Caesar 3 - Restored Cinematics v1.0 file

PREVIEW

DESCRIPTION

This is a pack of fan-restored cinematics for Caesar 3. The point of this project was to do a light-touch restoration of the cinematics to try to reverse the effect of poor 90s video compression, while keeping the output as faithful as possible to what those cinematics would have looked like in reality at that point in time, instead of trying to produce something super clean and over the top with AI upscaling tools, as I don't think the source material would benefit from that treatment (the original videos are in very low quality and those 3D animations were not that great to begin with, so an AI upscaling at 60fps would look terribly artificial).

To do the restoration I used AI-powered tools to (a) clean up the artifacts caused by the video compression (thanks to Kim2091's DeBink v6 model), and to (b) double the framerate via frame interpolation (thanks to DAIN). I have also cleaned up the audio in a couple of places. The result is in the exact same resolution as the originals so as to maintain the compatibility of the in-game videos and the feel of the full screen cinematics.

Unfortunately, the game only accepts SMK2 (Smacker 2) videos (a pretty terrible mid-90s video compression format), so despite using the best quality options in the re-encoding process there is still an appreciable loss of quality compared to the restored masters. This is primarily because SMK2 relies on the use of 256 color palettes - I have done my best to minimise the effect of this by introducing a new palette every second, but poor gradient effects can still be seen occasionally. Perhaps one day Julius/Augustus will support other video formats, which would allow for lighter, better quality cinematics.

The videos work seamlessly with the original C3 executable, but I would recommend everyone to use one of the excellent reimplementation projects Julius (for a 1:1 original C3 experience) or Augustus (for extended gameplay options).

WARNING: This pack contains only the English language cinematics.

INSTALLATION

- Simply unzip and replace all the .SMK files in the "smk" folder, which you will find in your Caesar 3 installation folder. This will work with either the original executable or with Julius/Augustus.

- Alternatively, if you would rather not delete the original files, there is an alternative installation method you can use (you will need to be using Julius/Augustus): (1) create a folder within your installation folder called "custom" and unzip the included smk folder in there (i.e. "custom/smk"); (2) in Julius/Augustus, go to Options and choose "custom" as your language pack. This will make Julius/Augustus use the restored videos instead of the originals, without having to delete the originals.

KNOWN ISSUES

There are a couple of wrinkles I may want to revisit in the future:

- The first scene in the Neptune curse cinematic was originally rendered at 6fps (by mistake I guess, given that the rest of the video, and all other videos, are rendered at 12fps). I have upped the framerate to 24fps to match the rest of the video, but DAIN does not handle that 4x jump all that well. It's just a few seconds, but I may try other interpolation options in the future to see if I can get a better result.

- The credits cinematic is still rendered at the original 12fps. This is simply because it's at a higher resolution that the rest of videos and sadly my GPU cannot handle the frame interpolation. Luckily this is just a glorified slideshow, so the effect is not that visible, and I have still cleaned it up so it looks smoother than the original.