A lot of older games I have noticed, such as some of the Assassin's Creed games, Resident evil, Age Of Empires, ect ect ect have been getting the remaster and re-release treatment with 4k High Definition textures, and compatibility updates..Wouldn't it be a dream if Maxis would do this with SC4? Surly they know that the game, after 15+ years still has a dedicated following, and has lived on through the custom user content.
Imagine if they upgraded the graphics, fixed a few bugs, and re-released it??? That would be a dream come true.
Every few years after I thought I had finely finished playing it I always end up come back to the game, despite the compatibility issues, and dated graphics...because the game is incredible...made timeless, by all the talented people here on LEX, and STEX, who share their content. I have tried other city building games over the years, Skylines, Simcity 2013 ect but nothing ever captured the fun of SC4.
Perhaps we should start a petition to Maxis, or EA Games, or who ever would have the power to release an updated HD version of the game and see how far it gets?
A more likely route would be to wheedle a partial source code release out of them so we could expand DLL patching ourselves without EA investing a dime (but players would still need to buy into the game to use whatever we develop).
I would rather not see EA involved in "upgrading" our beloved game considering the damage they will be doing. Imagine a completely closed source, always online, un-moddable game with a handful of season pass content. Is this really the price you want to pay to see sc4 in "4K FullHD" ?
Maxis is dead. Eaten by EA like a lot of old school good game developers.
Plus personally i like the fact that SC4 can run on any computer from the latest super mega tripple 4K HD machines to a simple potato. Old games are better than new games. Fact.
I agree with Jeffryfisher. Obtaining some of the source code from EA would be really cool to allow even more nice modding opportunities. Sadly i really don't see that happening.
The way that everything is pre-rendered 2d images, and the way the zooms work, you can effectively have an HD version of the game by having a high resolution monitor and then playing at a zoom closer than you normally would.
For example, back in the day I had an 1024x720 monitor. Now I have a 1920x1200 monitor, which has twice the pixel density as the old one, so playing in zoom 5 now is about the same as playing in zoom 4 back then, except with more details.
I suppose there's a limit to that though, because if someone got a really high density 4k monitor, they could play the game entirely in zoom 6, but most BATs are in SD rather than HD. For the sake of hard drive space, having all BATs in HD isn't practical yet. But I bet the game still looks great in 4k in zoom 6.