"There's... this weird obsession with crowd sizes." (August 23, 2024)

[ChrisReid]

When you're signing something as important as the Treaty of Torgo, you need all hands on deck! LOAF pulled together some step-by-step images that show how the crew was replicated to fill the TCS Victory's bay. You can really see - outside of the group closer to the table - how it's the same four people replicated thirty-two times!

FAKE CROWD! ADMIRAL TOLWYN SHOULD DROP OUT!

--
Original update published on August 23, 2024

 

[Aeronautico]

Shouldn't the Confederation President have been at this thing?

 

[TankGunner]

There wasn't a single politician at the Japanese surrender; Fleet Admiral Nimitz was the highest ranking person to sign it- equal to Tolwyn.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

They call out the connection right in the script!

ABOARD THE VICTORY FLIGHT DECK

IN A SCENE REMINISCENT OF THE ENDING TO WORLD WAR II, WHEN GENERAL MACARTHUR ACCEPTED THE JAPANESE SURRENDER ABOARD THE USS MISSOURI . . .

ADMIRAL TOLWYN, GENERAL JAMES “PALADIN” TAGGART AND NUMEROUS CONFEDERATION BIGWIGS SIGN A TREATY WITH THE KILRATHI - - LED BY MELEK.

IT IS A DAY OF TRIUMPH FOR THE CONFEDERATION . . . COLONEL BLAIR, HOWEVER, IS NOWHERE TO BE SEEN . . .

 

[ChrisReid]

There's a lot to love in this scene!

Look at that gorgeous Arrow in the corner. It's a perspective angle we don't always see.

I love how the Kilrathi have several different color robes, and the hauled some kind of wooden desk to the middle of the deck.

Also, two cruisers in the background! One could be the Ajax, but normally you'd have the Ajax and two destroyers (Sheffield and Coventry). Wasn't it awesome that the Victory had a little squadron of standing escorts in WC3?

 

[Quarto]

All the background stuff is pretty neat (though I personally would have had the cruisers parallel to the screen, they look a bit weird facing us), but man - that is such a cheap trick with the crew replication! In the screenshot, it looks absolutely horrid. The identical poses, the pixel-exact repetition of the distances between each rank and file... not a good look. Easily avoidable, too - after all, Origin had a lot of 2D graphics artists at the time, and it would have taken just a day or two to retouch this.

But... this is yet another example of how a cheap, horrid trick is often entirely sufficient. We see the repetition looking carefully at a still image, yet probably nobody paid any attention to it when watching the sequence in motion. Back in 1994, the scene itself was so amazing, that nobody cared (and indeed - this news post, thirty years later, is probably the first time anyone bothered to mention it!). So, I guess, at the end of the day, they were right not to be bothered about it. It was good enough that it didn't detract from the rest, and any additional energy spent on improving it would have been wasted, in the sense of not making the game noticeably better (until someone decided to analyse it three decades later ).

 

[Bandit LOAF]

None of this would pass today. (Though the shots above are a bit higher resolution than the actual videos... at 320x200 interlaced a lot of sins are erased!) They do similar crowd duplication in the funeral wide shots and the Kilrathi crowds in the intro. I think the funeral wide shot is the crummiest!

 

[MadMac_5]

Not only was it at 320x200 or 640x480 (if you were rich and had a Pentium), it was also with an 8-bits-per-pixel colour depth so you had all sorts of dithering artifacts alongside the compression artifacts and low resolution. Even if they had hired enough extras or even built mannequins to fill out that shot, no one would have been able to tell the difference!

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Yup! The source movies on the disc are actually stored at (I believe) 320x160. Here's a full sized still from the PlayStation version (which is /slightly/ clearer than the PC because of its compression):

(But that shows us why the Cruisers are flared instead of some other angle; the Hellcat formation splits and follows each direction at the end.)