Windowed mode & stretched videos: GDI score screen image - Command & Conquer Unofficial Patch 1.06 mod for Command & Conquer
The Past Ain't What It Used To Be... The first Command & Conquer received its last official update on the 21st of June, 1996. Since then, the game has been ported to Windows (as "Gold" version), and re-released in the big "The First Decade" collection pack, but has never received any more bug fixes. The C&C Gold Patch 1.06 project aims to bring this classic into the new millennium, by fixing the old bugs, supporting higher resolutions, and adding new modding and mapping possibilities. It also contains an addon-based language system, allowing anyone to create translation packs for the game.
[THIS CHANGE HAS BEEN MADE OBSOLETE SINCE THE GAME'S OWN VERTICAL STRETCHING ALGORITHM HAS BEEN FOUND]
This shows the algorithm written into the ddraw.dll by CnCFan to detect scenes with scan lines (videos, score screens, mission choice screens), and both remove the lines and stretch the scene to fullscreen.
The detection and the stretching was complicated a lot by text drawn over the scenes afterwards, which did NOT have scan lines, but with a mix of game edits and changes in the detection and stretching algorithms, we managed to make the effect pretty much perfect.
As an added bonus, all of these scenes will have their aspect ratio corrected, so they look as they are meant to look, like they did in the original DOS game.
These new video stretching options are fully integrated into the new CCSetup tool.
That's quite impressive. Nice work! :D
Indeed!
There's some news on this now... AlexB (who is one of the people working on the Ares project) has figured out how to make the game itself stretch these things vertically as well. So the black lines problem is 100% history, even without the external dll.
Silly thing is, the game simply has 3 stretching methods, namely one that leaves the in-between lines blank, one that doubles the lines, and one that actually interpolates to find the best values between 2 lines. The setting determining which method to use was simply never filled in, making it default to the first method -_-
cncfan mysteriously disappeared around the time Alexb appeared, so he was gone just as I wanted to ask him to split up the line filling and the stretching into 2 separate options, but now Hifi is implementing the 640x400-to-fullscreen detection & stretching functionality as option that can be enabled in the official cnc-ddraw release, so all's going well :)