Making the Game - Part 35 (June 9, 2008)

[Bandit LOAF]

Here is the Component Manager Meeting agenda for October 18, 1996. There's a very interesting note from the Production Designer: "Working with Grills on the capship test, I've gotten rather worried about our spaceflight light sourcing. At the moment it's pretty ugly, guys... Are there plans to work on this further? I don't think it's currently good enough to make this game look better than WC4, and considering the reduction in texture quality we're facing, it's the ONLY thing that can!" What does this mean? Why would the texture quality be reduced from an earlier game? Can any art or programming experts enlighten us?

Component Manager Meeting Agenda
Download (3.9 MB)

Date: October 18, 1996
Project: Wing Commander Prophecy
Donated By: Billy Cain
Pages: 8

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Original update published on June 9, 2008

 

[Taser8]

I can speak to that a bit.

When we did WCIV we concentrated first on the cinematic ship models. We used a huge library of photos Chris Douglas took of real-world aircraft, ships, helicopters and such and cut them apart in Photoshop and reassembled them into custom, semi-photo-realistic textures for our ships - see my renders of the Arrow and the Thunderbolt for examples. We then took lower-res renders of the cinematic models for use on the in-game models.

A great idea in theory; the problem was that there was so much detail, the textures were so low-res, and the rendering engine so primitive (compared to what we needed) that the textures tended to just turn into noise - like the static on a tv tuned to no station (does anyone remember what THAT looks like? ;-) )

So when we started Prophecy...er, sorry, WCV, we decided that we still wanted detailed cinematic models but that we needed to vastly reduce the complexity on the in-game ship textures. We decided the best way to do that was to try to design the textures using simpler and fewer bold lines, but add detail to the cinematic models with specular highlights. You can check out my render of the Shrike to see the difference - there is much less surface detail in terms of panel lines, but lots of specular detail. The idea again was to make the in-game ship textures cleaner and simpler so that they'd render better and look nicer in the game.

I suspect that this is what Chris was referring to.

Oh, and the class that I taught really wasn't that exciting, it was just really going over the technical restrictions and requirements me and the engine guys had come up with when we designed the best-practices protocols for the game...

 

[Wedge009]

That's a really great insight into the project, thanks for that.

I always thought the WC4 textures came out rather 'dirty'. I understand the intent, but the end result makes me prefer the WC3 textures. I'm really glad Prophecy turned out the way it did, the cleaner textures (and the new engine) made everything look much nicer compared to its predecessor.

 

[Quarto]

Hmm, what about texture resolution, was that an issue? I know 3Dfx required textures to be limited to 256x256 at the most - but then again, I don't remember if WC4 ever used any textures bigger than 256x256.

 

[Mace]

I agree with Wedge on the WC4 vs WC3 textures, the clean, less complex textures came out more nicely, especially while playing the SVGA version of the games.

The ships simply looked more "clean" with less detailed textures..