Freelancer Gets AI Upscale Enhancement

Here's another video that I wasn't at all expecting but am very happy to see. ODVS has further branched out from the core WC FMV games and has created an impressive 4K 60 FPS enhancement to the cutscenes included with Freelancer. There aren't very many, which helped make the work pretty manageable. All of the prerendered portions look fantastic. The engine-rendered bits show the limitation of the models used at the time, but everything still gets a very nice upgrade here.

Freelancer was made by Chris Roberts and a number of Wing Commander vets out of Digital Anvil. Cruising around its open Sirius Sector sandbox was a popular pastime for quite a few Wingnuts through the mid 2000s. Maximize your window and make sure the 4K stream is selected to see the full effect below!

Freelancer: not directly Wing Commander-related, but it is a Chris Roberts game... so maybe a Wing Commander cousin?

Anyway, I was playing around with the game files on Sunday night and (with the help of some info online) managed to tweak a few .ini files to get it running at 4K, 16:9 without any stretching.

Then, while poking around, I found that the three FMVs used at the start of the game are all Windows Media Video files (because, of course, Microsoft bought Digital Anvil) - which made them very easy to replace. So I did a quick 'n rough upscale/remaster on them and got them working in-game, too :)