Stretching table fix for South Africa mission info 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.
Thanks to my cooperation with CnCFan, who is developing a system to remove the black lines from the C&C95 videos, I have been looking into the way the game stretches other such scenes, like the world map animations, in the horizontal direction. Apparently, the system is ridiculously simple; for each 256-colour palette, the game contains a file with the optimal colour to throw in between two pixels, for all 65536 possible colour pairs you can make with the 256 palette colours.
This research didn't just lead me to developing a tool to generate my own stretching tables for the game, but also showed that the game was MISSING a few of these tables. Some of them are mistakenly used for both the Nod and GDI equivalents of a scene, while these scenes have different colour palettes.
One of the most noticeable ones is the info screen of Nod's final South Africa mission. The top of this image shows the original situation, with incorrect in-between pixels because the stretching table of the info screen of GDI's final mission is used. Below it, you see the fixed version, using a new stretching table generated with my own tool.
If you want the in-depth look on this, my research is all here, on the patch 1.06 forum:
Forums.cncnz.com
Sexy.
Looks great Nyer! :)
Those purple pixels in the lake in the middle (under the "100%") always bugged the hell out of me. I'm so glad it wasn't hard to fix :p
Nice !
Looks cool, though the text overlapping the country graphic is still a little messy.
Hopefully a way is found to remove those lines altogether!
Eh, read the description. This fix was a SIDE EFFECT of the research that was done for removing the LINES. The removing of lines WORKS, we're just optimizing and debugging it at the moment. See the link in the description. I'll post pics of that soon.
Hey I'm not reading that wall of text. :P