Thanks everybody for you stories. I would say we all had a similar experience; being new to RTS games, having language barriers or quitting the game and then going back to it few years later.

I also like the visual design of the game, the machines are very colorful, you could say the game looks cartoony. Even though it has old graphics, it is nice to switch to first person or third person mode and look at colorful sky with planets, I bet it looked amazing in 1999 compared to the usual 2D strategy games back then. I also like the voices of various machines, it is one of my favorite parts of RTS games when units have unique voices.

I agree with TMG HK the game is very hard and I also got stuck on the Fortress and Controller mission, took me a whole day to beat each of those. I highly doubt I would be able to finish those missions if I played the game as a kid.

...and we all missed it. According to Moby Games, Machines was released on April 14th 1999. According to Wikipedia it is one of the first 3D RTS games. I think it would be nice the few people that still remember this game to go down memory lane and write down something. When did you first play it, how did a 3D RTS feel back in 1999, what are some good memories you have...

Machines is the first RTS game I ever played and it might also be the first thing I ever installed on my computer by myself. I think it was the year 2000 or 2001 when I messed around my Turok 2 CD and found the Machines demo on it. I barely had any games to play, so finding a new game was really exiting. I was such a noob back then, I had no idea what I was supposed to do, so I started shooting at my own units and buildings. When I destroyed everything, new units started appearing with different colors, so logically I concluded that is how you play it; like some kind of shooter with new enemies spawning at the edges of screen. I don't remember how I figured I can build stuff. I remember my neighbor also installed it on his computer, so we slowly explored this new game type. The next breakthrough was discovering that sending a technician to research center gives you ability to make new units, then discovering the one included campaign mission and the shock of being attacked by a gorilla. I remember being in first person mode when I saw it on the horizon, slowly approaching...

Funnily enough I have never finished the full game until November last year. I did join the old forums in 2008 to download the full version, but when I started playing it I got bored. Recently I found new interest in slower games like RTS, so I finally decided to finish what I started 18 years ago. Objectively I think the game could have been better in many ways, with more engaging story, better pathfinding, more missions, but I had a ton of fun with it. There are not many missions, but many of them are really difficult and I had to learn each units strengths and weaknesses and develop new strategies, which I found interesting. Even the first person mode turned out to be much more than just a gimmick, there is a lot you can do if you use it cleverly, to distract larger units or to hunt down large enemy units with Judas Warlord. Too bad there was never a sequel, they had a solid base they could build on.

@TotalDemise You say there isn't anything, but the picture tells otherwise. In your photo we can see early designs for the machines and the tall one is probably a Gorilla. I never saw that before, so it is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for sharing. Is there something interesting in "Acclaim The State Of Play" ?

@martin I can't do proper upscaling at this point. First, one needs a good trained AI upscaling model, and the one I used in the example is not really good, because it was trained on JPEG compressed images with artifacts, so you get those JPEG squares and noise when you upscale with it, the higher the resolution the worse it is. To train a new model I need thousands of images and a NVidia GPU (which I don't have), because the algorithms are based on CUDA. I need a good model trained with ground textures with rocks, sand and grass. Even if I did find a good model again I would be limited by doing the upscaling on the CPU which is very slow. And then a day later someone could release a new model that would give better results. It is best to wait until this tech matures and people make better AI models.

Btw, I don't want to rush anything, I was just curios, because these few posts are all public info I know about and it came out of nowhere. I don't use discord, because I don't like the closed nature of it, I am more old-school and hang around public forums like this.

I used to work on a "20th anniversary" update myself, but for Abuse from 1996. Haven't touched it since I released it:
https://github.com/antrad

So... is there any blog or something to follow the development or we will have to wait for the 40th anniversary ?

@martin The example I posted is IMO the worst case scenario, the tutorial map, where the whole map terrain is covered with just 4 256x256 textures and looks terrible. This is probably the only map that would really benefit from 1024x1024 textures, while other maps would probably be good enough with 512x512 since they are more... eh, dense, more textures cover the same surface area, I hope you understand.

As for LOD, is that option already available in this version, I would like to try it ? I think it is best to give an option and let people go crazy if they wish, since it doesn't influence gameplay.

This is a big surprise ! Where did you get the source code from, are you one of the original developers ?

I really like how you increased the LOD distance, machines used to be just a bunch of triangles most of the time. But can you completely disable LOD switching and let the game render the highest quality models all the time ? Modern computers should be able to handle it, maybe add an option or some multiplier in the config file.

Texture resolution has also been increased to 512x512, is there any reason why there is still a limit ?

https://i.imgur.com/Dgov3ad.png - original 256x256
https://i.imgur.com/XHQ7kEu.png - ESRGAN 512x512

With AI image upscaling algorithms improving, this could get better if even higher resolutions were supported.

I noticed the health and shield icons at bottom-left are now displayed. There used to be question marks there for me.

This soundtrack RIP is not good, some of the tracks don't start and end where they are supposed to. You will probably not notice it if you play it in order, but if you set one of the tracks to loop you will notice at the end it starts to play the next track for a brief moment.

I have ripped the music myself from the CD, imported it all into Audacity, joined everything, then split the tracks manually at proper locations, and exported it all to MP3 at 320 kbps. I also extracted the music from the intro video using RAD Video Tools and converted it to MP3 as well.

