WC4 Remastered Mod Enhances Planetary Missions & Solicits Assitance (March 26, 2024)

[ChrisReid]

We've got a delicious update today on WC4 Remastered. Pedro reports that the team is digging deep into the ground missions of the game. As is usual on a project like this, once they started peeling back the layers of the original, things got complicated. This has necessitated some clever solutions, which have been detailed in a new WCRespace article. A few options include taking some artistic license and deviating from the original experience slightly, but this should produce a more engaging product overall.

The first issue was to add support for loading the terrain and we had to ensure that the models which we had full transforms for lined up exactly as they did in the original game.
Classic buildings and terrain.

We have accomplished this and added support for terrain collisions. The ~1 million vertex original terrain can be rendered on modern hardware in a single draw call – but still that’s not an insignificant number of poly’s. Going in I had expected to find a largely repeating landscape, but no, the team had a single heightmap that it took hours to fly across.

We want to stay as true to the original games as possible, but being too faithful to this geometry would inevitably be disappointing. As such we’ve decided we are going to work on creating more exciting terrain, something perhaps more inline with what PSX gamers were shown than what PC gamers actually got.

The team is also looking for some assistance to help process things more quickly. No technical experience is required! Learn more here.

What we need is for people to play a special build of the game which logs which room you entered, which videos played – and most importantly what variables were changed so we can identify what they are used for. We need people to then go through the original game and record which of the multiple background images are used for each conversation.

If you can help let us know on the forums and we can provide you with a special build for tracking the variables in-game.

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Original update published on March 26, 2024

 

[Vidmaster]

I completely agree with what the team is doing there, the atmosphere missions never worked in WC3/4 and pretty much every change will be an improvement, especially everything discussed in that article. It is stellar news from my point of view 😀

 

[Pedro]

I completely agree with what the team is doing there, the atmosphere missions never worked in WC3/4 and pretty much every change will be an improvement, especially everything discussed in that article. It is stellar news from my point of view 😀

Yeah the ground missions are a weird one, I think most things were done well in one Wing Commander game or another, and so when we want to make improvements we largely look to the other titles which we felt did something better. Ground missions are an exception as there's no in universe example of them working really well.