Wcdx - Kilrathi Saga for modern Windows

!?! Awesome. I could have sworn the last WCDX was released within the last year... can't believe it's been that long.
 
Yeah, it really doesn't seem like that long ago. I've posted a few builds on this thread since then, but never promoted anything as a release.
 
The mouse feels smooth now, though with a bit of delay sometimes, but its far miles better.
And i tested with the reshade stuff here, the screen now fits with the game itself, but bloom still reacts weirdly compared to the non-wcdx, but then i think its because of the wrapper reacting with the 4:3 scaling.
https://imgur.com/a/cB3duED
 
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Thanks for these great patches Stinger. I recently discovered them and successfully finished the first WC. The only thing that bothers me is the sound of laser guns. It's much louder than other game sounds and it's very irritating. Can you do something about that?

I also have few questions about WC2. When I want to patch WC2 do I only need to run this command "wcpatch Wing2.exe Wing2_wcdx.exe"? Also the keyboard in WC2 is not working properly cause when I press two arrows at the same time only one button is responding. WC1 does not have this problem. Also the response time is much worse compared to WC1. SO1 and SO2 have some problems with colors. I couldn't make screenshot to show you this.

I also have some suggestions for your patches. It would be great if you could enable subtitles for cutscenes with sound. It would also be great if you could make your patches more user friendly like one click solution. Can we hope for Privateer 1 patch someday?

Thanks again for these great patches. I had really good time playing WC1 again after all these years.
 
@ShadowArm: I'm surprised to see your bloom issues are still there; the game now draws the black sidebars (in fullscreen mode only), but it only draws them when it needs to. Maybe ReShade is tossing out information from previous frames? I guess I can just draw them every frame, that's not really a big deal. In fact, I've now done it. Try the version attached to this message. (You can just replace the wcdx.dll, no need to re-run the patcher.)

@mj78: You can use ctrl-up and ctrl-down to change the volume of the digital effects without impacting music. Changing just a single effect would take some time on my end, but may be worthwhile at some point.

For WC2, yes, that's the only command you need. There's still a ton of work left to do on WC2, and input is definitely a huge part of that. I haven't done any work at all yet for SO1 and SO2, so I'm not surprised you're having issues; I am surprised you got them running at all.

Subtitles are a good idea; I'll add that to the to-do list.
 

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@Stinger: I could easily fix the volume of laser guns in WC1 but their wav file is not in GAMEDAT folder like the rest of sound effects. When you fight 3-4 Salthi or Jalthi the sound of their lasers is MUCH louder than anything else and it's very irritating.
 
After testing few SFX files in Audacity everything looks normal on playback meter. Then I opened SFX04.WAV(mass driver) and SFX07.WAV(lasers) in the same Audacity window and played them at the same time. After listening a few times I think that lasers are louder. Can someone here test this and tell me that I am not imagining things.
 
The issue isn't the effect itself, but rather the way it gets stacked when a Jalthi fires. Each shot plays the sound effect, and the Jalthi has four lasers.
 
It's not just Jalthi. Pay attention when you fighting 3-4 Salthi or Dralthi and when they all start shooting it's a disaster. You can barely hear any other effects. I am using headphones now instead of speakers and it's little better.
 
@Stinger: There is a bug in asteroid fields. When I enter any nav point that has asteroids and Kilrathi the guns won't fire. I have to fly around little and then they become responsive.

Do you know for some good hires texture pack that would work with your patch? I am asking this because I heard from someone about better textures for old WC games but I could not find anything.
 
The guns not firing is most likely an engine limitation. The engine can only track 64 objects at once, and that includes gun blasts, fighters, asteroids, engine plumes, even the nav point marker. The wcdx patch does nothing to address this (or exacerbate it).

As for graphics upgrades, any sprite replacement that works with the DOS version should also work with this version, but you can't actually increase the game's resolution; the only way to do that would be to write a whole new graphics engine. WC1 just won't support a higher resolution. That said, there are lots of high-res fan-made models floating around the CIC somewhere, and I believe there was a Prophecy mod a long time ago that recreated some of the WC1 missions.
 
Stinger said:
That said, there are lots of high-res fan-made models floating around the CIC somewhere, and I believe there was a Prophecy mod a long time ago that recreated some of the WC1 missions.
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I think you're refering to the WC1 Remake for Ed Benowitz' "Flight Commander", which is basically a rebuild of Prophecy's Vision-Engine.
 
Yes that guy is very skilled at assembly. I too have been following him since the beginning :) But not all problems are equal and some are impossible.
 
FekLeyrTarg said:
I think you're refering to the WC1 Remake for Ed Benowitz' "Flight Commander", which is basically a rebuild of Prophecy's Vision-Engine.
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Yup, that's what I had in mind!

mj78 said:
So modifying the engine would require some crazy skills like this guy did with NFS3: http://veg.by/en/projects/nfs3/
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That looks like some pretty impressive work!

Interestingly, changing the resolution of a 3D-rendered game is actually much easier than changing the resolution of a 2D sprite-based game that does all of its rendering in software. While sprite scaling is by its nature a resolution-independent operation, there are many elements in WC1 that don't scale, and (for performance) those are drawn directly into the frame buffer with minimal processing. There are lots and lots of places that assume the frame buffer is 320x200, and all of those would have to be modified to look up a value rather than using a constant. Multiply that by 6 (the number of different game executables for WC1 and WC2, not counting the transfer program) to get the total amount of work required... and that's not even counting that you would probably want new sprites with more angles. It would be easier to bypass the original code and write a whole new sprite-based D3D graphics engine than it would be to try to modify the game engine in-place. (The engine is actually the easy part; the tedious part is tracking down all the locations in the game that draw stuff, and making them use the new engine.)
 
@Stinger: He did much more then resolution change. When I was checking his readme file I was blown away with the amount of things that he was able to modify without any access to source code. I have never before seen a fan made patch of that quality. But enough of NFS3 let's talk about WC.

Is it possible to import WC speech from Sega CD to PC version? Why don't you contact people at GOG.COM and show them your patch? Maybe you could make some deal with them. WC with your patch vs WC with Dosbox and your version always wins.

@FekLeyrTarg: When I asked my friend to tell me where did he saw WC with better graphic it turns out that he was thinking about Super Wing Commander. I explained him that this is not a mod for WC1 but 3DO version of WC1.

@wcnut: It's nice to meet a NFS fan here. If you like older NFS games you should also check zaps166 NFS2SE patches. Here is one for Glide version: https://github.com/zaps166/NFSIISE/releases and here is one for software version: https://github.com/zaps166/NFSIISEN/releases

I like software version better because of cockpit view.
 
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