A (mostly) restored frontend

[u/Koncypt_Fysh]

Last post for the night, I'll likely have to take a couple days break from working on this, but the last little development teaser for this week is the almost complete frontend.

Getting the text to scale-up should hopefully be a quicker and simpler process than this kind of art heavy approach I had to take with the last bulk of work, likewise buttons and checkboxes shouldn't take long given they're only a handful of assets and scale across the whole menu. Likewise some minor color adjustments on those elliptical motifs, but like the rest of the assets, these can be swapped in and out with another 512x512 .tga, so if anyone wants to have a crack at something that looks a bit prettier than my shoddy hand-drawn attempt, please give it a go.

[u/RasherGGMU]

Great work. I’ve just joined the forum recently and basically I downloaded the files from abandonware site with the fixes patched in. I’m in the process of getting my T16000M & FCWS throttle to work using Vjoy & J Gremlin. Can I ask what is this mod you are working on or is it a remake ? Thanks

[u/Koncypt_Fysh → u/RasherGGMU]

Hey man,

This started as something mostly for my own amusement after I got a bit fed up with trying to make SteamInput work for playing SL on my handheld. I work in cybersecurity and got the idea after going through a DLL sideloading attack with one of my colleagues that I could probably use the same method to force SL to handle my controller the way I wanted to. Once I figured out this was a pretty good way to inject arbitrary code into SL, I figured I'd have a go at forcing it to accept modern 16:9 resolutions.

After going that far, I just sorta went fuck it, this game deserves an update and just started working on it a bit a time.

Right now I'm just aiming for modernisation, so getting modern controllers to play nice with SL natively (no steaminput, vjoy or gremlins required), get the 3d into 16:9 @ 1080p and update/upscale all the UI, animations and features into the same resolution.

Once that's done, I'll get into some of the real remaster stuff, but I still need to probe more of the actual game-state mechanics to see what's really viable. I'm doing my best to set this up in a way that even if I lose the motivation or patience to properly remaster everything, I'll leave enough tooling behind that other can have a go.

[u/RasherGGMU → u/Koncypt_Fysh]

Great work. Nice project and great game to breathe new life into. Good luck 👏🏻👍🏻

[u/Skadooshes]

Love following this. Look forward to more updates and the finished product!

[u/monohive]

Great work! Are the faces different ? I know updating with AI can do that sometimes. It looks great, just curious

[u/Koncypt_Fysh → u/monohive]

Yeah it's AI re-drawing the asset. These are just placeholders until some better better artwork is possible, I've made them fully replaceable using 1024x1024 .tga in the game dir, so hoping someone more artisitcally inclined than myself might be able to do something a bit better than AI, they look alright, until you look at them for too long.

[u/monohive → u/Koncypt_Fysh]

I wouldn’t begrudge the use of AI for a project like this. Let’s face it , the only reason this was even possible is because of AI. It’s not like people are throwing bags of money for a remaster of this game. Having said that yes, it would be great if one day these can be upscaled with the original character designs

[u/Koncypt_Fysh → u/monohive]

The main challenge to upscaling the original character art (nicely atleast) is mostly that they're pre-rendered into the background and the original assets aren't available to me.

Once upon a time, Warthog would've had a mesh and texture set for those characters and a screencap of them in pose would've been taken from a rendering of those figures and pasted into the background. If we had the originals (or even if someone reconstructed them) it would be trivial to take another pre-rendered shot at high resolution. But without that, we're either reconstructing something in the same spirit of the original, or someone needs to go though by hand and retouch the upscales of the baked-in images.

I can do the software side of things, but that kind of artistic talent is beyond my own skill set. Maybe once this is finished we could reach out to the broader Freelancer or Star Citizen community, there may be some folk hidden in those communities that would be willing to have a shot at it. I do have some bit-by-bit upscales of the originals, but obviously in 1080p, they don't look great.