WC4 Remaster Previews Enhanced Ground Effects (September 13, 2024)

[ChrisReid]

We've got an amazing week on tap if you are someone who is fascinated with the ground textures of Wing Commander 4! Yesterday LOAF showed off the different landscapes featured in both WC3/4, including how WC4 differentiates itself by no longer just being a collection of monochrome planes. The WC4 Remastered team is now working to build on this in a major way with both geometry and texture getting an enormous boost. Read all about it in their new article here!

Wing Commander IV’s original terrain—there wasn’t much to work with. I won’t go into too much detail as wcnews has already covered it! Each “mountain” was just a single height value, and as you can see from the example image, sometimes lakes defied gravity, or terrain appeared under buildings. Modernizing this aspect of the game was a task.

The first step was to add tessellation support (scaling polygon density based on camera distance). Even without modifying the heightmap, this improved the geometry: instead of a sharp, pyramid-like peak, the use of linear texture sampling produced smoother, curved hills. Still, the results weren’t acceptable—too many equally sized smooth hills were conspicuous.

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Original update published on September 13, 2024

 

[Pedro]

Something I forgot to mention is one of the advantages of this approach is it's all automated so without changing anything we could enhance all the existing WC3 and 4 planets (the lack of textures in WC3 isn't relevant as we don't use them).
Tyr is actually the worst case with extra features as it's an earth like planet. More desolate locations like the other planets won't need trees, water, etc.

 

[Vidmaster]

This is, as expected, very impressive. Great work 👍