Commandos 3 - HD Remaster announced

www.commandos-game.com

• release date: expected to be released in September 2022
• developed by: Raylight Games (and not by Yippee! Entertainment who made C2HD)
  Raylight already worked on C2HD, on their website it says:
  "Task: Swith [sic], Mac OS, Linux porting. Project rescue on Ps4 and XboxOne"
• multiplayer: 'Deathmatch' and 'Collect the Flag' mode for 2-8 players, all with distinct victory conditions
  apparently no Co-Op
• platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4 (upward compatible with PS5), Xbox One (upward compatible with Xbox Series X|S)
• keyboard shortcuts for each weapon, item, and ability
  fully customizable keyboard/mouse/gamepad layout for PC
• censorship: nazi symbols can be enabled/disabled by the player (according to a developer at the Steam forum)

it looks like they finally fixed the faces of our beloved Commandos characters

I wonder who actually buys these remasters, they seem kinda pointless. I am actually surprised they decided to remaster C3 after a shitty C2 remaster. I am sick of remasters that are actually worse than the original games... I just cannot comprehand who decides that this is what they should do with the games.

The least to say it's a controversial decision. On one hand the locked 800x600 resolution of Commandos 3 is not for today's displays and systems (but there are obviously ways to play those missions under the same HD Project umbrella @stankan was kind enough to share with the community). Unfortunately on the other hand the game itself was a massive step back from, and lacking the heart of Commandos 2 without the creatives of the previous episodes, especially Gonzo Suarez and Jon Beltran. Combined with a lower production quality all this resulted in something that should not have been considered any more than a mappack for C2, and certainly not a full sequel. It wasn't a weak game overall, but it was a weak Commandos. Yippee! is out of the picture, but I'm not convinced that Raylight Games will do any better, with their only other PC title Deer Hunt Legends from 2015 receiving overwhelmingly negative reviews, that's certainly not a promising prospect. Other than that, it doesn't really matter how many more polygons the revised models consist of, the average player won't notice anything from the bird's eye view the game is meant to be played, and if they decide to zoom in after all, an extremely low quality, blurry and pixelated bitmap will stare back that is stretched onto the ground almost untouched, meanwhile @herbert3000 you demonstrated that with an appropriate upscaling engine, really eyepleasing results can be achieved. The game's steam page lists it as an Online Co-Op game too, but I also have the feeling that it only refers to the otherwise alien-to-the-genre team deathmatches, and not the option to play through the single player missions cooperatively. Considering all this, I don't see how this project could turn out positive, but I wouldn't mind to be surprised positively for once...

Some screenshot from the HD remaster and the original game for comparison:

What the hell.

I actually think the original looks better... I see no difference in terrain, and the new models look plain awful. The only real difference is the widescreen support but that can also be done in the original game...

Honestly, once again, I see no point in these remasters... they should have just release a patch that adds widescreen support and make it easily playable on w10 and w11. I think if they really would like to do something interestin they should have combine all 3 games into C2 engine at least... Instead they completely skipped C1 which probably needs the remastering the most.

I don't understand this...

Original comm3 was underrated because missing hotkeys and missing coop. They only fixex hotkeys. The original comm3 faces still better than c2 or c3 hd remaster. I like the zoomed interiors in the trailer.

Im not sure how to feel, a new commandos game was my dream from years and the c2 hd remaster was worse than the original. In another hand, I would feel very stupid If the company get rich releasing a new game while I was keeping the game alive for free...

 multiplayer mode,

Edited by AndrewT, 11 March 2023 - 02:38 PM.

I guess the MP being included is more important (somewhat) for C3, if only because C2's MP is just the SP with co-op while C3's is more unique compared to SP. (Even if I do agree it sucks it was never added to the Remaster of C2.) 

I am somewhat excited for Rookie mode, one of my complaints with C3 was how it felt like it was locked to essentially a difficulty harder than C2's "Very Hard" mode, while the Remaster's new Rookie mode (according to a response I got on the steam forums) will make Medkits heal more and give weapons more range like C2. (I wouldn't mind C3's difficulty as an optional thing and they are still including it but I honestly felt like C3 was a bit too unfair for it to be the only difficulty mode, not to mention C3 itself never says how different Commandos have different weapon ranges.)

Censorship is apparently optional now so that's good. (I get they need to do it for certain markets but it shouldn't forced on all.)

The devs are aparently different so hopefully they pull this off better than C2's remaster.

I do like that hotkeys are apparently returning, I did like the "next/previous" weapon hotkeys in C3 but it coming at the expense of any unique hotkeys for weapons sucked. (I like being able to just cycle through them for a certain weapon since I don't remember all the hotkeys but I should at least be allowed to memorize the hotkey for anything you'd need in an emergency, like the Rifle.)

