Strike Commander with Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality Headset) project.

[fabiensanglard]

Maybe your research about terrain data could be relevant for those Wing Commander games with planet-side missions?

I would be glad if that could be the case. Maybe the work I did on the 3D jets can be reused on Wing Commander III but I chatted with Mario and I think I remember the RealSapce 3D format had evolved by WCIII :/ !

Anyway, after I add gouraud shading and the object, I was thinking of adding a nice atmospheric scattered sky to see how much I can improve the rendition while keeping the old assets:

 

[Shades2585]

WOW! Beautiful! That's what in game would look like? Very nice!

I would be glad if that could be the case. Maybe the work I did on the 3D jets can be reused on Wing Commander III but I chatted with Mario and I think I remember the RealSapce 3D format had evolved by WCIII :/ !

Just because it has evolved doesn't mean that your work would not be helpful. It may still provide printers.

Keep up the good work.

 

[fabiensanglard]

And more useful, it may also provide pointers.

 

[Shades2585]

LOL! Yaaaaah! That too.

 

[fabiensanglard]

I am ridiculously close to be able to draw a full scene. I am only missing the ground objects coordinates. I cannot figure it out, they make no sense so far. As a result, I am missing the tanker in the port, the AA battery, the landing strip and the Tomcat base.

Overall, it is starting to look decent and Oculus-able. And all that with just the OpenGL fixed pipeline !

An other one with more sky:

A quick motion blur test:

 

[delMar]

Overall, it is starting to look decent and Oculus-able. And all that with just the OpenGL fixed pipeline !

Your progress in such a short time is amazing.
This thread was created on Dec 10.
Did you dare to imagine how far you would be in about a month's time back then?

 

[fabiensanglard]

@delMar I would have never imagined going that far in such a short amount of time. I can't believe it ! To be fair I did not start from scratch, I was able to leverage Mario's amazing work on the archive system (TRE and PAK)....but reverse engineering the rest was really hard and I am very proud.

It started as a crazy dream but now I know It is going to happen and it is just a matter of time...and hard work !

 

[Worf]

There's the 90/10 rule (or 80/20 rule) - where the first 90 (or 80) % of the work is done in the first 10 (or 20) % of the time.

It's an annoying thing - but you'll see massive progress like this in a little over a month, but then it's all the little things that you need to do to finish it off suddenly will take you into 2015. Lots ot little things - some game breaking, others that are merely annoyances, and each time the list gets shorter, something happens and it triples in size overnight.

It's also during that part that one needs the most encouragement because the last bit is a tough slog.

 

[fabiensanglard]

That is why I have been trying to lure developer and build a team to complete this crazy project. I have worked on countless game/software and working alone is really hard.

 

[fabiensanglard]

I wrote a little something to summarize the state of the project and see if I can find other people with the same crazy idea:

http://fabiensanglard.net/reverse_engineering_strike_commander/index.php

 

[FekLeyrTarg]

Wow, it's very fascinating to read.

Btw I take it that you reverse-engineer the floppy disk version only. Do you think there might be more differences between it and the CD-version, except of full speech? Have you considered reverse engineering the Add-On "Tactical Operations" and the SCCD aswell (and eventually "Pacific Strike" and "Wings of Glory")?

But anyways I really like where this is going.

 

[fabiensanglard]

I worked on the floppy disk version because it is the one I own from 1993.

I think the CD version had a slightly improved 3D engine with less haze and full speech pack. If I complete the reverse engineering of the floppy version, the CD should be easy.

I never played TO, Pacific Strike or Wings of Glory: the nostalgia factor won't be there and it is not on my roadmap. But with the knowledge from SC it should be easy for anyone to perform.

 

[fabiensanglard]

So I was playing with IDA and I came across this in OPTTEST.EXE

INT 3F

The game uses freaking overlays. The process just turned from very hard to OMMMMMMMFFFFFGGGGGGGG !

/rant.

 

[PMKnecht]

Hi, i really enjoyed your last projects and yesterday i somehow hyperventilated while reading this thread and studying your github code I really appreciate it and maybe this one will help you:
http://download.wcnews.com/files/documents/sourcecode/shadowforce/transfer/asommers/mfcapp_src/
I'm also not sure about the fact that every code has been lost, since a lot codeparts was used (like in other companies) for further projects. Since the author of the code Jeff Grills where responsible for the W95 Port of WC1 and other older projects, i'm sure he might help you. Or you could ask Anthony Sommers who uploaded the code to the wcnews database.

Peter

 

[fabiensanglard]

@PMKnecht Thanks I actually found about this yesterday. What would have been useful (TRE, IFF, LRE) have already been RE by Mario.

 

[fabiensanglard]

@PMKnecht Do you have the contacts of Jeff Grills or Anthony Sommers ?

 

[PMKnecht]

Mr. Sommers is cofounder from http://www.spacetimestudios.com. As far as i remember there was an email on the imprint you could use and Mr. Grills has an LinkedIn Account. I did not contacted them earlier, since i do not wanted to become some sort of stalker and/or nagger who just wants to get an old piece of source code in order to build some sort of voxel engine for wc1. I stopped working on it, but i was really impressed to figure out how every piece of information has been squeezed into such a limited amount of space.

 

[fabiensanglard]

I have finally understood how the color system worked in Strike Commander: Full palette are rarely provided, instead the game assets store color patches.

The MAINMENU option screen for example takes no less than 3 palettes patches from the initial game palette:

1. Full palette patch (256 colors) for the game.
2. Partial palette patch (32 colors) for the mountains.
3. Partial palette patch (48 colors) for the sky.
4. Partial palette patch (128 colors) for the silver menu/buttons.

I have documented the format in the source code:

https://github.com/fabiensanglard/libRealSpace/blob/master/doc/strike_commander_palette_format.txt

 

[fabiensanglard]

Modern hardware provide runtime anti-aliasing. I wonder if I should use it in the menus:

Opinions welcome.

I also read the paper "Depixelizing Pixel Art" (http://imgur.com/a/gRXPJ). I wonder what kind of result I could get with strike commander. Someone published code sample here (https://github.com/jerith/depixel). If anybody wants to give it a try, I can provide the individual layers for the MAINMENU and we can run a test.

 

[Shades2585]

Nice job fagiensanglard! Looks good. As for the anti-aliasing, the mountains look good but the text looks off for some reason.