Make Room for Drastically Better Scenery Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Update ID

ODVS and the WC4 Fan Remake team have a great new article on the technical process of remastering the gameflow rooms. It turns out that this step is a lot different than upscaling or even using the AI-techniques that have allowed him to significantly enhance the video quality so far. The animations and how they interact with each setpiece are their own unique puzzle. How did they solve this issue? Read the full article at WCRespace to find out! There'a also an example video of their impressive output below.
As part of the ongoing Wing Commander IV Resmastered project (https://wcrespace.com), I've upscaled and remastered all the game's rooms, environments and sprite animations using ESRgan AI/Deep Learning. These are a few samples, along with comparisons to the original 640x480 room visuals.
You might think that remastering the rooms and sprite animations for Wing Commander IV would be a similar task to remastering the videos – I certainly did before I started – but it’s actually a very different beast.

For a start, all the “shapes” (as the game files call them) are static images. I was expecting that for the room backgrounds, but not for the sprite animations (Eisen and Maniac on the bridge, Vagabond in the bar etc.). Yet when Pedro extracted the files from the original game and sent them my way, there they were – eight thousand, five hundred and thirteen TGA files, comprising the rooms, hangars, computer consoles, buttons, toggles and every individual frame for every character animation.

Upscaling static images using AI is quite different to upscaling video footage. When you have an image sequence in a video file, the AI can analyse groups of frames, identify similarities and changes between them, gather and analyse depth information from parallax motion and interpolate a lot of data to add to the image. With a static frame, you don’t get that.

As previously mentioned, the team is focusing on WC4, but occasionally they gain new insights with experimenting in WC3. Here's an upgraded gameflow demo Pedro recorded as well:

Recent Updates


Follow or Contact Us

All Wings Considered

Episode 37 - Back to Gemini!
Archived video streams

Forums: Recent Posts

  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  

Current Poll

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Where to Buy

WCPedia: Recent Contributions

  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  

Site Staff