Tech Focus: Stranger's Wrath and the Rise of the HD Remaster

We thought that JAW may actually be running at a disadvantage compared to the Ubisoft team that created the HD reworkings of the Splinter Cell titles. After all, it had PC assets to work with while Stranger's Wrath was only ever released on the Xbox, running at a basic 640x480 resolution. Gilray revealed that the assets Oddworld created actually gave it so much more to work with.

"The first thing we decided to do was update all the character models in the game, some 80-plus in 50 per cent of the cases we had NURB based versions of the models that were used in the cut scenes, so we dropped those down to a level we could use in the game," he explains.

"Those that we didn’t have NURB models, we recreated them using the original Xbox models and the original concept art for reference. Oh yeah, we had all the original concept art too."

The notion of NURBS models is that they are generated from curves rather than polygons. In theory they can scale up massively to provide detailed models well beyond the work that ended up in the final Xbox version of the game. The treasure trove of assets went well beyond model work though, with enough raw material there to radically transform other elements of the game.

"Once we'd settled on that, we decided to completely overhaul the GUI using the original mock-ups we found in Perforce. Then we took to the environments. A lot of the textures in them were 64x64 up to 1024x1024, but things like the detail maps were 128x128, so we added new 512x512 ones, along with replacing ALL the foliage textures with at least double res ones," Gilray continues.

"Once that was done we decided to go through the game and actually update environment meshes. For example, pipes WERE hexagonal, now they’re pretty much round. Some might say we've done a lot more than just make it HD in the usual sense of the phrase."

While the artistic enhancements are obviously very welcome indeed - and above and beyond the usual re-deployment of existing assets, the Stranger's Wrath HD remaster does have some similarities with the standard practise. The game will play like the original as it is effectively running the same code… but even here, Just Add Water has been working like demons on optimisation in order to get the game running well on a completely different hardware architecture.

"Again we've used the original code as we are effectively running the original game, but with massive optimisations and some elements being re-written completely. An example is the particles," Gilray offers.

"The original particle system used 46 per cent of the PS3's PPU. After doing some clever stuff it's now taking two to four per cent - there were a few areas like this that we changed. There's also a system in the game for 'decorators', these being foliage or other painted meshes. The original literally drew each one, one at a time. We've changed this so that they're all batched up and rendered in almost a single pass, vastly reducing the number of separate draws."

The PS3 version follows JAW's work on porting over the existing game onto the PC, where an OpenGL-based renderer was used. Aiding the conversion effort is the use of PSGL, a PlayStation-specific iteration of the API.

"We took our OpenGL version from the PC and went with that, it didn't take that long to get the game running on the PS3," says Gilray.

"Our biggest headache was the data, getting it in the right format. After all, the PC is Little Endian, where PS3 is Big Endian. So we had to do swizzles on every read, but as the game had a lot more than one read/write system we had to go into the engine and do stuff there in there… so doing all that probably took the longest out of all of it. Beyond that it was optimising mainly and for the most part it was just repetitive task rather than a 'oh my god we can’t do this!' type of thing."

The good news for existing owners of the PC release of Stranger's Wrath is that all the enhancements JAW has made for the PS3 version of the game will end up being rolled back into a title update, meaning that the conversion effort for the consoles will result in a free, visually more impressive, optimised experience for the PC too. If the assets available to Just Add Water are as exhaustive for the other Oddworld games as they are for Stranger's Wrath, it will be hugely intriguing to see how the Yorkshire based developer plans to follow up its first console remaster.

While backwards compatibility re-releases have perhaps been seen as a way to effectively make money from old rope, the rise of the HD remaster is a fascinating development that can see classic games reinvigorated for audiences old and new, and needn't break the bank. But at the end of the day, whether the games will be successful or not all comes down to the strengths of the original release: does the gameplay stand up to the exacting standards of 2011, where it's actually rare that we see genuinely bad games? Can the quality of the original artwork stand up to HD rendering? And is the budget - and the will from the developer - there to see that the released product will be the best that it can be?

While 343 Industries and Saber's work on a high budget, full-on remastering of Halo: Combat Evolved will mostly likely gain the most press and has clearly had a lot of time, money and effort put into it, it's Just Add Water's approach that is the most fascinating: there is a certain purity to the whole enterprise that pays the most respect to the original source material. By working with the original concept art and NURBS models, Just Add Water's Stranger's Wrath HD ticks all the boxes we would want from a remaster (full HD with a 60 frames per second target) but at the same time derives its visual boost from all the hard work of the original creators, who retain full sign-off on the final version of the game.

In this sense, Stranger's Wrath HD promises to be what you might call a purist's HD rendition of the original game and perhaps the template for these endeavours going forward: the right choice of game, genuine effort put into the actual "remastering" and comprehensive involvement from the creators and visionaries behind the original game.