Widescreen mod

[thedanhil]

Hello guys. I saw a video somewhere along YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cigf0ZT9pu0) of someone playing Grim Fandango in a widescreen mode where the sides had been painted on to fit into a (sort of) 16x9 aspect ratio. Now this referred to Grim Fandango Deluxe as a source. So I have a few questions about this.

1: Are you thinking of using this? 2: If you guys did this, how far have you come? Because I am an artist myself and would be interested in helping out with the adding of widescreen backgrounds, so essentially painting the extra details in. 3: How would you implement it? Because I saw a thread about using the 3D lighting data from the remastered version of GF, so I don't know how you will go ahead on that and implement it. I would really appreciate an answer as I would love to contribute to this project; but I am just an artist not a developer or programmer so that is just about the only thing I can do.


PS.: Just so you know that I'm not just some kid who likes to fiddle around in Paint or GIMP, but actually know what the hell I'm doing, you can see my stuff at http://danielhildebrand.de (don't worry no viruses or anything shady there) or on http://theonlydaniel.deviantart.com.

[JohnnyWalker2001]

Hi Daniel, thanks for offering your help. The video in question was actually a mockup made in Aftereffects. In other words, it was just trickery and never actually live. Given that Grim Fandango Remastered adds images to the sides of the screen, it feels like it MIGHT be possible, if we could convince the game to change them for every room, instead of every year.

It's all just conjecture at the moment, though.

[ultraneonoirantihero]

When I made that video 4 years ago I was ready to start remastering ALL the backgrounds for widescreen if someone found the way to put them into game.

Someone actually did say it was possible: to center the game window, detect which room you are in and then to display additional images on the side... but no one actually tried it so I stopped remastering backgrounds.

I'm still willing to do it if someone makes the ResidualVM display side-images.

Also, there has to be like 400+ backgrounds in the game, recreating them all from scratch in 3D would be madness. People have recreated Manny's office number of times but no one actually made any further progress. If you ask me: Photoshop addons, you all saw the video, looks great and was done in one afternoon.

Cheers

[JohnnyWalker2001]

When I made that video 4 years ago I was ready to start remastering ALL the backgrounds for widescreen if someone found the way to put them into game.

Someone actually did say it was possible: to center the game window, detect which room you are in and then to display additional images on the side... but no one actually tried it so I stopped remastering backgrounds.

I'm still willing to do it if someone makes the ResidualVM display side-images.

Also, there has to be like 400+ backgrounds in the game, recreating them all from scratch in 3D would be madness. People have recreated Manny's office number of times but no one actually made any further progress. If you ask me: Photoshop addons, you all saw the video, looks great and was done in one afternoon.

Cheers

I agree the Photoshopped version looked great. As I say, Grim Fandango Remastered changes the side images every year... Maybe someone can dig into how they're changed and see if they can be changed every room. If there's no space between the side images and the game, it should be perfect.

The only issue is that ResidualVM will never support Grim Fandango Remastered, which means that all Deluxe efforts may no longer be done in conjunction with Residual :-/ Of course, their expertise and knowledge of GF would be great appreciated none-the-less.

[thedanhil]

Thank you guys for your answers. Yeah the way I see it somone would have to go in and see if there is a listener somewhere waiting for the action of changing room or detecting it. Maybe a programmer might volunteer because I am a total noob at that.

@ultraneonoirantihero well, if the guys decide that it is possible and they want to put it into the build at some point we might just split the workloads of creating the backgrounds. I might even get more artists to work on this. Does that sound cool with you?

[somaen]

I'm still willing to do it if someone makes the ResidualVM display side-images.

Well, displaying side-images is of course trivial (see Remastered's side columns for an example), once you have a 16:9 window with the actual 4:3 game viewport centered inside it.

The current issue for ResidualVM, is that we assume that the screen resolution is 4:3 all around the engine (aspect is handled by modifying the initial screen setup). So we don't have any easy way to "draw outside the box" right now.

As for picking up side-images, they can be picked up by simple name matching, since I'd assume there'd be one image per background, so if mo.bm is loaded for instance, then we can easily trigger mo_left.bm and mo_right.bm implicitly.

[ultraneonoirantihero]

Does that sound cool with you?

GF Widescreen always sounds good to me I'll dig up my old HDD and post the finished backgrounds... here?

So we don't have any easy way to "draw outside the box" right now.

So until that's resolved...

I remember there was some user on wsgf.com who managed to run GF on higher res, the models & walking boxes were centered, but the 2D backgrounds were in the upper left corner. Cant find his screenshot... So maybe instead of drawing "out of the box" could ResidualVM increase the game's resolution and re-position the newly extended 2D backgrounds while keeping the 3D stuff in the center of the screen? This is just and idea, I never did any reverse engineering on GF...

