WC4 Remake

Thanks. I was also aware of the basic grid concept from JPEG, which is obviously related to MPEG. As you say, I suppose the bulk of the improvement somehow comes from refining how they compress the data in those squares while still retaining as much of the data as possible, improving with each generation. I'm aware there's some interpolation that can be done between frames too, that helps with relatively static scenes. If they're really squeezing that much more detail out of the same bit-rate (or conversely, reducing bit-rate while maintaining detail), that's remarkable. They did it with the move from MP3 to AAC, so I suppose AVC/HEVC/VVC/etc is all just more work on the same. And then there's the royalty-free VP9 -> AV1... oh, it makes my head spin to keep up with all these standards...

Ah well, clearly you must be having an impact then.
 
I've also compared h.265 with older h.264 video files and I've noticed color improvement with the smaller x265 compressed files, TV episodes I compared some time ago, not sure if the colors were entirely accurate but the general quality seemed improved if the resolution does not fall to low or the compression not to severe like for example below 480p,

Like you mentioned I noticed higher CPU demand on them but it is very interesting what can be achieved going h.265...
 
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Wedge009 said:
I know folks (...) in places with reliable, high-bandwidth Internet are happy to 'stream' videos from on-line
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People like that will be be doom of us all, jumping head-first in the trap called platform economy because it is so convenient in the short-term.
Yes, I am exaggerating :). But also yes, I think this is a massive problem.

Disney, GamePass, Netflix, HBO and the bane-of-all-existence, Amazon, all provide a great service at what is actually a pretty good bargain. But no one thinks of the long-term consequence of voting with their wallet for these kind of things.

At least Stadia is dying... for now.

There will be a day when you can still play Wing Commander 4 but are unable to enjoy last year's Madden (to stick with EA).
 
Vidmaster said:
People like that will be be doom of us all, jumping head-first in the trap called platform economy because it is so convenient in the short-term.
Yes, I am exaggerating :). But also yes, I think this is a massive problem.
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Agreed
 
Vidmaster said:
People like that will be be doom of us all, jumping head-first in the trap called platform economy because it is so convenient in the short-term.
Yes, I am exaggerating :). But also yes, I think this is a massive problem.

Disney, GamePass, Netflix, HBO and the bane-of-all-existence, Amazon, all provide a great service at what is actually a pretty good bargain. But no one thinks of the long-term consequence of voting with their wallet for these kind of things.

At least Stadia is dying... for now.
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Yeah, the deal is irresistable here - for the subscription price, I get many more hours of entertainment than I could buying up discs. The overwhelming majority of things I only ever would have watched once, so it's essentially like I'm renting content for pennies on the dollar.

And the situation is magnified enormously when you have kids. It's one thing if you're comparing me watching a movie on my television via streaming or Bluray. But I don't just watch on one TV. It's not just a matter of walking over to the DVD shelf to pop discs in - in some cases it'd mean walking across the house and to a different floor to get a certain disc. I have Xbox/streaming setups in place in literally no less than ten rooms in my house right now. And at any given time, four to six of these might be on. Most services have some kind of family plan that lets you simultaneously stream to numerous devices for a couple more dollars. And that doesn't count mobile devices. On top of the TV, I've got five smartphones and four tablets that all actively get used for Netflix/DisneyPlus/YouTube/etc. And sometimes these get taken to the backyard, the park or the doctor's office and the content stream continues unbroken. Discs are just a complete nonstarter in my household in 2021.

Vidmaster said:
There will be a day when you can still play Wing Commander 4 but are unable to enjoy last year's Madden (to stick with EA).
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There's an easy enough modern EA/Wing Commander example! Wing Commander Arena will probably die when Microsoft no longer supports XBox 360 Live games. That's awful, but it doesn't change how for the 99% of other content, service-based delivery is the way to go. The converse example is that Wing Commander Academy could go out of print on DVD any day - but it's also available for streaming on Peacock at a moment's notice (and Peacock is free to most Comcast subscribers, so that's millions and millions of people with easy free access to the Wing Commander TV show!).
 
Vidmaster said:
People like that will be be doom of us all, jumping head-first in the trap called platform economy because it is so convenient in the short-term.
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ODVS said:
Agreed
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That's another reason why I still prefer physical media even if I just wind up archiving it all on my HDD. As Chris alluded to, for the masses the immediate convenience trumps long-term concerns. Not saying 'streaming' itself is bad, but the market moves in a certain direction that alienates minorities like me. This applies to other things besides movies too and I know many here think I'm a fool for making these choices, but at least I still have choice... for the moment.

Edit: Back on topic, I belatedly realised UHD BDs exclusively use h.265 compared with h.264 on regular BDs. I suppose that's why they can pack in a wider spatial resolution when the disc data capacity is not much more than regular BDs.
 
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I'm huge on streaming of TV. I will still buy Blu-Rays but it's super rare.
I don't think that not owning the content is a big deal, I went from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray for a number of movies; my iTunes purchases were all upgraded for free.
I wish the digital codes that come with some discs were done better, it'd be nice to see discs being a collectors item, that will still work in years, but realistically you're going to use the streaming versions.

Games are another matter entirely - they are active rather than passive so I don't play them whilst doing something else; I tend to play the same game broken up over months (once or twice a year I get hooked on a single game for a week, but nothing to justify the subscription). I can see the point in subscriptions though, just not for me.

