Classic RA1/TS background images for the CnCNet 5 client

[55aa 0]

Given that I admittedly had never been much of a fan of the default "map" client backgrounds, I was trying out some original game background files with it, and found the following two to work suprisingly well:

 

 

RA\redalert.mix\hires.mix\sovpaper.pcx

 

SUN\tibsun.mix\local.mix\dbak6440.pcx

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Some colors may be a bit inaccurate due to Imgur recompressing images, especially that greenish tint on the last one is quite a bit off.)

 

 

The images scale quite well and still look nice even with a maximized client window, and some pixellation that becomes visible actually adds a lot of charme to it as it is a bit of a throwback to the old interfaces. An issue that had been raised with the CnCNet 5 client was how it supposedly had very little to none of the look-and-feel of the original game interfaces, and I think these images serving as background help address this concern at least somewhat.

 

An archive with the images is attached; the files come in PNG format and are renamed to 

CnCNet5ClientBackground.png

,  so they are ready to use with the CnCNet5 client (image needs to be put in  "

<game_directory>\CnCNet5\Others\

", make a backup of the existing file before overwriting).

cncnet5_ra1_ts_classic_backgrounds.zip

[FunkyFr3sh 216]

we used the TS one before, but changed it cause the res was too low

[cn2mc 188]

I use the background image from the old CnCNet site and some green fonts. Works nice:

 

[55aa 0]

That looks nice indeed, care to share the image?

 

 

we used the TS one before, but changed it cause the res was too low

It seems to me that the issue is not really the relatively low resolution of the source image, but rather the very rudimentary scaling capabilities of the client. From what I can tell it can only do nearest-neighbor upscaling of smaller images (which results in pixellation), and doesn't do any downscaling at all (cropping the lower/right portions of a larger image instead). If it applied a soft filter on upscaling (like bilinear, anything above like bicubic or Lanczos is too sharp already - a background shouldn't be competing in detail with the foreground), a lower-res background would effectively look a lot better.

 

Attached are the original images (converted from indexed-color to RGB) along with versions upscaled to 1072x670 (default client window height, I suppose most people use that window size) with a bilinear filter - it helps reduce blockiness, and the softening minimizes any adverse impact of forground font readability. (I also reminded myself that the background image doesn't need to be named 

CnCNet5ClientBackground.png

  necessarily, you can select any supported image from the client settings dialog, so the image files themselves have descriptive names this time.)

cncnet5_client_classic_bg_ra1_ts_1072x670.zip

[FunkyFr3sh 216]

nearest neighbour scaling was added on purpose (by default it won't scale like this) since the images would look blurry otherwise

[Blarg227 0]

I use the background image from the old CnCNet site and some green fonts. Works nice:

However did you do that? I'm not big on editing in installation folders.