Earthsiege 2 + just a few modern special effects

It's actually kind of insane how much of a difference just a few tweaks to the graphics of this game makes to the overall quality of the visuals.

In this series of shots you can see a few Godot engine features overlaid on top of the base game:

global illumination

day/night cycle

interpolated polygons on the terrain (a 12x increase in polygon count while still following the original map layout and height maps)

upscaled ground textures (this makes an enormous difference, since the ground is the biggest thing in every scene)

replaced the original weapon effect sprites with modern shader effects

replaced the fire textures with a modern set of high fps, high resolution ones

proper skybox, with clouds and stars at night

increased view distance

maximum LOD on everything, no matter the distance to the camera

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what's really cool is that all these visuals can be added to the game without affecting the logic or state of the simulation at all, simulated replays play out exactly the same with the "remastered" options ticked on or off.

i've made a ton of refinements to the underlying sim, and now it more closely mirrors the original ES2 much more than before.

Still not perfect... but i'm making really good use of my tokens, i think...

Github repo coming some time this weekend... I need to sweep the repo to remove PII for myself, and to remove a bunch of stuff i have woven into the directory structure that just shouldn't be there...

Get used to seeing companies mining their catalogs for games like this, running them through an LLM, and repackaging them in remasters like this one... if i can do this at the end of the work day with a few prompts, the giant corps are going to do this en masse....