Streaming is another matter though. The lag introduced in gaming for me makes it unusable. Every gaming purchase has reducing it in mind; the high refresh g-sync monitors, the quality of a TVs gaming mode, low latency gaming mice etc. Action games feel better than they have since the CRT days; the idea of losing those advantages is insane to me. I'll accept the compression artefacts no problem but streaming, even within the home, is 30ms I'm not willing to give up.
I can't even play action games on a TV anymore, they are frustrating rather than fun (admittedly you can get some TVs with great gaming modes now)- add streaming into that mix, especially with something like stadia and I'd rather watch TV which isn't negatively impacted by those delays.
 
Wedge009 said:
Regarding h.265, what is it that makes it compress so many times more?
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It's also a case of hardware finally getting up to speed with decoding video fast enough. h265 is pretty essential in making it possible to stream 4k because it keeps the data sizes below the limits of the average person's bandwidth. The tradeoff though is that it's more CPU/GPU intensive than h264, which on current hardware isn't really as big of an issue.
 
Floating-point (im)precision has always been a bane in computing - different hardware, different software, different programming languages, and myriad other factors can make the 'same' calculations produce different results. Had this problem with a migration project at my work recently.

So the jittering cockpit struts in WCP was not necessarily deliberate and is a product of this FP imprecision? Fascinating, I did not realise that.
 
Wedge009 said:
Floating-point (im)precision has always been a bane in computing - different hardware, different software, different programming languages, and myriad other factors can make the 'same' calculations produce different results. Had this problem with a migration project at my work recently.

So the jittering cockpit struts in WCP was not necessarily deliberate and is a product of this FP imprecision? Fascinating, I did not realise that.
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Yeah, to their credit I would have assumed it was intentional too if not for working on Standoff. You'll notice a few navpoints floating off the navmap range; they are the worst by far.
WCIV seems to largely use smaller ranges so the effect is lesser, but still incredibly noticeable when you have the cockpit up. To be fair we could fake that by always rendering it in camera space, but it'd just be masking the issue rather than addressing it.

BTW we spotted it says bytes where it should be bits. We will update the image shortly
 
We had a similar issue on XWVM. Our solution was using a form of player-centrism.
The exact details are beyond my comprehension but our player-centrism is programmed in a way that it would work even in multiplayer.
The original X-Wing and TIE Fighter also used player-centrism but it wasn't MP compatible, which is why it got removed from XvT and XWA.
 
FekLeyrTarg said:
We had a similar issue on XWVM. Our solution was using a form of player-centrism.
The exact details are beyond my comprehension but our player-centrism is programmed in a way that it would work even in multiplayer.
The original X-Wing and TIE Fighter also used player-centrism but it wasn't MP compatible, which is why it got removed from XvT and XWA.
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Hopefully the task isn't too bad; we use PhysX and there's an inbuilt function to shift the world origin:

Unfortunately quite a few areas in the code base are going to have to take this into account.
If we added online play we'd need multiple scenes, or make clients responsible for the area around them; either way that'd be an additional consideration. Definitely doable but we will have to cross that bridge when we come to it. It wouldn't really matter for PvP at a single navpoint, just co-op.
I didn't really touch on this issue because it's going to cripple us (it will probably only cost us a few weeks), but it's interesting to me. I always wondered how Wing Commander handled this issue ever since I did my first space combat test program in Uni.
 
The killboards in both WC3 and 4 would sometimes not be accurate. Is this something you are fixing?

On my most recent playthrough Primate got awarded 25 kills in a single mission! I mean I know he is good but... 😉
 
I always thought those kill score increments are randomised - the only ones that are fixed are yours and your wingman's, according to the mission tally. If Primate got 25 kills after one of Blair's missions, the algorithm must have decided he needed to catch up somehow.
 
YCDTD said:
The killboards in both WC3 and 4 would sometimes not be accurate. Is this something you are fixing?

On my most recent playthrough Primate got awarded 25 kills in a single mission! I mean I know he is good but... 😉
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Kill counts seem to handled by the game scripts. In the interest of maintaining our sanity we won't be editing those - we have to draw the line somewhere.

Incidentally we're all pretty swamped with work atm.

For my day job I've been working on this:

It's nearing the end of the project so I'm ridiculously busy lately - updates on the remake are probably going to be far and few between for the next few months.
 
Pedro said:
I love it but we are matching the FMV as closely as possible.
The initial release I hope to keep faithful and non controversial. A mod which replaced some fighters with novel variants would be great; I definitely plan to open source to make that kind of thing possible. That said personally I'd just give Defiance's Hellcat a black paint-job, we are aesthetically trying to match the FMV whereas this strikes me as a more modern interpretation.
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That's good. I think most people will approve of a faithful version of the game, after all, it's a remaster rather than a remake.

That said, down the line, modding might be fun. I normally disapprove of game mods wholesale because they have a tendency to detract from the brilliance of the original product and very often ruin it completely-- buuut, I missed the Thunderbolt during the Confed part of WC4, and if anybody has the time or inclination, the Border Worlds flying Scimitars as per the novel might also be a laugh.

(quoted you in here so not to hijack the other thread)
 
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