Widescreen mod

[ultraneonoirantihero]

New user here, so please excuse my lack of familiarity.

Hi, welcome.

How can I help out? If you need more scenes expanded, I can give it a shot.

There are a couple of forum topics that explain the data files, their extraction, z-buffer images and tools for creating 3D scenes from them:

viewforum.php?f=26
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=15530
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=15964
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=15957
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=15537&sid=8ba5dbad ... a627b80aba

Could you describe your process of drawing them a little?

Some scenes have alternative angles which give more complete image of the surroundings that is being cut off by 4:3 aspect ratio. The "Z-buffer to 3D" can be used with multiple scenes to give an exact geometry compiled from multiple angles, alongside with texture projecting to give an almost complete 3D textured "room".

Some scenes have unused angles, which can be accessed by extracting the game files. While others have "cutscene only" alternative angles, like the Manny vs Domino in front of Membrilo's morgue, which can be switched during gameplay using the "developer commands".

Some scenes are "video" only, like the Calavera caffe cactus or the Rubacava Automat which can be seen from different angles only in a video (which has no z-buffer dara and the original game has heavy video compression artifacts).

And some scenes like Land of the Living Diner have no references at all.

But in the end it all boils down to Photoshop



You need the original scene and then use whatever technique you like to "draw" the widescreen addons. You can use zbm2obj to recreate the room in 3d in widescreen. You can just "clone" existing parts of the 2D image to fill in the blanks.

Note: different angles mean that some objects are obscured, so there are elements that need to be made from scratch

Keep up the excellent work!

Thanks. Here are some of the screens that had all of the mentioned "techniques":

[RetroNuva10]

viewtopic.php?f=26&t=15957

Oh lovely - thank you! For some reason I didn't think to use the in-game camera data to replicate the camera angles rather than tediously eyeballing it, haha. I've been looking at mo.set (Manny's Office) but am unsure how to parse the information into useable camera X, Y, Z, Yaw, Pitch, Roll, and FOV. I see "position", "roll", and "fov", but that's all I see at first glance. Not sure what "interest" is. Cervian seems to have figured it out but never seemed to have explained it, but I'm sure you understand what they each mean.

viewtopic.php?f=26&t=15964

Do you have access to kavehth's zmb2obj release build and GrimEdi? His links to them in the above thread are broken.

I took a quick shot at 16:19-ing the packaging room using some pixel-pushing, clone stamping, etc. rather than recreating the room's mesh and rendering it (but I hope to once I'm able to import camera data). I'm anticipating having a harder time with other backgrounds than this considering this one's so dark, so I had the leisure of being a little sloppy without it being noticeable to players. I was unable to perfectly compress the color palette of the side bars to that of the original background image (Gimp's color indexing mode creates weird banding artifacts and Photoshop's doesn't respect the colors perfectly), but I was able to match the original dither pretty closely:

[ultraneonoirantihero]

Cervian seems to have figured it out but never seemed to have explained it, but I'm sure you understand what they each mean.

Not really, it was a long time ago and if it isn't documented in the forum then...

Do you have access to kavehth's zmb2obj release build and GrimEdi? His links to them in the above thread are broken.

Here are the links to:

• GrimEditor (executable and updated source project)
• Zbm-2-Obj
• 3DO viewer and converter

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

I took a quick shot at 16:19-ing the packaging room using some pixel-pushing, clone stamping, etc. rather than recreating the room's mesh and rendering it

Nice, seamless. An easy one

I'm anticipating having a harder time with other backgrounds than this considering this one's so dark, so I had the leisure of being a little sloppy without it being noticeable to players.

Start with the easy ones. Petrified forest has a lot of trees and roots, the server room has a lot of metal and brick walls, so they might be more suitable for cloning. And they're darker. The DOD rooftop has a lot of buildings that need matching, but it has a lot of skies too which are easier to blend.

I was unable to perfectly compress the color palette of the side bars to that of the original background image (Gimp's color indexing mode creates weird banding artifacts and Photoshop's doesn't respect the colors perfectly), but I was able to match the original dither pretty closely:

To be honest, I didn't try to use the exact colour palette, just match colors. There were works on the Residual branches that supported higher res images but I think that code left in the Residual and it isn't merged with latest Scumm. But if someone fixes this, then those finished upscaled Esrgan screens can be used to replace existing low-res backgrounds, and those new screens have a 32bit palette. So I wouldn't worry much regarding the exact color table.

Have you made more, are you using them in-game during playtests with other backgrounds? There are 50 backgrounds that cover 90% of first puzzle and some Rubacava (year I & II) and El-Marrow in a zip file ready for download on the website.

[JohnnyW]

This is incredible. I'm only learning about this progress now. Amazing stuff! Well done!

[Longcat]

Unfortunately, there has not been much progress in a long time. The project appears to have halted.

[ultraneonoirantihero]

Hello,

After a 5 yrs of no updates (sorry about that) I can say:

• Years 1 & 2 are 90% complete.
• There are 120 rooms that are now in widescreen
• Posting new widescreen pack by the end of the month

Here is a puzzle gameplay preview (~30min of widescreen gameplay):
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvhA ... gv9Nb4W6V4

Here are the addons:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/161Ngrh ... sp=sharing

Just follow the instructions on:
https://grimwidescreen.com/

This is the first milestone in a presentable state for a nice playthrough. A lot of rooms and scenes needed to be put together in order for this to "flow" and a lot of them required a lot of work to make this both "screen accurate" and presentable (aka not too distracting).

Thanks everyone on this for making this possible, from making extractors and editors to 3d renders and residual mods.

[Napper]

Does this work with scummvm (instead of residualvm) ? I created a "widescreen" folder containing all the png files and put it in my GRIM directory. But it doesn't seem to enable

[ultraneonoirantihero]

It only works with the special widescreen build of Residual VM. You can download all necessary files from this topic or from website which also has instructions. The mod branch hasn't been merged with the master nor Scumm.