Reply to Re: Modifying/Expanding on the base game
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🤮 I refuse to learn Perl in case something on the site stops working. Anyway, here's a brief outline on how one could sort of remaster the game:
First of all, the sound effects were either licensed from Hollywood Edge or made by RTSoft on their Korg keyboard. One could relatively easily get high-quality originals of just about all of those sfx. In the case of the rest, me and a few others have managed to track down which presets they used to make the sound effects on the Korg T3 keyboard (including for Mystery Island). Thankfully Korg have released the M1 as a VSTi which also includes the T3 sound banks making it a trivial task of re-creating them all.
For music, we have the original CD soundtrack available to us now, and the remaining RTSoft MIDIs could be relatively straightforwardly rendered and/or recomposed in the same way Age of Empires was for its remaster. The remaining classical compositions could potentially be licensed, and of course there are going to be numerous high-quality performances of those available.
The graphics are definitely the most difficult part. RTSoft have shown no intentions to ever release the 3D models and/or Photoshop files to anyone for free, or even unpalletted BMPs. We don't even know what they have available still. Certain features we can be sure they don't have though are the rocks and most of the trees. This is because they were lifted straight from Fractal Design's (then Metacreations, now DAZ) Bryce which was also what splash.bmp was made in. Unfortunately in this scenario with a lack of proper source material it leaves us with weird hack-jobs such as ESRGAN upscaling and stuff like that. I've run a few of Dink's graphics through ESRGAN with wildly varying, but often usable results.
First of all, the sound effects were either licensed from Hollywood Edge or made by RTSoft on their Korg keyboard. One could relatively easily get high-quality originals of just about all of those sfx. In the case of the rest, me and a few others have managed to track down which presets they used to make the sound effects on the Korg T3 keyboard (including for Mystery Island). Thankfully Korg have released the M1 as a VSTi which also includes the T3 sound banks making it a trivial task of re-creating them all.
For music, we have the original CD soundtrack available to us now, and the remaining RTSoft MIDIs could be relatively straightforwardly rendered and/or recomposed in the same way Age of Empires was for its remaster. The remaining classical compositions could potentially be licensed, and of course there are going to be numerous high-quality performances of those available.
The graphics are definitely the most difficult part. RTSoft have shown no intentions to ever release the 3D models and/or Photoshop files to anyone for free, or even unpalletted BMPs. We don't even know what they have available still. Certain features we can be sure they don't have though are the rocks and most of the trees. This is because they were lifted straight from Fractal Design's (then Metacreations, now DAZ) Bryce which was also what splash.bmp was made in. Unfortunately in this scenario with a lack of proper source material it leaves us with weird hack-jobs such as ESRGAN upscaling and stuff like that. I've run a few of Dink's graphics through ESRGAN with wildly varying, but often usable results.
