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Blade Runner is being remastered
A little more info from the ps4 store.
Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition is a faithful restoration of the classic adventure game featuring:
*Reconstruction and upressing of original Westwood VQA Videos
*Cinematic Video frame rates updated from 15fps to 60fps
*Modern HD Display
*Enhanced “Knowledge Integration Assistant” (KIA) and clue user interface
*Enhanced Subtitle support
*Modern gamepad support
*SMAA Anti Aliasing
*Anisotropic texture filteringNot much new here.
-Videos are just upscales. *Reconstruction*. Pfft.
-Upping frame rate won’t add any detail.
-Modern HD display=upscaling.
-Enhanced KIA - already implemented by ScummVm
-Enhanced subtitle support - already implemented by ScummVm
-Gamepad support - could use any key mapper
-SMAA Anti aliasing - more smeared “upscaling”
-Antistropic texture filtering - again, there Are no textures in this gameI’ll pass.
100%, maybe I will even replay the original on this release
Not much new here.
-Videos are just upscales. *Reconstruction*. Pfft.
-Upping frame rate won’t add any detail.
-Modern HD display=upscaling.
-Enhanced KIA - already implemented by ScummVm
-Enhanced subtitle support - already implemented by ScummVm
-Gamepad support - could use any key mapper
-SMAA Anti aliasing - more smeared “upscaling”
-Antistropic texture filtering - again, there Are no textures in this gameI’ll pass.
You sounded like they pushin abandonware.
“Going on means going far - Going far means returning”
Huh. This is a surprise.
There are screenshots on the xbox store:
https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/blade-runner-enhanced-edition/9mvww4nj8tls
It’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on, but my best guess:
-Backgrounds are upscaled, with mixed results. Some look a bit better, some look too smooth. I really hope the cutscenes are not as smoothed out as that video a year ago.
-Characters look a little sharper. Not more detailed, just cleaner. Dunno if just because it’s running at a higher resolution or… given the mention of SMAA and antistrophic filtering maybe they’ve somehow ejected the voxel models into their KEX 3D engine?
-But a problem with the models being sharper while the backgrounds are softer: they stand apart from on another much more. It’s odd.
My thought here really looking at the comparisons between the original & remastered version is that it’s going to be more appealing to a new audience. It’s a fantastic game so I hope so!
Not much new here.
-Videos are just upscales. *Reconstruction*. Pfft.
-Upping frame rate won’t add any detail.
-Modern HD display=upscaling.
-Enhanced KIA - already implemented by ScummVm
-Enhanced subtitle support - already implemented by ScummVm
-Gamepad support - could use any key mapper
-SMAA Anti aliasing - more smeared “upscaling”
-Antistropic texture filtering - again, there Are no textures in this gameI’ll pass.
You sounded like they pushin abandonware.
It’s not far from it, tbh.
Huh. This is a surprise.
There are screenshots on the xbox store:
https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/blade-runner-enhanced-edition/9mvww4nj8tlsIt’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on, but my best guess:
-Backgrounds are upscaled, with mixed results. Some look a bit better, some look too smooth. I really hope the cutscenes are not as smoothed out as that video a year ago.
-Characters look a little sharper. Not more detailed, just cleaner. Dunno if just because it’s running at a higher resolution or… given the mention of SMAA and antistrophic filtering maybe they’ve somehow ejected the voxel models into their KEX 3D engine?
-But a problem with the models being sharper while the backgrounds are softer: they stand apart from on another much more. It’s odd.
There are no voxel models. The game uses something called slice modeling. It’s not possible to upscale/antialias these in same way you would a 3D model. It’s probably just anti-aliasing of the entire image, making the edges of the models look a bit more blurry.
The end result is just a smeared mess. It’s a shame new players will experience the game like this for the first time, it does not add anything, and part of the charm of Blade Runner is the grittiness of its aesthetics.
To be fair though, the character models have always stood out from the rest of the graphics in Blade Runner. They never meshed in quite right and especially the scaling has always looked a bit messy. What they can do, realistically, as they’ve shifted this into a new engine, is to try to improve how scene lights affect the character’s appearance. There are many places in the game, where the characters just are on there and receive no light from the scene, making them stand out even more.
