Resident Evil 3: Restoration Project mod

Greetings, dear fans of Resident Evil.

I would like to present you the outcome of our long and hard work that my team and I were doing for over a year and a half. It is about one of my favorite games - Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, which was the first one introducing me to the world of this brilliant franchise. As I tried different versions of the game, looking for advantages and disadvantages present in each of them, I was hooked up on a feeling that developers have created a sort of puzzle quest for their players, because practically every version of the game had its own unique features that were not present on other platforms. Thus, the PSX version has the best VO quality, Dreamcast game can make boast of its HQ background sound effects (shooting, zombie moans, step sounds etc.), while PC version is the worst in terms of its music, sounds, and video quality, but the SourceNext edition came out with video quality improved. Another advantage of PC version is its modding flexibility, which became the final argument in favor of using it as a platform for our project. Ok, first things first. In 2006 a modern edition of Biohazard 3 made by SourceNext came out in Japan, which, apart from minor upgrades, contained fullscreen videos in decent resolution. Those uncut fullscreen HQ videos were much more appealing than those of the original version because of extra top and bottom image parts present instead of black borders that you could see before. It's strange that CAPCOM didn't use them in their Playstation, PC, Gamecube and Dreamcast versions of the game, given that technically those platforms were capable enough for that. And of course, many of us wanted to see that eyeful in the US version of the game. Achieving this kind of result was not easy. To do so we had to solve two major problems:

1. Overcoming the frame width and height limit, which is 320X160 pixels in original vs. 720X480 that we needed.
2. Cleaning lots of frames from three videos by hand in order to remove Japanese subtitles from them.

Improvement No. 1.
Uncut Fullscreen HQ videos without Japan subs.

Our major achievement that we are proud of. In a year we have managed to solve both abovementioned tasks, so now everyone can enjoy fullscreen SourceNext videos in the US or any European version for PC and PSX. One note: now they play in their original speed - 15 frames per second vs. 30 FPS in the SourceNext edition. We had to go for this limit in order to reduce the number of frames for manual cleaning. Besides, to my taste, the 15 FPS version looks more spectacular in this version. The videos are in their original resolution of 720X480 and converted with lossless settings.

Improvement No. 2.
Lossless Voiceover and Music.

The English voiceover was ported from the PSX version.
Its quality is much higher than that of PC version. Consider this:

Original PC version voiceover:
Bitrate - 88 Kbit/s
Frequency - 22,05 kHz
Bit depth - 4 bit

High quality PSX voiceover:
Bitrate - 605 Kbit/s
Frequency - 37,8 kHz
Bit depth - 16 bit

The music was ported from an official OST:

Original PC version music:
Bitrate - 176 Kbit/s
Frequency - 22,05 kHz
Bit depth - 4 bit

Lossless OST score:
Bitrate - 1411 Kbit/s
Frequency - 44,10 kHz
Bit depth - 16 bit

Improvement No. 3.
Centered in-game text for comfortable reading.

In order to make reading more comfortable and to avoid people getting crossed eye, the in-game text was centered and moved to the right, just like it is in every console version of the game.

Improvement No. 4.
The original music playback was fully restored.

Some melodies that were muted before can be played again, besides an incorrect
playback of some melodies was fixed to loop smoothly. All credits to RhymeKidder and Lexas87.

Improvement No. 5.
Minor bugs were fixed.

• The cutscene with Carlos and Jill by the restaurant was fixed. (Carlos stopped running away before the end of conversation)
• Flying head bug was finally fixed (thanks to rhymekidder, myloch).
• The pre-rendered backgrounds at the Clock Tower were replaced with HQ ones (they were left inside game files by developers). Also, a new unused background was unlocked.
• Video lag at the beginning of every video was fixed (PC version).
  This problem is present in every PC version of the game regardless of PC configuration and OS.
  Every video was lagging for ~ 3-5 seconds with its sound going on normally.
  This problem was solved through using Huffyuv lossless codec.
  The patch is big in size mainly because of uncompressed videos, that can be played on PC without lagging due to the format.
• The game now have full support of XBOX 360 controllers, you don't need to configure anything (thanks to Lexas87).

Future improvements.

You might soon have an opportunity to enjoy a fully restored graphics in the PC version of the game, so support our project, stay tuned and keep following the news.

Compatibility.

This patch based on standard USA release and can be installed on any game version including SourceNext, but keep in mind that it turns any game version in common USA edition.

Setup.

1. Install Resident Evil 3 from your game CD, using the "full installation" option.
(Note: if you're using UAC protection on your system, it's not recommended to install the game in Program Files folder, otherwise, make sure that game is installed in it's default path (...CAPCOM\ResidentEvil3).

2. Run the patch and follow the setup instructions.

3. Press the "Browse" button to locate the setup directory of the game.

4. Wait for the setup to finish and run your game.

Credits:

Kalash49, Lexas87, Viktor Volkov, Yevgeny Lychany (aka Johnny Doe), Anastasia Zhukova, RhymeKidder.