u/fakeaccount696969666

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....

Some of you have seen my remaster attempts from a few days ago....

I've been having quite a time layering in different gameplay systems and trying to re-create Earthsiege 2 in godot, but I'm realizing that the proper path miight not be to start off with the hercs in a blank world, with no rules, but a total recreation of ES2, with everything as accurate as possible as the starting point.

So that's that i've attempted here- an attempt at cloning Earthsiege 2, replicating as much of the original game as possible before I slowly layer in new things like higher resolution textures, modern special effects, etc, and then after that, tinkering with core gameplay systems.

I also think that if (big if) this thing gets acceptably close to replicating the original game, it would simply be useful as a way to play the original on modern systems.

My zip file includes the contents of the freely available earthsiege 2 ISO, which i understand to be abandonware, but if i'm mistaken, please tell me and I'll take it down so fast...

https://gofile.io/d/9OG1Bw4c

All that said, the state of the port is... i'd estimate, 70% done. It feels like Earthsiege 2, sometimes, but play it for a little bit and you can tell that the sim has numerous bugs and incomplete features. This is a first attempt and proof of concept, and I'm mostly looking for validation to my remaster approach, and am interested if people think this is worth continuing at all.

LMK! Thanks guys!

(I'll post screenshots later)

What do you all think?

The left is the original ES2 model, the middle is an updated version I had been using in my Godot earthsiege, with clear cockpit glass, and real vents instead of the texture the old game had.

The right side is a ground up reinterpretation, very early work in progress . What's the consensus here? worth continuing to refine this, and then bring this new design language to all the ES1/2 hercs, or am I off my rocker here.

you guys seemed to appreciate my last thread, so i thought i'd share some progress...

old thread from last week here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tribes/s/CRWq86aBI3

I've been converting more and more of the old games' assets to the godot engine and have recently turned my attention to damage modeling and weapons.

also, i've started the process of porting over 3d re-creations of the original cockpits (you can see that my roadrunner cockpit is still a complete mess). also, the cockpits are just 3d models with no functionality, that logic is a whole can of worms.

lastly, and i get a kick out of this as an Earthsiege 1 fan, the ES1 hercs use the same data format as the ES2 hercs, so I can remaster hercs in that game that never made it into ES2, like the patriot and roadrunner in that collage. yea yea, the patriot has messed up legs, and the apoc is still ugly AF.... im working on it.

pretty cool though, IMO. the damage modeling ported to godot is a 1:1 copy of the ES2 model... i have dreams of making it more complex, but i think my goal is a complete re-creation of every aspect of ES2 before i go about complicating things, or creating something wholly original.

like i said, given the use of an LLM and the original games' assets, this is just a personal toy that brings me great joy... but im not a jerk, ill give the files to anyone that wants them once i have this toy in a state that wouldn't personally embarrass me.

As the title says, I took the original ES2 models (for all the HERCs) and converted them to standard glb files with Claude code doing most of the heavy lifting, and just dropped them into the godot engine...

I'm not sure how much this qualifies as AI slop since it's using the original models, but i'm impressed at how much the look and feel of the original game can be ported to a new engine. things like the speeds, hot points, internal systems, damage model (though i tweaked it a bit to allow for deformable surfaces), etc. can be lifted directly from the original game...

Just a thought, for anyone else that loves these games and wants a modern update to them... do it yourself! Claude can literally lift most of the important bits of the original game and put them into godot, as i've tested, and you can then edit and tweak to your heart's content.

An additional example is subtle, but illustrated in my first screenshot: the combo of a script written by Claude and the godot engine were able to massively improve the bipedal simulation over the original game's canned animations. now the walking is procedurally generated per HERC, and it reacts to stepping over objects and being on inclines. Cool.

I have wild dreams of building an effective "Earthsiege 3" in this style, but obviously, it's just a personal toy because of how it is being built.

Hooked, token costs be damned.

Just thought I'd share something that has given me endless amounts of joy over the past week or so... anyone that misses these games can really get a lot of fulfillment from using an LLM to remix the original games into what your childhood imagination always upscale them to be.

AI/LLMs suck, and so do I, I know, but with that out of the way, guys, give it a shot if you are so inclined, it's very possible, it becomes very fun.