

And it works:

- Started with King Graham because his RAVE portrait is simpler
- Swapped it with Alex (which is why he's representing the wrong character but it's way easier to test)
- Character generated and hacked together with Midjourney + Pixelmator (Mac)
- Color palette needs some serious work, it looks muddy but that is an artistic issue and I'm no artist
- My script generates a whole new GRAHAM.BIN file that is fully animated, lip-synced and cues exactly to whatever dialogue represented on screen.

Let me know if anyone wants to try this file in their game. I only tested on ScummVM.

Time for sleep.

[deckarep]

Here's the code if anyones interested in the secret sauce to make this work:

https://github.com/deckarep/SCI-Rave-Hires-Portrait-Encoder