WC4's In-flight Comms Get Visual Upgrade

The WC4 Remastered team has a new article on their journey to improve in-flight comms. The videos that come across your VDU in flight are far smaller and more compressed than the game's regular FMV, so getting these tiny clips to look good is an extra challenge. So, ODVS has incorporated several technologies to try to bring them up to modern standards. Check out the new video below to see how they look!

Aside from the miniscule resolution of the source material, another major problem is compression. In order to fit all those thousands of frames onto the game’s CD-ROMs, they were quite heavily compressed using mid-90s techniques. The unfortunate side-effect for us is that they’re blocky even for their tiny resolution. Lots of chunky pixels and harsh right angles are baked into the image – which our AI models and routines then try to maintain when upscaling. To combat this, I added a CRT-scanline-style effect over the top and some intentional digital-corruption-looking effects. I hope you’ll agree they’re an effective way of making the ugly compression artefacts from the original material look more like they should occur natually in-game. We can consider it headcanon that these glitches are a side-effect of whatever future-tech Confed and its contemporaries use to send signals across the vasts of space.