WC4 Remake

I had been planning to put these out weekly in a build up to the Birthday. With the delay however we've decided to release most of what we had planned to keep up forward momentum. We will hold one piece back, and aim to produce something new over the next two months.

So here are the final shots; for the first I've provided an image from the original engine for comparison.
WC4Orig.png
WC4Remake.png
Bearcat.png
 
I had been planning to put these out weekly in a build up to the Birthday. With the delay however we've decided to release most of what we had planned to keep up forward momentum. We will hold one piece back, and aim to produce something new over the next two months.

Looks good.. hopefully the delay helps projects that might have been squeezed to get something completed by mid August!
 
Looks good.. hopefully the delay helps projects that might have been squeezed to get something completed by mid August!

With a bit of luck this will give us time to do something else we'd run out of time for. What we're putting out has been done for a while; everyone's schedule is a bit crazy over the next few weeks so we prepared some stuff in advance. One way or another we will definitely still have something for the party.
 
This still looks really goodm a clear style.

Visually there is still a long way to go; for instance the engine flames were inspired by the in-game ones but our chosen aesthetic is to match the FMV. There are some compromises; ambient occlusion wasn't really a thing even in pre-rendered scenes in 1996, but once you start rendering at 4k I feel it is necessary.
Once it's a bit more common place I hope to start using ray traced shadows/ reflections which should be even closer to the original look.
We've added film grain, but sadly it never comes through the compression very well. It's a lot more noticeable when playing.

Hopefully our new nebula looks familiar, but frustratingly the nebulas seem to change within the same system. Here are two shots from Nephele, I've still not decided if we need to switch skybox between navpoints or have two color sets on a single skybox.

The lexington/ intrepid jump sequences always re-use the same background too, this worked for WC3 with the consistent navy blue space, the more distinctive space in WCIV makes this problematic. No one noticed in the original as in-game it switched to a black background.
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Also, we want to look at potentially recreating some "lost" FMV, or FMV that's unique to one format (PSX vs PC, etc.) where the source is just too poor to upscale properly. The irony here is that while we could render it natively in HD or 4K, it would look out of place next to the originals, so we would need to render the videos at the original native resolution and then upscale them. :)

We're also in the process of re-texturing the larger assets (Bases, Capships) in 4K so that awful looking Orlando Depot will not look so awful in future images. Fighters were natively done with 4K textures.
 
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Four little words: "This is just awesome!". Can't wait to play it when it's ready!
I never liked the original WC4 Cockpit and preferred the WC3/Armada version with visual cockpits and not just a HUD.
 
Since you guys made your own page
Id suggest making a Moddb page too for, it along with WCPSO pack.

Flat Universe and the other projects are still there
 
Ugly discharge from engine nozzles. Make it more transparent and a little shaky. Now the gas jet looks like a cone from the games of the 90s. Very annoying.


The capabilities of modern computers are sufficient for the quality to be like in videos
 
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Ugly discharge from engine nozzles. Make it more transparent and a little shaky. Now the gas jet looks like a cone from the games of the 90s. Very annoying.


The capabilities of modern computers are sufficient for the quality to be like in videos

“So as not to do Defiance a disservice I should point out that all effects so far are programmer art, free textures (plus one purchase) and pre-first pass particle effects. Things will definitely improve once I expose the particle editor to him.”

or just a few posts above yours

“Visually there is still a long way to go; for instance the engine flames were inspired by the in-game ones but our chosen aesthetic is to match the FMV.”
 
Ugly discharge from engine nozzles. Make it more transparent and a little shaky. Now the gas jet looks like a cone from the games of the 90s. Very annoying.


The capabilities of modern computers are sufficient for the quality to be like in videos
Yep - we're aware. These screens are currently in a pre-alpha state and alot of the FX are simply placeholders to test engine functionality. When we release an actual alpha, most of the FX will get another pass.
 
“So as not to do Defiance a disservice I should point out that all effects so far are programmer art, free textures (plus one purchase) and pre-first pass particle effects. Things will definitely improve once I expose the particle editor to him.”

or just a few posts above yours

“Visually there is still a long way to go; for instance the engine flames were inspired by the in-game ones but our chosen aesthetic is to match the FMV.”



The ships in the presentation on wcrespace.com look good. They don't look very good in modification. How did it happen?
 

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The ships in the presentation on wcrespace.com look good. They don't look very good in modification. How did it happen?

There is no effect in the presentation, there is only the emissive map + bloom.
There is no great mystery here, it's a placeholder effect that was easy to create very quickly; we have not even discussed how to do the final flames yet. A later pass at a later date will be entirely different (but still need to be positioned in the same location, adapting to the same inputs and therefore using much of the same code).

From the website:
IS THE MEDIA HERE REPRESENTATIVE OF THE FINAL PRODUCT?
No, they aren't even first-pass. However we only intend to push to the point of matching the FMV visuals as closely as possible.

I realise there may be a language barrier here but the tone of the majority of your posting history comes off as quite aggressive. You might want to reel it in a bit and read before responding; I feel like this was adequately covered in previous posts.
 
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@ODVS and I were having fun this weekend and decided to post some details about how we intend to recreate some of the footage for the remaster:

It’s worth nothing that we aren’t recreating many scenes; but the same jump scene with the same nebula background is used for each system. As we add nebulas into the game this would be more noticeable.
 
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