I was wondering if there was a mod that moves the character portraits from the inside of the POV screen to outside of it, onto the unused space? and have the character blurbs come from the edge of the POV screen?

I don't own the game yet, but seeing the widescreen mods and their bloated compasses/maps kind of irked me.
I figured why not use the unused space for the portraits?

At one point I might draw what I am talking about to explain better.

Btw I hope it goes on sale at one point again.

So that the portraits pop out to the black side columns
which appear when you play the game on a widesreen display while telling OS/video driver to keep the 4:3 aspect ratio?
Such a mod does not exist to my knowledge.
I wonder what would happen if I would run that on my T60p Frankenpad with 4:3 ips flexview panel;)

.
It would probably require to teach the engine to break the 4:3 aspect ratio
unlike the widescreen mod which at least stretches the UI,
while the view angle in 3D window is increased,
but not at the degree one would expect from looking at the black sidebars of the 4:3 output.
You can also set the video output via 3dSetup.exe to OpenGL,
if you get grid lines install the openGL fix:
http://www.zimlab.com/wizardry/recovered/wolfie/Wizardry8BUG-FIXES.html

Should you find a coder who can expand the native video output of the game,
it would be nice to also get some hardcoded limits removed in the process :D
Make all 160 possible spells 100% functional for PCs and monsters, incl fizzle&backfire,
or even increase the total number to lets say 1000, code in turn to stone & stone to flesh effects, remove hardcoded limit of 1000 facts.


However there is an option to make at least the bottom more transparent:
Get the transparent compass mod here: http://www.zimlab.com/wizardry/recovered/zip/W4st_Transparent_Compasses.zip
find the transparency increasing update to that mod as part of this small mod pack:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/7ztx3jyl0cuhvn6/Wiz8_various_mico_mods.rar/file.
(you must collapse at least one of the 3 windows aka radar, text or formation,
else cursor graphi glithes, best use text window as the messages are still displayed.


You can also go "full transparent": run the unpatched version (v 1.0) under cyber man's wizardry 8 trainer,
it unlocks a developer mode with console and shortcuts, one of them, F8, will hide all UI elements from the screen.

I'll ask around and see what I find after acquiring and starting this game.

Most of what you wrote went over my head lol, but thanks for the information.

Let me get this right, it would require the game's coded display itself to be changed to allow anything the be shown in the black bars, since the bars themselves don't really exist for the game. Since it's 4:3. I thought it would as simple as changing the x coordinates for where the portraits are displayed. Seems I am naive.

Maybe I'll just stick with the widescreen mod and get used to slightly fat faces.

Well the coords for e.g. pc portraits in ui are obviously not absolute,
else they would not always appear at the screens border, literally glued to it,
the point is that the game cant selectively stretch only specific parts of the ui graphic files
and keep others like portraits and circles in given aspect ratio.

So there is also another option, one could compensate the stretching of these pictures
by horizontally scaling down each of them.
Thats probably > 100 files, and they have such a low resolution
that every scaling or other deforming modification causes significant quality loss.
Last not least the required factor for scaling down is ofc specific to the screens aspect ratio,
so you will almost certainly need different specific sets of ui graphis for the various existing widescreen ratios.