WCPedia: Summer Projects

It's some place weird. I just have no clue where.

Kris might know though....I feel like last time I wanted it edited he did it. I'll look later see if it comes back to me.
 
Awesome thanks Kris. It appears anyone can edit it. It doesn't have a "protect" tab at the top (which is what's on the Main Page - only bureaucrats and sysops can edit it) which I'm surprised by since almost every other page has one.
 
Attention Wing Commander III PlayStation owners!

If anyone owning a copy of the PlayStation version of WC3 can try the FMV extraction tool released for the CIC's birthday, the WCPedia could use your help.

Basically, I am wondering if the raw movie files extracted from the game can be cleaner than the DivX-compressed ones provided in that same news update. Compare the following images:

The latter is larger and has greater colour depth (the PC version was limited to 256-colours), but unfortunately, red pixels suffer badly in JPEG/MPEG-compression, such as DivX.

If anyone could provide a clean PNG of the Temblor Bomb image as well as the Skipper Missile image, it would be most appreciated.
 
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Well, if you can extract the 3DO version, go for it. My understanding is that the 3DO videos are marginally better than the PlayStation version.
 
Attention Wing Commander III PlayStation owners!

If anyone owning a copy of the PlayStation version of WC3 can try the FMV extraction tool released for the CIC's birthday, the WCPedia could use your help.

Basically, I am wondering if the raw movie files extracted from the game can be cleaner than the DivX-compressed ones provided in that same news update. Compare the following images:

The latter is larger and has greater colour depth (the PC version was limited to 256-colours), but unfortunately, red pixels suffer badly in JPEG/MPEG-compression, such as DivX.

If anyone could provide a clean PNG of the Temblor Bomb image as well as the Skipper Missile image, it would be most appreciated.

(EDIT= Since I have all the uncompressed stuff sitting on my harddrive already I can take some screenshots for you...)

The raw movie's aren't a whole lot cleaner than my divx versions. They might have slightly better details but not in any really noticable fashion. The resolution is so low (I've doubled it for the DIVXs) that the only option is either really blocky looking images or the more jpeg compressd looking versions I made.

HCls brief look into the 3DO versions seem to indicate that the 3D0 version might not have that much better of an image. It may end up with cleaner lines (yeah the reds are a little blocky) though... so we'll have to wait till a converter for the 3DO videos is available. In the meantime, this is pretty much as good as it gets.
HCl said:
The 3DO videos should have quality similar to the PSX video. I would expect to see the same color depth and resolution at least. As for compression artifacts, that's a tough one to predict, although i would expect to see artifacts more similar to the PC-version on the 3DO videos. I suspect (although i haven't confirmed it yet) that the 3DO codec somewhat resembles the PC codec, using the 3DO CEL engine to accelerate key parts of the algorithm. In contrast, the PSX codec involves shoving data blocks at the video decoder hardware as fast as it can handle, and that's pretty much it (think of it as each video frame being JPEG-compressed, that's pretty close to what is happening)

The WC3 PSX version *may* still have the edge on image quality though.

I could upload one or two uncompressed but the file size ends up being an issue... (over 20+ GB for all the video. Ideally, HCl might make a proper codec file for windows to play them natively... you could then just convert at will in something like virtualdub, but given HCls current sittuation, don't hold your breath.

If someone else can play with them, then by all means go ahead. My experimentation with different smoothing filters and edge enhancement weren't overly successful, and my DIVX compression uses what I figured gave the best all around results.
 
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While I like the look of the PSX video in general over the PC, this would indicate to me that some fine detailing like text might very well be a big improvement over the PSX on the 3DO...

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Oh... so after all that, does this mean the PlayStation videos were also 320x160?

They do have the extra colour depth over the PC version but... hmm, this is disappointing.
 
Oh... so after all that, does this mean the PlayStation videos were also 320x160?

They do have the extra colour depth over the PC version but... hmm, this is disappointing.

It has both cleaner compression (you don't have the wierd sticky pixel artifacts) and better color depth. But the resolution is the same... and has that jpeg-like compression. The best bet for better/smoother looking video is the 3DO but it will likely also be the same resolution. Ideally it will be cleaner and have better color depth but better line crispness of the PC version (since it's codec is closer to the PC than PSC version). There's also the potential that the 3DO has better sound but I don't think so.
 
Well, this all confuses me, since the 3DO clips we have on the CIC are 640x320 - have they been up-scaled for encoding purposes as well?

The sticky-pixels of the PC version aren't so much a problem when taking still frames for images. Maybe I'll revert to the PC version for the wire-frame animations, then.
 
Well, this all confuses me, since the 3DO clips we have on the CIC are 640x320 - have they been up-scaled for encoding purposes as well?

The thing with the 3DO is, we just won't know until there's a working file extractor/decoder. It's impossible to tell what the resolution really is when all the samples were taken by running a 3DO into a video capture card. I think we can expect it to be about the same resolution. It should look better in still shots of text since it's essentially the same as the PC codec but it should have the better color depth and cleaner look of the PSX version.
 
Following up from this:

https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Talk:WCPedia_Rules said:
I know the rule is "don't steal from Wikipedia, only from yourself"... but what if the two are the same? For instance, I wrote the entry on the Confederation and it's still sitting there six years later, practically unchanged and being voted on to merge with the main article. I think parts of it are better than what we have now - so could I go and rip those parts from my last solo revision? I'm itching for a go at the whole article, actually.

I also wrote an overview on battleships that's since been deleted - gone for over two years now. I don't have the original anymore, but it's still floating around the internet on various Wikipedia copycat sites. I'd like to take it, try and clean it up, bring it up to date. Is that kosher?
Bob McDob 11:53, 12 August 2010 (CDT)

I finally managed to dig my old battleships article up (off of what looked like some eBay phishing site, of all places), but since it was originally written for an open source project, I don't know what the legal repercussions of using it would be. Is there anyone here familiar with the laws applicable to this sort of thing (apparently, the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons) and whether or not it can or should be used on the project?
 
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I'm not versed in legal matters, but the GNU FDL seems to allow for what they call aggregation (point 7). Re-licensing (point 11) also talks about using the original work in a public wiki. I'm not sure how that works with the No Derivatives variant of the Creative Commons licence cited on the WCPedia, though.

Really, since you were the author of the original work, however, I find it unreasonable that any of this could prevent you from re-using it in the WCPedia.
 
So SM1.5 should now be finished completely, if you want to confirm anything (some of the speech is really wierd, especially in the grey areas between totally defeating the enemy and failing miserbaly) then let me know, otherwise i'm pretty happy with it :)
 
I'm not versed in legal matters, but the GNU FDL seems to allow for what they call aggregation (point 7). Re-licensing (point 11) also talks about using the original work in a public wiki. I'm not sure how that works with the No Derivatives variant of the Creative Commons licence cited on the WCPedia, though.

Really, since you were the author of the original work, however, I find it unreasonable that any of this could prevent you from re-using it in the WCPedia.

I'm not worried so much about the legality of using it on the project as I am that using it would somehow open a legal loophole that woukd allow other people to copy the work on it, in the way that, say, Origin releasing some of the Ultima Online code on an open license let people set up private emulation servers.
 
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