But yeah, if they haven’t remodelled the in-game characters, there’s very little they can do to improve their quality, as they don’t have access to the original resource files. Those have been lost forever, or so I’ve understood.
To be fair though, the character models have always stood out from the rest of the graphics in Blade Runner. They never meshed in quite right and especially the scaling has always looked a bit messy. What they can do, realistically, as they’ve shifted this into a new engine, is to try to improve how scene lights affect the character’s appearance. There are many places in the game, where the characters just are on there and receive no light from the scene, making them stand out even more.
But yeah, if they haven’t remodelled the in-game characters, there’s very little they can do to improve their quality, as they don’t have access to the original resource files. Those have been lost forever, or so I’ve understood.
Since slicemodeling basically results in drawing a 2D sprite, you would be projecting light onto a 2D surface. Which would not improve things.
A lot, if not all, of the scene lighting is also pre-rendered.
I mean, that is what Nightdive often does. They re-create 2D spirit-based games, like Blood or Doom64, in their 3D engine. Which lets them tweak things in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in the original. But in this case it does seem minor. Two years ago they talked about the difficulty they were having re-building the game in KEX due to the nature of the assets.
https://www.thegamer.com/blade-runner-enhanced-edition-delayed/
Since slicemodeling basically results in drawing a 2D sprite, you would be projecting light onto a 2D surface. Which would not improve things.
This is actually quite common in modern sprite-based games. It’s just a question of if adding something like that in Blade Runner is feasible or not.
Since slicemodeling basically results in drawing a 2D sprite, you would be projecting light onto a 2D surface. Which would not improve things.
This is actually quite common in modern sprite-based games. It’s just a question of if adding something like that in Blade Runner is feasible or not.
It is? What games does this? Please elaborate how you would add natural lighting to a 2D surface over a pre-rendered 3D background.
I mean, that is what Nightdive often does. They re-create 2D spirit-based games, like Blood or Doom64, in their 3D engine. Which lets them tweak things in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in the original. But in this case it does seem minor. Two years ago they talked about the difficulty they were having re-building the game in KEX due to the nature of the assets.
https://www.thegamer.com/blade-runner-enhanced-edition-delayed/
Based on the screenshots on the Xbox sales page, they have obviously not recreated anything in Blade runner.
There is a trailer on Steam. Everything is just smeared to damnation with (badly done) upscaling.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1678420/Blade_Runner_Enhanced_Edition/
It was well known long before Nightdive announced they would do a remaster that the original dev team did no longer have access to the sources, because the ScummVM team had been attempting to obtain them for years. Nightdive then wanted to use ScummVMs reverse engineering efforts for their remaster, but did not want to open source licence their work, or credit the ScummVM team, and thus had to reverse engineer the game by using ScummVMs code as a template. They had hoped EA would give them access to their archives, something EA was not interested in doing. The end result is a botch job that ruins a classic for future generations, imho. Much like the Simon the Sorcerer 25th anniversary “remasters”.
https://www.pcgamer.com/blade-runner-enhanced-delayed/
please, tomimt don’t elaborate that much
It is? What games does this? Please elaborate how you would add natural lighting to a 2D surface over a pre-rendered 3D background.
Well, here’s how they made it in Broken Age: https://www.p1xelcoder.com/2013/12/14/dynamic-2d-character-lighting/
Every time you see a modern pixel game with awesome light effects, they’ve most likely done something similar to this.
Since slicemodeling basically results in drawing a 2D sprite, you would be projecting light onto a 2D surface. Which would not improve things.
This is actually quite common in modern sprite-based games. It’s just a question of if adding something like that in Blade Runner is feasible or not.
It is? What games does this? Please elaborate how you would add natural lighting to a 2D surface over a pre-rendered 3D background.
I’ll be surprised if they’ve done it for this remake (it’s fairly labour-intensive), but the technique itself is very common. A normal map is used to model how the light should reflect from the sprite’s surface (searching “2d normal mapping” will give you more info). If they get fancy, they can also create specular maps and whatever else.
Another dev for another game (I can only apologise!).
Check out Mistmoon Falls, a weird murder mystery set in a Stardew Valley-inspired setting. Or don’t! Choices matter.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1684290/Mistmoon_Falls/
https://mistmoonfalls.com
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