Return to Monkey Island background artwork

[Paco]

Ahoy there,

 

For a personal project I have been collecting artwork from all the Monkey Island games.

I was wondering if anyone has attempted ripping the background artwork from Return to Monkey Island?

There's some really beautiful background pans in the game. Online I can hardly find backgroundart from this game (without the characters in it).

I attempted pasting together screenshots for some of the locations. However it's a painstaking task, as most of the environments feature a lot of moving background elements, like palmtrees, water, clouds, ships bouncing up and down.

I'll share some of my attempts. far from perfect, but it shows how beautiful these backgrounds look in their wholeness.

 

But if anyone has some tips on where to find more backgroundart from Return, it would be much appreciated.

 

 

 

 

[Remi]

I think that looks good. Going by assumption, it'd be hard to perfectly put together the backgrounds from assets because of the dynamic light sources, etc. I was going to look at doing it programmatically -- minus aforementioned complexities -- but haven't gotten around to it yet.

[Laserschwert]

The game scales quite nicely to different aspect ratios, so at least that would allow to use windowed mode to squeeze it as wide as possible. Obviously, this decreases resolution.

[Remi]

I started putting together a script to assemble the backgrounds. An example of the output:

 

 

It'll take some work to put in place the logic for some of the more complex locations, but I'll be looking at it over the next week or so.

[Paco]

Oh nice! That looks good. I'll be interested to see how it tackles the more complicated backgrounds.

I am not smart enough to script, so I gave Dinky Explorer / Thimblemonkey a go and ripped some backgrounds and their elements.

But it's probably even more difficult to put all those seperate elements & effects together.

Started with LeShip, but kinda gave up half way through 😅

 

  

 

Pasting together screenshots is always an option as well.

Perhaps a combination of both works best, to get rid of the characters while keeping most of the effects. 

I'll also play around with the aspect ratio to see what results that gives.