Emulation ROM Hack Call of Duty 2: Big Red One - GameCube Texture Restoration

ScaryHobbit · Sep 29, 2023

Been in a World War 2 game mood as of late, and through this got some inspiration to try out some of the texture loading and dumping tools in Dolphin Emulator (and PCSX2 as you will see).

For those who may not remember, Call of Duty 2: Big Red One - Treyarch's first Call of Duty title, was ported to the Nintendo GameCube by High Voltage Software (known for the Conduit games on Wii). However as part of the porting process, the game's files had to be cut down in size in order to fit on the Cube's smaller mini disc format.
Multiplayer was an easy cut - because the GameCube didn't officially support online gaming, and all the main campaign content and gameplay was preserved unsullied with nearly on-par visuals and performance compared to PS2 and Xbox. Unfortunately, HVS felt the need to downgrade some of the games textures in order to meet their hardware goals, which can be argued to be excessive since the reduction in file size isn't big enough to justify the downgrades, with the difference adding up to only 2 - 5 megabytes.
(In fact, COD2BR1 was already well within disc capacity: 1.02 GB on a disc that can hold up to 1.46 GB. For comparison, Metroid Prime 2 uses 1.21 GB of disc space.)

So since I own both a GC and PS2 copy of the game yet prefer playing the game on Dolphin (Better looking and more stable than PS2 - both console & emulation, and the controls feel better.), I decided to replace the downgraded textures with their more-detailed equivalents on PS2 - plus fix a few notable textures that were messed up during the porting process.

During my research, I found the following areas to have received substantial downgrades in their texturework:

1st Person Weapon textures
Clouds (but not the skyboxes... those weren't downgraded.)
Several in the plane mission
3 of the vehicle types
Rivers and coastlines
A couple others in random spots (crater marks, etc. Very minor differences.)

All other textures in the game are on-par with the other consoles and weren't downgraded. In addition outside of multiplayer, no in-game models were cut nor downgraded... except for the rivers and coasts, which I'll explain later.

The texture files in both versions of the game are packed in .cod files, which I have no idea how to unpack. I can't find anything online that is able to open these up. So to circumvent this, I had to play both versions 100% thru, and use the texture dumping features of Dolphin and PCSX2 to hunt down the downgraded textures. This meant that I essentially had to play thru both games back-to-back just to access the textures I wanted.
From there I used GIMP to edit the PS2 png files into a state that Dolphin can read and apply them in-game. So long as the PS2 textures share the same aspect ratio as their GC counterparts, the higher-rez textures wrap perfectly around the GC models.

For the rest of this post, I'll showcase the first and most prominent category of the GC port's visual downgrades:
Screenshots were taken on Dolphin at 1080p, unless specified otherwise.

Weapon Textures

Browning 30.cal

BAR

Bazooka

Beretta M1938A

BM37

Breda M1930

Carcano M38

Chatellerault

Gewehr 43

Karabiner 98K

Karabiner 98K - Sniper
Note: There is no downgrade in the scope accessory's texture from PS2 to GC. It's the same texture for both versions.

M1 Carbine

M1 Garand

MAS-36

MAS-38

Reached attachment limit. Continued on next post...

Post automatically merged: Sep 29, 2023

...Continued from previous post.

MG34

MG42

MP40

Panzerschreck

Springfield

Sniper Scope

StG 44 (MP 44)

M1A1 Thompson

That's all of the weapons in Big Red One's campaign.
Next time, I will show some of the other downgrades that I've been restoring. There won't be as many pictures, but enough to show off the main differences and get the point across.

ScaryHobbit · Oct 11, 2023

Finished restoring all the rest of the textures that I could find that I was looking to restore, but otherwise here are some more pictures showcasing some more of what was changed in the GameCube port of COD2BR1.
Surprisingly, it's not just about simple resolution downgrades for a few of these, but I'll explain when I get to them.

Environments

The textures for the passing clouds overhead were all halved in resolution, making them look blurrier and less detailed on GC compared to PS2.
A couple of the hi-res textures gave me trouble importing them, creating ugly black ghosting lines in the sky - and I found a few of the PS2 textures to be a bit overly harsh and in need of a slight blur, but the rest were very easy to import using Dolphin.

Original:

Hi-Res:

Crater textures were also downgraded from PS2 to GC. There are multiple different crater textures with different coloring based on the location the mission takes place in (North Africa, Maubeuge/Mons, Normandy, etc.), so tracking these down was a little bit tricky.
Even when the resolution was kept the same, the PS2 had a fade effect around the crater to make it blend into the terrain, while GC forgoes the fade and leaves a hard edge around the crater texture. These too I was able to fix on Dolphin.

