Stock BC 20th anniversary edition (yes, you read that right)

[King Class Scout]

there's something very interesting going on over at our discord.  a guy going by the name Elijah has been working hard cleaning up the bone stock version of BC for its 20th anniversary and has been making some very interesting discoveries in the process.

so far, he has
a: cleaned up and resized ALL the stock textures to modern sizes and quality
b: managed to find a way to widescreen BC without 20 zillion scripts

currently, he's investigating the stock models, and, as of last night, located the fact that the Bird of Prey model actually had another hidden model inside of it.

we know the game was rushed to release, but dayum...

[newhalo123]

When you say "cleaned up and resized", most people are going to think the textures will look amazing, but, just upsizing textures doesn't do anything. You don't gain detail. So, I'm not entirely sure what the point would be in doing it.

That said, the 'cleaned up' part makes sense I guess, because if there was artifacts or if the textures were simply just bad, then cleaning them up could mean fixing them in that way.


On the other hand, WIDESCREEN IN STOCK BC!?!?!?!? WHAT THE FU**!?! HOW??
I can barely get that to work unless I have KM. Even then, trying to move the relevant scripts over from KM to a fresh install without the rest of KM seems to bork stuff up for me.

[FekLeyr Targ]

When you say "cleaned up and resized", most people are going to think the textures will look amazing, but, just upsizing textures doesn't do anything. You don't gain detail. So, I'm not entirely sure what the point would be in doing it.

It depends.
If you use one of these new Upscaling AIs (ERSGAN and co), you can actually gain quite a bit of detail.
And I think the point would be preserving the look of Stock BC while gaining a little bit of detail.

[Lurok91]

True Widescreen =  ship exterior AND bridge interior 

[angryandorian]

there's something very interesting going on over at our discord.  a guy going by the name Elijah has been working hard cleaning up the bone stock version of BC for its 20th anniversary and has been making some very interesting discoveries in the process.

so far, he has
a: cleaned up and resized ALL the stock textures to modern sizes and quality
b: managed to find a way to widescreen BC without 20 zillion scripts

currently, he's investigating the stock models, and, as of last night, located the fact that the Bird of Prey model actually had another hidden model inside of it.

we know the game was rushed to release, but dayum...

Can you link to said discord? I always love to hear about hidden or cut content from video games, especially ones I like.

[newhalo123]

Can you link to said discord? I always love to hear about hidden or cut content from video games, especially ones I like.

https://discord.gg/CNFYss2

[King Class Scout]

all I could get out of him on the resize was that it's a "paid program".  couldn't even get a name for it.  the shared Galaxy textures are apparently giving him hell, though.

the sov textures came out very well, btw.

there's been some problems with the character mouth movements.  apparently, the .LIP files hiccup over the size increase.

[King Class Scout]

mini update

the Sunbuster/Solarformer has been gone through, updated, model corrected and hardpoint corrected.  some new texture pieces are being added as well.  an excess camera was spotted in the actual nif itself and may have been intended as the view shot for when the buster MVAMed itself open to fire.

I've also been now passed a trick to reduce a model's VOX debug file size, which as been spotted as being a big performance drag.

[angryandorian]

https://discord.gg/CNFYss2

Thank you. 

[vonfrank]

These discoveries sound interesting. I cant seem to find much reference to them on the discord though. Do you guys have a spot where all of this is being discussed?

[King Class Scout]

@vonfrank  most of this is being discussed in the Ten Foreward channel.  there's only like four of us that yack a lot.  the posts alternate between "LOL lookie what i did with the settings", and "why hasn't anyone bothered playing with anything?!" lately.  we've also had to confirm to Elijah that no one's bothered 'touching' the engine or a lot of these settings.

unfortunately, you'll have to scroll through gobs of posts and a few rants to find em

[JimmyB76]

unfortunately, you'll have to scroll through gobs of posts and a few rants to find em

which is why Discord sucks and forums are better

[King Class Scout]

update for you guys on the 20th special

all stock textures have been resized and upgraded, including the space dust!
there's been some trouble with the shared galaxy/nebula textures.  no word on repair in that department, yet.
all stock models of ships have been gone over, and the rushed modeling errors have been removed, the ships have been resmoothed, extra faces and pieces have been removed.  the Akira model has benefited the most.
note that it was discovered the Sovereign model was discovered to have been made as MVAM ready!
the D bridge model has ALSO been gone over and error removed as well.
the potential cleanup of the character models is being discussed.
Elijah is contemplating removing the low and medium grade models to reduce memory load.

[Vidmaster]

Yeah, talked to him. This looks like a really good idea, a fresher, more stable base to start on.

[FekLeyr Targ]

I agree. With today's hardware, I doubt BC's stock LOD-models are needed anymore.

[ltajax]

Dbridge has so far been an easy fix mesh wise. The problem is if you import anything stock with keyframe data it breaks it, so atm i have to strip the animations for chairs etc. Sadly bridge modding is not well documented

[Lurok91]

... Sadly bridge modding is not well documented

Those of us who did bridge modding provided as much as we could at the time  .  When I started there was practically nothing.   If there had been equally more interest at the time we might have been able to provide more.  If you dig around the forums you will usually find answers. Or feel free to open a Q&A  and I imagine those of us still here will help as much as we can 

[ltajax]

Those of us who did bridge modding provided as much as we could at the time  .  When I started there was practically nothing.   If there had been equally more interest at the time we might have been able to provide more.  If you dig around the forums you will usually find answers. Or feel free to open a Q&A  and I imagine those of us still here will help as much as we can 

A Q&A would be great, I definitely need to do that while I'm working on the bridge fixes

[starfox1701]

anything ever come of this?

[King Class Scout]

sadly, no.  both persons working on their versions have gone silent and faded from the scene.  it appears that they so aggrivated each other over nitpicks, the whole thing's been abandoned on both sides.
it's been dead quiet lately in all formats.  I know what my reasons are, mostly work related doing 6 days a week.