P.S. Speaking of remastering GF in 3D:
http://www.theriftarcade.com/heres-mann ... -the-rift/

[JohnnyWalker2001]

Why do we need to draw outside of the game's 4:3 area? I don't believe there's ever anything animated that goes past the edges of the screen. If we just keep it as decorative for now, as a better replacement for black bars, then why not do it?

We could start with Manny's office as a test to see how it feels.

[ultraneonoirantihero]

Can't find the original PSD files, so for now I'll post these. There are 4 backgrounds here that are not in my YouTube video but I'm certain I did more back then...

http://imgur.com/a/xUSgM#0























I just re-watched my video on YouTube and I'm almost certain that at some point YouTube re-re-encoded my video to even higher compression... maybe clips with less than million views get that treatment to preserve space on Microsofts servers.

[JohnnyWalker2001]

Nicely done! It seems you went beyond 16:10/16:9 though? It looks almost like 2.35:1? Is it just my eyes?

[ultraneonoirantihero]

Nicely done! It seems you went beyond 16:10/16:9 though? It looks almost like 2.35:1? Is it just my eyes?

I have to mention that I dislike full frame 16:9 because it reminds me of a cheap TV broadcast. Every good movie I watched has 2.35:1 aspect ratio and it is something that leaves a certain artistic impression on me. Tim said Grim Fandango was inspired by movies Glengarry Glen Ross (2.35:1) and Casablanca (4:3) so I very much liked my final result on those backgrounds. It looked very cinematic to me and in the video it looked more of a movie than a game.

BUT... I see that people don't like their games to be like movies, which was the case with the game "Evil Within". The game has 2.35:1 aspect ratio and players complained about the "black bars", they even made mods to remove them:
http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/the-v ... 1100-5055/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaG8xplgjic

That being said...

I remember when I started to work on the first image I took the original 640x480 background and placed it on 1024x768 stage, since it's the first next greater resolution. I left the original background in its original size and just filled in the blank on the sides. It looked awesome and I really didn't measure it until now, 4 years later

Since the size is 1024x480 then its aspect ratio is 2.13:1 ... and it's a real aspect ratio! I Googled it and it's "Ultra Panavision 70", was used for Ben-Hur!

So if you want to preserve those backgrounds in their original size (no resampling) and just add more info on the sides without rescaling then:
- for 2.35:1 those backgrounds I made need to be 104px wider (+52px on each side)
- for 16:9 those backgrounds need to be cropped 170px on the sides (-85px on each side)
- or leave them like this and have GF in "Ultra Panavision 70", a format which was abandoned in 1966 (but at least it had Ben-Hur )

But until someone actually makes Residual to do widescreen magic all this doesn't really matter and it can change due to tech limitations. Can the stage be rescaled, can it be repositioned, which resolution would be supported... then we could talk about aspect ratio

[ultraneonoirantihero]

P.S.
An idea came into my mind, to record a short playthrough of the Grim Fandango Remastered and add my images on the sides, so I could have high res textures, dynamic lighting, orchestral music AND widescreen all in one video But i remembered that GF:R uses dynamic lights which cast shadows beyond the original framing. So if I added imagery on the sides the illusion wouldn't hold because there is no Z-buffer data beyond those 4:3 and you could clearly see the shadows being cut off.

I wonder if anyone from the GF:R team saw the widescreen video and said "damn, it would be nice if we did widescreen"? My guess is that it was "too expensive" for them to re-render all those backgrounds and cutscenes so they just lied in those Making Of videos and said "we don't have ALL the source data".

Did you guys get any feedback from the Tobias Pfaff?

[JohnnyWalker2001]

It may not be utterly perfect, but I still think it would look great. Plus this is something the could actually happen -- as opposed to extending the game, which seems hugely unlikely.

Also, come on: Plenty of great movies were filmed 1.85:1

[ultraneonoirantihero]

Tonight, I'm going to do a quick test to see if I can resample & enhance the image quality of those widescreen Photoshops. Unfortunately, I only have my old CS3 Photoshop and not that new CC which has "Shake reduction".

Basically I will try to upscale and sharpen the images while removing the compression artifacts and gif dither... which is exactly what those Remaster developer said they wont do cause it's tedious.

I haven't looked for the original PSD files, I'm in quite a mess right now.

[Nitrus]

P.S. Speaking of remastering GF in 3D:
http://www.theriftarcade.com/heres-mann ... -the-rift/

Yeah, there have been many such attempts before(including one by me), but in another thread there's recreating them from the z-images, which is quite amazing if you ask me, I believe I once said that it would be impossible because I thought they actually only contained clipping data and shell objects, but this proved me wrong
Of course, recreating every scene would take a LOT of time and effort, but if the contributing community grows, I think I can see it happen with what we actually have.