Original:

Hi-Res:

Broken Textures:

In my research, the following textures in my opinion are less of an intentional downgrade to save space, and cross the line into being considered a "screw-up" by the porting team.
The most glaring of these kinds of downgrades are found in the Piano Lupo and Mons rivers, and the shoreline of Omaha Beach.

This is how rivers look on PS2. On PS2, there is a seperate water mesh that is used to create undulating animated waves, which sits on top of a flat background mesh with its own backup low-detail texture.

On the GC port, this moving animated mesh was removed, leaving only the static flat mesh and it's low-detail texture visible.
Other bodies of water in the game had this background texture replaced with the correct textures - so the difference isn't so jarring between the two consoles, but on Piano Lupo and Mons the devs forgot to replace them!
So this is how the rivers look on console: VERY muddy!

To add to the wierdness, the correct textures are still present on disk and are still loaded by the game.
At the very least, it made it easy for me to find them and replace the offending textures.
It may not be a perfect conversion, but it's much better than before!

Original:

Fixed:

Omaha Beach has a somewhat different error: Like the rivers this beach level also had an animated wave mesh that was removed, but thankfully the water textures were correctly transplanted to the background mesh.
This time however, the texture of the whitecap waves was butchered in the porting process. Replacing it with the PS2 version texture fixed this error.

Original:

Fixed:

The few other errors I found involved some glass and puddle textures that weren't properly set up to be transparent - rendering as a solid object instead of being see-through like on PS2.
Obviously, glass isn't supposed to look like how it is on GC... though it can sometimes blend in well with the fake "jpeg" windows on the walls, which were the style of the time.

Original:

Fixed:

Original:

Fixed:

Original:

PS2:

Fixed:

I should be able to finish my comparisons in my next big post. To wrap up, I will showcase vehicle differences and the cuts in the bomber mission.

Post automatically merged: Oct 12, 2023

...And now for the rest of the items I wanted to highlight.

Vehicles:

Curiously, only the textures for 3 of Big Red One's vehicles were downgraded: The U.S. Jeep, the Sherman tank, and the Kubelwagen. All three vehicles have different variants for each climate depicted in the campaign, each of which were downgraded as well.

Original:

Hi-Res:

The GameCube has one notable advantage over the higher-res PS2 version, however...
Surprisingly, the PS2 texture is almost entirely in monotone - and when converting the texture to GC, the porting team actually went back in and colored in key details such as brake lights and dirt.

With a little Photoshop magic, I was able to transplant the GC coloring on top of the PS2 texture to create an ideal version.

The Sherman... (I also did a GC color overlay of the Sherman, but I forgot to snap a picture. This is just the PS2 texture before any edits.)

Original:

Hi-Res:

Original:

Hi-Res:

The wrecked version of the Sherman was also downgraded.

Original:

Hi-Res:

And lastly, an example of the Kubelwagen. Also take note of the crater the Kubelwagen is stuck in.

Original:

Hi-Res:

Bomber Mission:

The final segment that I want to show, the bomber mission had a ton of big texture changes made to it.
Mainly the clouds, the ground, the bomber HUD, and the shadowmaps as well - all of which have a very noticeable effect on the visuals.
You can also see that the compass for the bomber was messed up in the GC version, so I fixed that as well.

Original:

Hi-Res:

Speaking of "messed up"... On GC during the section where you commence the bombing run on the German factory, the ground texture creeps up and engulfs the structures, disrupting the appearance of the buildings and the railroad that runs through the segment. It's also the case after I replace the ground texture with the PS2 version.

In an attempt to fix this, I was able to get a workable solution by reducing the opacity of the ground texture. The buildings and railroad are now much more clear to see, but at a cost of detail to the ground terrain.

Original:

Hi-Res:

The shadowmaps in the plane mission where the only ones in the game that appear to have been changed compared to PS2. And while you would think that this wouldn't affect the overall look in-game, the downgrades create ugly black artifacts all over the nose and tail gun positions that simply needed to be fixed.

Original:

Hi-Res:

Original:

Hi-Res:

Elsewhere on the plane, however, the hi-res textures aren't all an automatic improvement.
In fact, despite being more detailed, I actually find that many of the PS2 shadowmaps actually look worse than their downgraded GC counterparts.
The PS2 looks blotchy and grimy in places that doesn't make sense, while the GC is at least smooth in its shading and doesn't interfere with the main textures.

With this in mind, I prefer to only fix the gun positions, and leave the rest of the plane as-is.

Original:

Hi-Res:

That's all for everything notable that I found and fixed over the course of this project.
Feel free to post away if you have any questions!

Emulation ROM Hack Call of Duty 2: Big Red One - GameCube Texture Restoration

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