I wrote a QuickBMS script which allows us to extract the file Game.pak

https://zenhax.com/v...php?f=9&t=17364

I wrote a QuickBMS script which allows us to extract the file Game.pak

https://zenhax.com/v...php?f=9&t=17364

Very Good 

I wrote a QuickBMS script which allows us to extract the file Game.pak

https://zenhax.com/v...php?f=9&t=17364

Does this mean we can mod the remaster? (Since wasn't the C2 Remaster unmoddable or something?)

Does this mean we can mod the remaster? (Since wasn't the C2 Remaster unmoddable or something?)

Looks like it. I just loaded a modified file back into the archive and the game correctly displayed the changes.

Some manual hex editing including offset calculations were required since we don't have a repacking tool yet

I'm not sure if the C2 Remaster is really unmoddable, the latest version of the Commandos Developing Toolkit (see link in post below) can handle the BASE.PCK from the C2HD remaster.

Edited by herbert3000, 09 September 2022 - 04:21 PM.
removed link to old version of the toolkit

 

Does this mean we can mod the remaster? (Since wasn't the C2 Remaster unmoddable or something?)

Looks like it. I just loaded a modified file back into the archive and the game correctly displayed the changes.

Some manual hex editing including offset calculations were required since we don't have a repacking tool yet

 

I'm not sure if the C2 Remaster is really unmoddable, the latest version of the Commandos Developing Toolkit can handle the BASE.PCK from the C2HD remaster.

 

the new version: https://github.com/I...s/cmdt/releases

by https://www.cnblogs....31/1211298.html

the new version: https://github.com/I...s/cmdt/releases

 

by https://www.cnblogs....31/1211298.html

Thank you for the new link!

 

Does this mean we can mod the remaster? (Since wasn't the C2 Remaster unmoddable or something?)

Looks like it. I just loaded a modified file back into the archive and the game correctly displayed the changes.

Some manual hex editing including offset calculations were required since we don't have a repacking tool yet

 

I'm not sure if the C2 Remaster is really unmoddable, the latest version of the Commandos Developing Toolkit (see link in post below) can handle the BASE.PCK from the C2HD remaster.

 

Ah so that must have been it, it's not unmoddable, it's just formated in a different way?

I added support for Game.pak from C3HD remaster in Commandos Developing Toolkit, following herbert3000's analaysis.

https://github.com/I...tag/v20220910_1

It can extract and import files, but there's no file names, so we need to guess.

The lzo data can be uncompressed on extraction. When importing a file, no compression is used.

I haven't tested if the game can read a modified package.

Edited by r_ex, 10 September 2022 - 04:19 PM.

I added support for Game.pak from C3HD remaster in Commandos Developing Toolkit, following herbert3000's analaysis.

https://github.com/I...tag/v20220910_1

 

It can extract and import files, but there's no file names, so we need to guess.

The lzo data can be uncompressed on extraction. When importing a file, no compression is used.

I haven't tested if the game can read a modified package.

That's amazing!! Thank you so much!

It's even possible to identify more file extensions by checking the first few bytes of the uncompressed files.

"LDMB" (= .ABI), "2IBM", "1IBM" (= both .MBI), "BSMB", "XPrt", "DXBC" (no idea what those are)
.MAC files usually start with "TOKEN", "CADENA" or "# "

.SEC files start with 02 00 00 00 01 00 00 00
.LUA files usually start with "--" or "function"

Commandos script files (.MIS, .BAS, .GSC etc.) usually start with "["
There are a couple of files that start with "#version 330", those are also shaders.

EDIT:

Since the remaster uses the ABI, GRL, MAC and some other files from the original C3, we can easily restore the filenames by comparing the checksums.

Unfortunately this doesn't work for the MIS, BAS, GSC files because the format of the "de-bsmb-ed" files is different. If we ignore all comments and whitespaces, the files could still be matched. Many LUA files have their filename in the first line as a comment, this is also very helpful
 

Edited by herbert3000, 12 September 2022 - 06:36 PM.

Can someone who purchased the game confirm please what exactly the "Online Co-Op" tag on Steam means in practice? I don't suppose it means that you can play through the campaign with one buddy, rather the other multiplayer game modes, but it would be nice to know. Thank you.

You can't play the campaign in co-op.
But you can compete in 'Deathmatch' or 'Collect the Flag' modes for 2-8 players.

I haven't tried that yet, though.

Can someone who purchased the game confirm please what exactly the "Online Co-Op" tag on Steam means in practice? I don't suppose it means that you can play through the campaign with one buddy, rather the other multiplayer game modes, but it would be nice to know. Thank you.