PlayStation Version Changes

[Moburma]

A kind of sister topic to the level conversions (err, all three of them), collecting the differences of the PlayStation version, with an eye for possibly porting some stuff back

The obvious stuff that would be hard to port :

• Totally different lighting system
• Vehicles have faked headlights (not like the ones in the pre-alpha footage with "real" lights that was abandoned)
• Banks have a new design with a new texture of a dollar sign on flags to make it clear what the purpose of the building is

Stuff that could be fair game:

• New sound effects for some weapons. The sounds for the Uzi and minigun are nice with a bit more bite to them. The uzi sound is actually used in Theme Hospital too, so would serve as a high quality source (SW version is sped up and cut). Most of the other sound effects are a) the same and b) let down by the atrocious sample rate used - the female scream sound is like it was recorded down a bad phone line.
• Levels. There are only three new levels, a single eurocorp and zealot level, and a test level. I've converted them all already. There do seem to be some small differences on some levels, mainly due to the lack of trains.
• The cerberus IFF has a new graphic. I've personally always hated the one in the DOS original, it just looks like a gas cylinder or something. The PS1 graphic isn't great either, but at least looks somewhat like the thing show in the equip screen:
  
  I went to rip this, but there's so much crammed into the graphics I've actually not even found it yet.
• Some new map textures. I intend to port these (95% are the same as the DOS one, so battling with the Colour Look Up Tables isn't so painful), but we need a tool to save files like .pngs in the final .DAT raw format (there must be a tool for Dungeon Keeper?)

Misc:

• The moon level has a mech in it! It's only the claw mech, not the DOS unique model, but it starts in the same place, and notably can escape from the area it is in. Video of this here: https://youtu.be/fjr42m2oR7w?list=PLiUlAEB9Jcu-fdMFMaEHyyrpT0LQRqhep&t=167
• It's possible to buy the epidermis items, as discovered by @mefistotelis. I'm not sure this is actually normally possible, but there's a video of it running with various hacks to unlock them here: https://youtu.be/ZFPpvZI8o5o?list=PLiUlAEB9Jcu-fdMFMaEHyyrpT0LQRqhep&t=20

Some quite nice loading screens, although they all depict scenes not possible in the actual game, from the PS1 intro:

Oh, a weird thing, the console port famously doesn't have the scientists in-game (they just use briefcase men as stand-ins). However, they ARE in the graphic files and are loaded into VRAM on level start. The Shady Guys and some of the other missing civilians are in there too. Weird that they were cut, possibly not all frames are there, but a lot are. Considering a load of space is used up by the old HUD that was scrapped, they probably had enough VRAM for all of them if they cleaned up a bit.

[Moburma]

Ripped the PS1 Cerberus IFF. Talk about finding a needle in a haystack...

[Moburma]

Ported over some of the PS1 textures. Not sure this is a particularly worthwhile endeavour, but hey.
The big problem is the PS1 version runs in 16 bit colour, and stores its textures using Colour Look Up Tables. This means each tiny sub-graphic in the texture sheet has its own 16 colour palette. In the PC game it only runs in 8 bit colour, so all the texures use the same 256 colour palette. Therefore the PS1 textures can have colours simply not in the DOS one. I've just let GIMP map them over to the PC game palette, but they look somewhat washed out as a result. Note the inexplicable reappearance of the Indian man poster from the original Syndicate, the new neon signs and the pointless change for the red metal wall to say "PROPERTY BULLFROG" instead of "PROPERTY OF KIKOHO". Something else I never noticed is that the kind of white window with red supports across it actually has a silhouette of saucy ladies on it in the original, but is just plain white here.

[mefistotelis]

For KeeperFX, I made a tool which creates texture atlas from 32-bit PNGs. It could be used for SW Port as well.

The tool gets a bunch of PNGs with square textures merged into reasonable images, divides and shuffles the squares at proper positions. Here you can see the input files:
https://github.com/dkfans/FXGraphics/tree/main/enginefx/textures-128

Good to know the PS1 version has more colors, this could be later used to improve quality of PC textures.

[Moburma]

Yes, I actually discovered this tool thanks to the KeeperFX people last night! It does indeed work, but I've had some odd issues with colours and transparency so need to play with it to understand the parameters needed for SW. I got the above textures working in-game (with some weird effects with the white lights though) and also the unused set of Japanese textures from the JP version (https://tcrf.net/Syndicate_Wars_(DOS)/Japanese_Version#Main_Changes).
In terms of colours, the PS1 textures are swings and roundabouts - while they can have more different colours because of the CLUTs, in practice they are often simpler than the PC, and each individual texture (inside the atlas) potentially has less colours (only 16 versus 256). Also I cheated above by just pasting the changed ones over the PC ones, but actually there may be more changes I haven't noticed for the common ones. I haven't worked out how to automatically rip the textures, I'm doing this by hand using this: https://github.com/romhack/PsxVram-DotNet
Which works, but is extremely time consuming and manual (and you have to have an idea how each texture should look to know if you have the right palette!).

