New Construction Options: C&C Remaster Art Preview!

Hello everyone. Few days ago, the EA producer Jim Vessella has posted an update on the progress that they are doing on the Command & Conquer (Tiberian Dawn) Remaster. Here's his words on it:

Jim Vessella wrote:

Fellow Command & Conquer fans, We are approaching the conclusion of our pre-production phase, having achieved several of our key milestones since our last Reddit post. During March we delivered our first playable campaign mission (GDI Mission 1), which included multiple samples of the remastered art running at 4k. This was accompanied by a more complete Visual Target image, which helps the dev team align around our goals for the artistic fidelity. We are now in the middle of getting Multiplayer up and running for the first time, along with dozens of art assets iterating towards their finalized look. Last week we showed many of these items to the Community Council, and continue to receive fantastic feedback via their contributions. With that in mind, today we wanted to share a glimpse of the pre-production work with all of you here in the C&C community. And this is the first time anyone outside of EA or the Community Council has seen work from the Remaster. In this spirit, we felt it appropriate to start with one of the first assets you see in Command & Conquer - the classic Construction Yard. Now, if you’ve been reading our previous posts, our primary goal with the visual approach is to maintain the authenticity of the original in-game asset. It’s worth calling out that if there’s a conflict between the in-game asset, cinematic asset, or UI portrait, we’re always going to side with the in-game asset. That being said, if there are opportunities to pull in details from the cinematic footage to enhance an asset, we’ll do our best to incorporate those details. A good example here would be the blue pattern / texturing on the Con Yard door (Inspired by the classic Con Yard unpacking cinematic). As always, we are eager to hear your thoughts in the comments, and looking forward to sharing more details about the visual approach down the line. Cheers, Jim Vessella Jimtern

And, as clearly stated in his post, he has included the Construction Yard preview (click on it for a full size preview):




And that's where our zombie new post mode ends. The latest remastered versions of Command & Conquer Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert 1 will use Petroglyph's Glyph engine for graphics and may use the original engine code possibily for some of the physics and AI code. The last remaster of Command & Conquer Tiberian Dawn was made for Nintendo 64 in 1999 and it was already 3D. So, nothing new here.

The construction yard model shown above also follows strictly the design from all preview versions. The differences from the original design lies mostly on the crane (only when compared to FMVs) and the ventilation system (compared to N64), which, in my opinion is too far from the rest of the building, which doesn't make much sense. Despite that stupid detail, there is nothing else that may compromise the model. So, my overall humble opinion about it is very positive, with great texture work. This is why I think that Vessella's words seem to be somewhat accurate here. So, yea, it is worth to point out that they are making the models from scratch. Feel free to compare with the pictures from Nintendo 64 below and two from the FMVs from the windows 95 version:


Construction Yard on Nintendo 64, as taken from a YouTube video.






Construction Yard from FMVs, as taken from a YouTube video.


And that's all for now. I hope we'll see more from it on the next E3 in june.