Sunday, May 14, 2017

Chrome and Chrome SpecForce - Visual Fidelity (unofficial patch)

Another year, another patched old game(s). This time it is Chrome and the expansion/prequel Chrome SpecForce. All I wanted to do is play in 1080p with a FOV that would not give me headaches. Then I discovered Java source code that came with the games. Fix here, fix there, and is basically a whole patch that should be usable to others too.

The goal of this "patch" is to enable the games to be played in widescreen resolutions, ultra widescreen, multi monitor setups and in 4K and above by fixing text rendering and FOV issues and properly scaling some HUD elements. Another goal was to increase the visual fidelity of the game by forcing the game to render highest quality assets even when they are far away from the player. Only assets that will actually be changed are the HUD map textures. No gameplay changes have been made. Jackfuste from WSGF helped fix all the FOV issues and I used HUD map textures for Chrome from Chrome Widescreen Mod(Chrome HD Fix).

I have uploaded it to ModDB and there are more details and a list of changes there and in the included change log file. I wont post it all again here. Detailed instructions are also included.

md5:d4acfc676f0308ef65cea2ce18647199

Here is a short video comparison:


Here are some before/after screenshots (move the slider):

Saturday, March 11, 2017

Skeletal animation editor - ghosting

I added ghosting to my animation editor, so it is much easier to make animations and adjust individual frames, since I can see previous(red) or next(blue) frame of animation too:


I can also render and preview all frames at once:


Monday, March 6, 2017

Simple animation interpolation

I added simple animation frame interpolation, with basically single line of code, to make the animations smoother:

current_angle = last_frame_angle + (time_elapsed_since_last_frame/frame_time)*(next_frame_angle-last_frame_angle)

Left is the original animation, right is with interpolation between frames, both slowed down: