My little project - Cossacks Back to war - Fan remaster
Me and my brother used to play this game a lot when we were kids. Then later we also played Cossacks 3. It was also fun although I preferred the graphics of the original but that came with some nice quality of life changes so it was a better experinence. But then after playing that for a while I realized that they seemingly have not changed anything about performance and max unit numbers so the game ran into some issues at huge battles. It bothered me, but there was nothing I could do and also life was in the way so we kind of stopped playing for many years. In the meantime I became a software engineer and spent many years working in the field.
In the past couple of months I had a ton of free time so I was looking for something fun to do. Out of coincidence I found a source code from ereb-thanatos from 2017 online for this game and I started digging into it. I thought since this has worse graphics this must play better than the 3, I just needed a couple quality of life changes to it. So I started with adding an option which disables mortars as I really hated them (I only play agains AI). Then went for the zoom out and 4k support. Took quite a while but the game was already waay better. Then I thought what about the unit cap? Hmm the game has performance issues... And then I started going down this rabbit hole and spent the last couple of months just adding things to the game what I liked and thought was fun and sharing it with my brother. This became kind of a hobby/obsession for me. As he really liked it now we are at a point where I realized this might be interesting also for others so I thought it would be fun to made a kind of a trailer for it. Not sure what to call it, I really feel like it is more then a mod now but maybe not a remaster because visually only the ui is upgraded I don't know. I did not want to touch the originals, tried upscaling/new models but it just didnt feel right :/ But here is a "trailer".
There are also a lot of other things, I can make a changelog I guess but this is the highlight.
It has still some small issues which I don't mind and know, but before sharing it I would want to fix them. So if people are interested I would share this, some kind of patch for the original game or source code which needs the original not sure yet. I have tested it on the GOG version so far. I just wanted to share what I have. What do you think?
TLDR: for people who didn't watch: 16 players, battles of 200,000 soldiers, multithreading for significant performace improvements, zoom out to the whole map in up to 4K, giant maps and the map generator, the upgraded AI, invite-code multiplayer, no servers, completely new UI and a ton of smaller things