You can download it from my Google Drive if you wish: download link

@M123 I heard about ESRGAN just two days ago. I must say the skybox texture turned out amazing. Waifu2x is very bad with banding, because it is made to basically sharpen any lines it recognizes, because it was made for cartoons, so the banding gets even worse. That is why I left out the skybox. I think this technique would be especially great for all the skyboxes and planets.

But, I think the sky is supposed to be clear on a moon, so it doesn't need noise, so I used waifu2x to "denoise" your texture.
https://i.imgur.com/JSwXS7l.png

I also wanted to see how it would work on the terrain texture, and the result is amazing, but only when left at 512x512. Check this out:
Original with linear upscale to 512x512: https://i.imgur.com/STZeKR7.png
ESGRAN + waifu2x at 512x512: https://i.imgur.com/LPI3vdk.png

Such a shame we are limited at 256x256 ! With an increased texture limit, with a disabled LOD system that always uses the highest quality 3D models and dgVodoo wrapper which forces 32 color rendering we would be talking about a real game remaster here. So close and yet so far :(

Hi. I had basically the same experience. I had the demo which I played quite a lot which came on Turok 2 CD. I liked the machine designs, their voices and colorful graphics. It is one of the first games I installed myself and first RTS game I ever played. I downloaded the full version from the old forums in 2008, but I actually have not finished it until 2 years ago. It is a very hard game and I probably would not be able to finish it if I played when I was a kid.

There is not much activity here, but you can check out the discord community. I'm not a fan of it, but unfortunately forums are not popular these days.
http://wiredforwar.org/topic/169/wfw-discord

Allow me to be off topic once again and show you my finished Dungeon Siege texture project. It took more than 4 months and 3929 textures have been updated. The texture pack is 5.97 GB !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8WMZhyBg7k

@wildh0rse It seems I was partially wrong about Yellows and Greens. They sometimes do not attack each other, but today they did. It probably depends on the map, or maybe the position on the map, or maybe it is just random. The Blues always end up destroyed first when I play, they are the worst.

And something interesting happened today. The Yellows attacked my pod with three nuclear rockets at the same time, I never saw something like that. Luckily it was the one I captured from the Blues. They ended up being stuck because of resources and I destroyed the launchers with only one unit, then finished them off with 4 nuclear rockets at one.

We will have to tell they guy who made the 1.5 patch to maybe enable unlimited resources, it would be interesting to see how they would behave, since they always get stuck.

@wildh0rse The reason I hit the limit is because I tend to play these games slowly, build a base, build an army, then do one final attack. I don't attack constantly or try to win as fast as possible, it is more like a relaxation when I don't know what else to play.

Another thing I noticed is that Yellow and Green machines don't attack each other at all, Also Green like to use ion cannon and nukes, Yellow don't seem to use them at all. I guess if you want at least some challenge, you could do the things above, then destroy the Blue machines as fast as possible, so they don't damage Yellow and Green, and then continue to play against the Yellow and Green Alliance that will only focus on you.

Skirmish against the AI in this game is terrible.

First you have the unit/building limit, so you can easily get stuck and not be allowed to build more. But you can use the Loader program to fix this.

Then when you do this the AI builds like crazy and easily runs out of resources, without even building an army. You can help them a bit by selecting starting resources to 10000, but then they end up just focusing on nukes.

It's like they put no thought in it and after some very challenging campaign missions skirmish is very disappointing to play against the poor AI.

If there ever is going to be version 1.6, here are my wishes:

• support for 1024x1024 textures
• option to further increase draw distance (LOD)
• if anyhow possible I would like an option to disable ion cannon and nuclear silos in skirmish modes, make them unavailable to build
• add an option for more resources, like 100 000, because AI is very poor at resource management and eventually gets stuck, so to give them a chance in skirmish. It would be interesting to see what would happen.

I never like these weapons of mass destructions. I guess it is fine for ccampaign missions to spice things up a bit, but in skirmish mode it basically boils down to who builds the these weapons first. I wish there was an option to disable ion cannon and nuclear weapons in skirmishes. It was good that the last mission was underground so they couldn't be used.

@M123 Well, that example looks perfect. Now if only it wouldn't take me 13-14 minutes to upscale one 512x512 texture :(

@M123 Thanks, but I saw that and in description it says "Split images into tiles before processing them with ESRGAN and merge them afterwards with as little visible seams as possible". That is not good enough, if someone else with a bit more RAM can make it perfect :)

@martin I am doing all this upscaling on my CPU, because I don't have a Nvidia GPU, so it is a very slow process. I do run out of memory if I try to upscale anything larger, I am limited to upscaling just 256x256 textures and smaller. Also I can not train my own models, even though I have some interesting ideas I would try to do. If you do end up doing some upscaling yourself, have a look at my topic about removing dithering and color banding, which should be applied BEFORE you do any actual upscaling.

http://wiredforwar.org/topic/172/removing-dithtering-and-color-banding-in-original-textures-and-artwork

@Pisarz The reason I think that part of texture should be just rock is because in The Finger Of God level it covers the mountain and cliffs, and that dark green "line" around is like a border between ground with vegetation and mountain rocks. As for retaining cartoony look, I think the machines and buildings are colorful, but not much cartoony, and terrain looks very realistic. The multiplyer desert map is probably the best looking map and you can see it looks very realistic, probably the most realistic it could look using technology from 1999. I mentioned some new textures are 1024x1024 in size, so I can not use them in the game, because original game has a 256x256 texture limit and Martin's version has a 512x512 limit.