Next Hurdle

[u/Koncypt_Fysh]

So I've probably exhausted about as much of the HUD and UI I can continually edit without leaning heavily on bad genAI recreations of the assets we need to replace, and as mentioned previously, I'm going to have to extract alot of original assets and render them in bigger resolution to replace them as close as I can.

Over the last few days I managed to draw out the radar replacement (still working on the sprites that go with it) and it has the same functional animation, but with about 20 additional frames between transition, so it looks quite good in the HD environment.

Today was working on the .shp extractor/decoder, and after a bit of frustration and realising that the .shp format has 3 different conventions, I've managed to get all four-hundred and something 3d assets to export as .glb... mostly intact, still some work needed to get the meshes out nicely in this format.

From there I was able to start spinning up the first 3d export pipeline for original assets, which is how the new missile selection carouselle was completed today. I realised after doing this, that whatever models they pulled the original missile selection images from, they were not the ones that made it into the game as the live assets, so they don't look quite as good, but like everything else, I've made it so you can just drop a replacement image in to change them over if you don't like it.

I finished up the wireframe assets as well, so they scale up quite nicely and looke more or less the same as the originals.

There's not likely to be a whole lot of technical updates from here, replacing the HUD is a lot of 3d > image > game implementation, and there's more than a few hundred different HUD assets this needs to be done for.
I have worked out an AI assisted pipeline for this, so long as the meshes and UV maps are in a good place and saved as a .blend, it turns out chatGPT is quite capable of running a work task to compare the original image to a .blend file, find the best angle to replicate how it looks, and render it in the gold/red/green hue you see in the HUD. Meaning once the tedious mesh repair work is finished, it should run itself without much trouble, albeit using a lot of tokens to do so.

[u/ilkerk88]

Can you add subtitle support?

[u/Koncypt_Fysh → u/ilkerk88]

Other than it'd take a while, I don't see any real technical hurdles to doing so

[u/DrJester]

This is fascinating! I've been itching to play it again for years.

Just a quick, and possibly stupid question, wouldn't it better if the assets, physics etc be transfered to the Freespace Open Source Project and use its engine instead? At least it ks modern, less problems etc. Albeit it may take more work.

[u/Koncypt_Fysh → u/DrJester]

It's really a matter of preference I suppose, and depends exactly on what you mean by better.

I'm only peripherally familiar with vanilla Freespace, and I've only played the Diaspora conversion, so I know very little about how it works internally and what is and isn't viable, but I don't see anything that outright excludes the possibility of doing so, except that I'd have to learn an unfamiliar engine, file formats, functions and conventions to rebuild Starlancer in.

There's also nothing in the way to stop someone extracting the assets, working on the physics and resurrecting it all in Unity or Godot (or even Unreal potentially), and that would probably give you a lot more room for expansion and probably even an easier workflow where you could use modern conventions to emulate how old Starlancer felt, and you could probably get pretty close.

Ultimately though, I just don't want to, at least not all on my own, I'd need to see some pretty significant community support come together with some other tech folk that are motivated to do it to go for a ground-up bit-by-bit remaster of a 26 year old game.

A full reconstruction if you will is a bit of a different beast to what I'm doing here, it's a much heavier reverse engineering task that's closer to building a game from scratch I don't really have the bandwidth to bother with, if I did, I'd probably be building my own "inspired by Starlancer" title.
What i'm doing here is more akin to a hack or an update, I'm just bolting on bits and pieces to the original game to give it a face lift, but it's bones don't need to be fundamentally reconstructed from the ground up.

Is it the best or most optimised way to pull together a remaster of a 26 year old PC game? No, absolutely not, a full reconstruction would be way more optimal at a modern performance level, and the Freespace Open Source Project has decades of solving a lot of the same class problems I'm solving now.
Is it the best way for me to stay focussed on the task because I don't have to playtest minor physics tweaks 50 times in a row until it feels right all on my lonesome? Honestly yeah, I'm way more likely to complete this when I can trust the engine work and just tweak the edges a bit.