EF1 HD mod addon

EF 1 HD interface mod version 1.0 (2021-06-12) by 7Saturn

What is it?

This is in principle a (U)HD mod for the Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force game interface. With damn Covid19 giving me more time on my hands than usual, I figured, why not doing it? Give the old lady some more love. MEGA: Make EF great again! So I did: This mod replaces many of the LCARS elements (including characters) with a higher resolution. Also some elements from the HUD were replaced with more detailed versions, as well as awarded medal icons and level shots of the maps released by Raven Software.

Why this?

I've been playing EF for round about 20 years now and lately I was playing this on a 4 K screen. Actually the look of the game in general is still quite decent and with certain settings still has some surprises in store on higher resolutions (especially detailed textures look great from a distance!). However, one thing always sucked: The resolution of the HUD and menu interface. Even on not so high resolutions it is obvious, that numbers, letters and LCARS elements were rendered for a very low resolution. Already on 1600x1200 or HD resolution you can clearly see that. This impression gets even more intense when looking at level shots on 4K. The textures improve more and more (not in close up but distant viewed) but the rest seems to get shittier and shittier. Especially the big numbers indicating your health, ammo and shields give the impression of an old game, even when the rest looks OK-ish. You can't help but think: »Man, that could look better!« At least I felt that way.

How?

The LCARS elements were mostly redone using Inkscape. I tried to make them as close to the original result in lower resolutions as I can. Some may still differ slightly. The level shots were done by the build-in screenshot functionality. And the medals were upscaled with an AI website.

What does it Need?

Actually, nothing special. A simple EF installation should suffice. Just place the pk3 somewhere, your EF version will be looking for pk3s. If you are in doubt, have a look at this: Location of the Config Files Mods Maps. You should not require to increase any ...megs cvars, but it certainly won't hurt.

Caveats

First, here's a warning: If you are using EF on lower resolutions, like 1024 x 768, do not bother to use this mod! Especially the level shots will look even worse than the original. This mod explicitly aims at high resolutions, like HD or UHD. When EF is scaling them down a lot, they look worse than the original ones. Only use it on resolutions around HD and higher.

Also, existing problems with the interface (some LCARS elements clearly were no aligned properly by Raven Software, some button labels vertical alignment differs from the rest) were not fixed. If it was f***ed up in the original, it stays that way.

Also be aware, that this mod won't work with the single player of the game without increasing the zone megs value, given as a parameter during start. It is not sufficient to set it in the efconfig.cfg file! The game requires at least 11 MB for zone megs with this mod, so a starting command inside a Windows link to the single player stvoy.exe may look like this:

"C:\Games\Star Trek Voyager Elite Force GOG\stvoy.exe" +set com_zoneMegs "32"

This sets it to 32 MB (10 is the default). In any case, the mod was not checked out, yet, for accuracy with the single-player, but solely with the multi-player. So expect some parts to be not upgraded. Maybe at a later time I might get into that.

And for those, who are really into being accurate: I did not aim for »100% like the original but sharper«. You will notice, that the level shots were done by myself and the letters and numbers definitely do deviate from the original. I took my characters from the Okuda font. So IMHO, it is even closer to original LCARS than the characters delivered with EF 1. There are also small variations on those letters, that would go below the base line (like g, p or q). I shortened those a bit, so that the characters do not go above the x-line of the rest of the font and still are not cut on the lower end and still look OK. Also the CTF symbols presented in the lower right corner in-game use a question mark, that's not quite the same as the original, but close.

The awarded medal icons were up-scaled with an AI tool, as well as a few other symbols. I'm not completely happy with that result and it might get some rework in the future. In general, there are a number of elements, that might be overhauled as well, like the weapon icons or the CTF flag textures. In general, textures were not improved. (If anybody has good tutorials on how to work on such stuff with OSS on Linux, feel free to give a hint to me. I'm actually a graphics noob...)

The level shots may differ slightly, as I could not place myself accurately enough to get the very same level shot, as the original creator did. On a side-note, some of those original levelshots strike me as having been created from a map version, that differs from the eventual released maps. When placing yourself in that position where the original screenshot was taken from, the map definitely looks a bit different with EF 1.2 maps.

Also: This has only been tested up to 4K resolutions (3840 x 2160). I can imagine, that future players working on 8K may have a bit higher requirements. But then again, I'm not sure if there is much demand for that particular combination (EF1 on 8K resolution)...

Last words

This is far from being a complete rework and most likely not finished. It’s a very first shot at the problem. If you find any problems (such as letters not shown completely, LCARS elements not looking as they should), feel free to contact me. If it is not too much of a hassle, I will probably change it for the better. If you decide to do so, please use meaningful screenshots to illustrate the problem, or a video, if that works better for you. You can reach me on the EF Discord and via 7saturn@gmx.de.