Enhanced WC4 Video Released in German & French! Plus English Fix
ODVS is on a roll this week! Hot off the release of version 3 of the enhanced WC4 video pack, he's provided German and French translations as well. This is wonderful news for Wingnuts in Europe who get both high quality video and slick dubs as well now. Pedro has helped tweak the pack to make it easier to turn on alternate language support. There is also a fix for the English 3.0 files. The new 3.0.1 release corrects some aspect ratio issues that could potentially create problems on certain hardware. If you did encounter these issues, be sure to grab the new files (there is no patch - a full redownload is necessary). Even if you had no issues, we recommend unzipping the latest update into your video folder to ensure things run smoothly going forward. There's also a cool video that shows off the different languages in action. Note that the hot swapping between English, French and German is just an effect for this clip. In the actual game, you'll need to boot up fresh for the version you want.
- Wing Commander 4: Version 4.0.1, English, Pack 1 (4.0 gig zip) (replaced by 4.0.1 on 7/27/20)
- Wing Commander 4: Version 4.0.1, English, Pack 2 (4.1 gig zip) (replaced by 4.0.1 on 7/27/20)
- Wing Commander 4: Version 4.0.1, German, Pack 1 (3.8 gig zip) (replaced by 4.0.1 on 7/27/20)
- Wing Commander 4: Version 4.0.1, German, Pack 2 (4.0 gig zip) (replaced by 4.0.1 on 7/27/20)
- Wing Commander 4: Version 4.0.1, French, Pack 1 (3.8 gig zip) (replaced by 4.0.1 on 7/27/20)
- Wing Commander 4: Version 4.0.1, French, Pack 2 (4.0 gig zip) (replaced by 4.0.1 on 7/27/20)
Just a quick update - there's a minor bug in the WCIV HD Pack V3.0 release that might cause playback and performance issues on some CPUs and chipsets (so if anyone's been having playback issues with it, this might be why).Trying to cut the long story as short as possible, I forgot that the aspect ratio of the FMV in WCIV is a little all over the place - some sequences are just a little wider than others, leading to very small letterbox bars appearing at the top and bottom. Unfortunately, when I bulk compressed/encoded all the remastered sequences to the final files, the routine I was using detected those black bars and clipped them out of the frame. So while most of the sequences are a standard 1920x1080 resolution, some have weird resolutions like 1920x1076 or 1890x1080. We're frankly stressing the VOB container to be holding an HD image in the first place (since it was the standard used for DVDs back in the day) - and these non-standard aspect ratios can cause issues with some hardware.
This wouldn't be a problem if the game used hardware acceleration for video playback but it actually routes it all through the CPU - hence the problem. You might not experience any issues (I don't on my system, which is why I didn't catch this bug straight away), but I've replaced the V3.0 pack anyway.
Part 1 of both the German and French packs also contain a .BAT file (wc4dvd_DE.bat and wc4dvd_FR.bat, respectively). If you copy these into the same location as your wc4dvd.exe file ("C:/Program Files/GOG Games/Wing Commander IV", for example) and use them to launch the game, they'll activate all the German/French text, interface etc. Thanks to @Pedro for providing the command line extensions that activate the language localisation :)
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