Haven't tried your tool for the MSPR files yet.

[Moburma]

Something I played around with, I recreated the PS1 Eurocorp campaign.

https://pastebin.com/3rkJbT7V

Save it over miss000.ini to use.

This has no research, you just get awarded new items after each level. There are also much fewer levels and it's totally linear, you don't get any choice of level, you simply complete one level then get sent on the next.
This didn't work that great though, currently SW only supports awarding one item after each mission only, when the PS1 version commonly awards two. As such you don't get the body mods awarded, making this rather useless. Also because the research centre deliberately isn't rewarded after the first level you don't get research notifications after a level to know what you've unlocked.
My port of the first Eurocorp mission is in place, but it has buggy netscan info as there isn't one for this new mission and it's trying to use the ones for the original London level when actually the new level is actually set in Vancouver (the game recycles the same briefing and pretends it's London).

As such this kind of a dead end and doesn't really work very well, but I thought I would share it as a curiousity. Doesn't seem worth "fixing" the above for a novelty campaign that is worse than the original game.

It also made me realise why they redid the first level - the London map actually is not present at all in the final PS1 game. They clearly had big issues getting it to work in the console version, and the Duplicity levels are missing as well as a result. In fact it dumps the outcome of that level into the follow up save Drennan missions, so that is one of the few places where the briefing is different.
The different version of London in the Korean version likely shows an attempt at getting the level working on the PS1, which is why they took all the walls out, I assume they used up a lot of Thing slots, or slowed down performance, etc.

[Moburma]

Another observation on the PS1 version. The final mission(s) has an extra objective not present in the PC original. Once the Nine are defeated, the player's units must move towards part of the zealot superweapon to "evacuate", the level doesn't just end once all enemies are dead.

[mefistotelis]

Hm, my idea after seeing the outro was that the agents stayed stranded on the moon.
(though in the menu after outro they are available..)

[Moburma]

Yes, it's a bit weird and contradicted by the ending video. Also you're going inside the superweapon thing.... what's even going to be inside it?
See here: https://youtu.be/fjr42m2oR7w?list=PLiUlAEB9Jcu-fdMFMaEHyyrpT0LQRqhep&t=224

The PS1 version doesn't have the credits or even the final epilogue text, so if you wanted to know the significance of what just happened, tough!

[mefistotelis]

what's even going to be inside it?

It's supposed to be weather control system. Definitely not something you can use to go back, for that they'd have to wait for a shuttle. But I guess they could wait inside, where they're probably shielded from sun radiation, and have breathable air.

[Moburma]

But would anyone even bother to get them? It's not made clear if agents have any kind of personality or real autonomy left (outside of combat), they just seem to basically be terminator-esque robots controlled by remote. As such I'd imagine evil megacorp Eurocorp would have no sentimental attachment to them and happily just leave them on the moon if it cost too much to get them down again.
God only knows what is meant to happen next after the zealot ending.

[mefistotelis]

If there's a weapon on the moon, and an evil cult wants to get it, having a group of agents there would actually be logical.

So maybe on PS1 they're going in because they're staying?

[Moburma]

A little bit off topic, but looking in the Sega Saturn magazine coverage of the Saturn game they have some CGI images that aren't actually in the final PS1 version:

This one looks like it follows one from one of the actually used between level screens as shown in my first post.

I noticed also the PS1 intro features the advert for Creation that was on the first beta demo of SW, with the footage of the real life dam.

[mefistotelis]

I remember someone sending me the two animations with trucks, but I can't remember when/how. The person did claimed it was from SW, but looking at the animations it seemed closer to Hi-Octane, if at all related. So I ignored it.

It was two very short animations (like 5 seconds), presenting the same scene of a truck closing in and stopping. The only difference between them was the lights, which were off in one, and lit in the other - like on the frames you've pasted.

Honestly, it looked like a garbage truck stopping to collect the load. Also somehow I didn't even noticed the figure standing there.

[Moburma]

Duh, I just checked the game again and that scene IS in the PS1 version, it's in the long new video of various space scenes. This whole thing is really weird, it's not very Syndicate Wars-y in many ways, but it does use the same vehicles as the PS1 intro so it's not just from something else. I do wonder if bits of it were lifted from Creation or even another unreleased game though.
The Hi-Octane comparison is apt too, there is this weird overlap between the two games with the CGI police car (that doesn't appear in either game!). It's more like someone's side idea that was just crowbarred into both games because it looked good and they didn't have anything more appropriate created.

[mefistotelis]

So many flare effects. It did looked cool back in the day. I started hating flares only after that Star Trek movie which used at least one in every scene.

[Moburma]

A minor thing - I was able to rip the sound effects from the PS1 version using this:
https://github.com/vgmtrans/vgmtrans
However, it doesn't work great, and usually truncates the samples heavily. Mildly interesting to poke around though, the PS1 version uses an altered version of the second sound set, and includes sounds for all kinds of stuff cut from the PS1 version such as email notifications and interestingly the mech growling sound.