The HERCULAN Engine is a full reimplementation of Earthsiege 2 (developed by Dynamix and published by Sierra in 1996), with support for modern operating systems, powered by .NET.
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....
Donate more to https://www.patreon.com/Midair2/
Our priority song to get full tabs or a straight midi file is of the following.
https://youtu.be/CsZrCDQ61bM?is=WG5ALOBhjdSSps7b
However we would adore the full Tribes 1 soundtrack, and explicitly, "Ice" from Tribes 2.
If you're curious, our music is nothing special yet and nothing is polished, but should you wish to investigate:
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...
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)