There's always more aliens to blast, pilot! Travel back and replay a classic Shoot 'Em 'Up with all new graphics, SFX, and a new announcer pack to spice up your experience! With blessing from an original developer on Warblade, Simon Quincey, this mod also implements graphics shown publicly for Warblade II (which was never released due to the sad passing of Edgar Vigdal). This mod is a tribute to his amazing work and the childhoods he inspired with Warblade's deep and action-packed gameplay. Also features several different pack file choices depending on what you want your ship to be!
Articles
Hey everyone, and welcome to the first released mod for the original Warblade on ModDB! Read on to check out graphical changes, a video in action, and a changelog, as well as a little personal anecdote about the game/mod.
Warblade: Tribute: Revisiting a Classic
Warblade came out in 2003, and I remember playing it with my dad fondly. It's one of the earliest games I actually remember playing, and I spent hours chasing secrets, getting better, and hunting down all the ranks I could. Whilst the elusive Sol God Rank has never been on my profile, I still whiled away hundreds or even thousands of hours over the last eighteen years revisiting Warblade again and again. Now, as an adult and experienced modder, I asked the question every modder asks - can I add to this game somehow?
Warblade II was a project I watched in anticipation, but when the sad news of Edgar Vigdal's death reached me, I was heart-broken. It was deeply saddening to hear the creator of one of my childhood games had passed, and without seeing his creative legacy through. For many years, Warblade has languished without official word as to the sequel. In light of this, for my modification, I sought to try and restore some of this content into the original and put my own spin on a number of graphical changes that I feel, if nothing else, freshen up the game many may've spent decades playing. To ensure I was respectfully doing this, I got in touch with one of Edgar's close friends and co-workers, Simon Quincey, to discuss the usage of graphics and the creation of the mod. With his blessing, I powered on and created the full mod, alongside assistance from Iridum77 for technical support (a role he regularly performs on mod projects of mine) and Entity37/Sam Warren as the announcer for the action-focused Announcer Pack 3. With the story of how this came to be out of the way, check out the changelog below for a look at what to expect in Warblade: Tribute:
Changelog
Gameplay Video:
- Changed borders to resemble those seen in MK2 pre-release material. Easy and Hard have versions based off the YouTube "industrial" preview whereas Normal and Ace have borders based off of the pre-release logo renders
- Changed player ship and all associated graphics to be that from Warblade MK2 complete with movement animations
- Changed menu logo to the MK2 ship
- Changed "moth" motherships to resemble the remastered sprites
- Changed "wasp" motherships to resemble remastered sprites, and recoloured the smaller aliens to be more fitting
- Changed "sphere" sprites to better resemble remastered sprites
- Changed "V shape" motherships (in the last 10 levels or so) to resemble cut sprites, and the normal aliens received minor recolours for consistency
- Changed "frog fly" mothership aliens to better resemble the remastered sprites
- Changed splash screen to have the mod's title
- Changed company splash screen to serve as credits for the three mod developers
- Fixed some very small texture artifacts in the "rank-down" purple marker
- Changed meteor storm money pickups to green to make them more easily identifiable
- Changed moving sprites of the "flying saucer" aliens at Levels 17-20 to be consistent with their still sprites
- Remade the gameover text in a different style
- Changed bronze star to be more bronze and less orange
- Changed pink rank marker symbol on the border to be more pink and less purple
- Changed a few of the noticeably lower quality sounds
- Made large jewel variants match those seen in the Memory Station mini-game so all seven are represented
- Made arrow pointer a little smaller
- New announcer pack by professional voice actor
- Added alternate pacfile that swaps singleplayer ship and relevant graphics to the second player ship
- Added alternate pacfile that changes all icons back to the Warblade 1 ship
Closing Thoughts
Warblade was a huge part of my childhood, and it was super rewarding to revisit it for this mod. I know I'll be sinking another chunk of time to trying out the game again, and be sure to leave a review if you do play the mod! If you have any bugs, feel free to report them, and I will try to fix them soon!
Files
Warblade Tribute: Main 1.0 Release Files
Full VersionWarblade Tribute: Main 1.0 Release Files, utilising the Warblade II player ship!
Warblade: Tribute: Player 1 Ship
PatchWarblade: Tribute: Player 1 Ship patch for the main game files
Warblade: Tribute: Player 2 Ship
PatchWarblade: Tribute: Player 2 Ship patch for the main game files
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Just in case anyone is curious why their pac file modifications aren't working (since I'm doing more Warblade modding after a while!), I had to re-learn that you want to zip up the *contents* of the extracted pac file, not the folder your zipping tool will make (which would change the file pathing). Made this mistake and found the same fix I'd already found before! Writing it here mostly for my future reference but also to help anyone else. Thanks!
Hi folks - I just read "I'm doing more Warblade modding after a while". Just the announcement of "more Warblade modding" sounds GREAT for me. Can you already give me an idea on when to expect any new stuff?
Cheers, LoneWolf
Hey - at the time I was referring to this addon here which I whipped up after I had a dream about Warblade: Moddb.com
However, I'm also currently in the middle of looking into some very interesting stuff for Warblade I'll be excited to share soon! And I've come up with some ideas for expanding this particular mod too, so in 2024 expect to some some new stuff as far as Warblade modding is concerned :)
Lovely mod! How exactly do you edit the .pac file or any other Warblade related game files?
Hey there, it's been a while but as far as I recall, the .pac file is actually just a zip file (can't remember what extension for sure but I'm inclined to say literally a .zip file) with a renamed extension. Once you unzip it, you can modify the graphic files within which are pretty accessible - DDS or PNG files as I recall, a really readable texture format, at any rate. Other stuff like actual game functionality is in the .exe so, unfortunately, can't actually be modified as far as I'm aware, but lots of graphical stuff can be done.
I can see a Star Wars graphical total conversion mod working for example - changing the player ship into an X-Wing and all the other ship sprites into various Star Wars ships, recording a new announcer pack and replacing music, etc. Just some food for thought! Glad you like the mod :)