While most textures in DOS EE look fine, the female orcs seemed a bit blurry to me, so I extracted the texture pak and saw they only have a 256x256 texture, unlike the 512x512 or larger textures of most other orcs and bigger enemies. I noticed, however, that the dread variant of the female orcs have a more detailed 512x512 texture (
comparison). Using this dread texture as a base, I photoshopped myself together a less blurry texture for the normal green female orcs (
in-game comparison).
While poking around in the game's textures, I also found a few other similar occurrences of variants having higher-res textures (e.g.
zombies). The most notable is Leandra, who normally has a 512x512 texture, but whose dreamscene variant has a much bigger 4096x4096 [!!!] texture (here's a
comparison of a section of the specular map). It looks really good! So much more detail visible that's tragically been smushed away to pixels and DXT artifacts in the standard Leandra texture. Unfortunately I'm not skilled enough to photoshop together a HD Leandra texture from the dreamscene variant.
Presumably
every texture in the game was originally painted at a high resolution like dreamscene Leandra and just compressed down to account for VRAM and disk space limits, not just these. Would Larian ever consider making more of the game's original, non-downscaled texture art available, even just as a modder's resource or novelty, with zero official support? If not, would it be likely to ever see the light of day in some future remaster? (Or - worst case scenario - is it all stuck on some lost hard drive?)
