WACRP Beta 2.2 released!

Another 9 months have passed and it’s time for a new release! As you can see, time between different releases is getting longer but between buying a house and starting a family I’m surprised there even IS a new version 🙂 Besides, WACRP is in a pretty good state now.

BETA 2.2 includes 2 newly updated cutscenes. Further compression artifacts have been removed in both the intro and final cutscene. In addition I have resynced a few voices (intro and ending) and fixed a continuity error (ending). So remember using the newest version for your next playthrough of Warcraft Adventures.

Fixing continuity errors

From time to time I am still working on further enhancing all cutscenes. Recently I encountered a rather interesting continuity error, which I hadn’t realised before, although I had seen this scene at least 50 times (I think I know these cutscenes better than Star Wars now).

In the final cutscene of the game our treacherous orcs suffer a slow and painfull demise.

A few frames later both suffering creatures have magically disappeared…

…only to re-emerge once again:

Several things are wrong in this scene: Both orcs are missing (2nd picture), the art style changed (3rd picture) and the crater around them is gone (2nd picture). I epxerimented quite a bit and in the end decised to do the simplest solution by just adding the missing orcs. I masked the transition from one art style to the other and if you don’t look for it you won’t even regognize it. It’s interesting to see how the whole seqence is making far more sense now.

Beta 2.1 released!

It took almost exactly 12 month but I’ve managed to release the next version of my Warcraft Adventures Cutscenes Remaster Project. A lot of work went into this new release and I am quite happy with the result. So, what’s new?

BETA 2.1 includes 3 newly updated cutscenes. Further enhancements have been made to the TV recordings (Mix_complete17 and 22). Both cutscenes now run at 12 fps. That means, subtitles should work normally now. This is particularly important for the spanish translation project.

You can now use both mods without having any problems. Also several scenes now have proper mouth movements. Those were missing before, because I had started reanimating the characters but didn’t have time to do proper mouth animations. This has been fixed in the newest release.

Once again, I repainted a few scenes (Mix_complete17). For example, in this scene Thall finally has a real face again.

In addition I have removed compression artifacts in Blackmore’s horse riding scene (Mix_complete01). This had always been a scene where the low bitrate of the original videos became very obvious. Well, not any more.

So when you’re planning on doing another playthrough, don’t forget to download the new beta 2.1 and enjoy an even better experience. You know what? What are you waiting for? Go ahead and download your ultimate Warcraft Adventure Experience…RIGHT NOW!

Beta 2.1 Preview Video

While still working on the remastering, I had the idea of doing a comparison video to better illustrate the progress I have made so far. Enjoy…and always remember: It is still a work in progress.

 

The face is the soul of the body

When working on this project, I am not following a specific plan. Instead I keep watching scene after scene until I’m in the mood of changing a certain detail. Today I really disliked Thrall’s improved face I did for Mix_complete17 in Beta 1.2. So after a while I had drawn a new face which, at least in my opinion, represents him much more faithfully.

Who needs more fps? We want less!

One of the amazing things about Warcraft Adventures is how much of the game actually got finished. It has, for example, complete optional english subtitles. Even in it’s cutscenes! My remastered cutscenes didn’t change anything about that except for two videos. Mix_complete17 and 22 had been filmed from a TV screen, remastered (still an ongoing task) and reencoded by myself and then reintegrated into the game. When I did this, I realized that being initially filmed with a camera, these to cutscenes had been transformed into 30 fps videos (29.97 fps to be precise). I don’t want to get into to much detail but this had been done by frame doubling, so I had to carefully remove every doubled frame without removing unique frames that would otherwise result in choppy movements. Suffice to say, I did it the easy way which resulted in two 15 fps cutscenes.

What has this to do with the mentioned subtitles I mentioned at the beginning, you may ask? Well, in those two cutscenes (now being 15 fps instead of 12 fps, which the game expects), the subtitles didn’t match the voices anymore. This was especially bad for a spanish translation project.

So I returned to those videos, carefully removed 3 doubled frames each 15 frames and voilá: Mix_complete17 now runs at 12 fps, completely in sync with it’s subtitles. As a side effect a few animations are a little bit smoother now. Being quite satisfied with the results, I will do this for Mix_complete22 in the near future as well. And as always any changes will be included in the next Beta.

Next year? 🙂

Adding the finishing touches

Happy new year everyone! Having finished the big milestone BETA 2.0 last year, I am now working on small parts here and there. For example, in the game’s intro Blackmore is riding on a horse while enjoying the rain. Both, the movement and the rain, were to much to handle for the low bitrate of the original video. The result was a very blocky scene. This couldn’t stay that way! So I opened each frame in Photoshop and removed those nasty compression artifacts.

Beta 2.0 released!

After almost 7 months the next release is ready! BETA 2.0 includes 6 newly updated cutscenes. This means, that by now ALL cutscenes have been updated with sound effects and enhanced visuals and both TV rips are looking much better. A few sound effects have been replaced as well. So, what are you waiting for? Click on the green banner below and get our favourite orc back into action:

CHANGELOG

• improved image quality – numerous compression artifacts have been removed by hand (Mix_complete15, Mix_081)
• improved image quality – numerous scenes (and I really mean a lot this time) have been redrawn by hand (Mix_complete17, Mix_complete22)
• replaced a few sound effects (Mix_complete01, Mix_complete16)
• new scene – a completely new scene has been created to replace a cross-fade I had created earlier (Mix_complete22)

 

Beeing called a beta version, there is still room for improvement. In future releases, I plan to remove the last remaining compression artifacts, improve even more scenes in Mix_complete 17 and 22 (for example, a few mouth movements are missing at this time) and replace a few sound effects here and there. So you should definitely check this place from time to time 🙂

A new coat of paint V

I  wanted to go back to this scene and redraw the characters for quite a long time…which I finally did today 🙂 Remember, this is, as always, a work in progress.

A new coat of paint IV

It’s a long road towards Beta 2.0 with a lot of frames to repaint. Well then, it’s time for a few new comparison shots: