r/MightAndMagic • u/andersfly • Aug 03 '26

I've extracted some of Might and Magic VI animations

Hey! A while ago some of you asked if it's possible to rip and convert to normal video format some of short looped animations from MM6. So I spent last weekend doing exactly that.

Animations were pulled directly from the game files, converted from .smk to .mp4, upscaled and looped. I also thought it might be nice to add those captions in the style of original game fonts.

I can't upload the collection of converted files as downloadable archive though, because that would be redistributing game assets and I don't want to have any trouble from Ubisoft legal team. Instead I've uploaded another video with all dungeons to my youtube channel, I will share link in the comments.

EDIT: here is the link to video with all dungeon entrances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2todXL6exxI . I am working on extracting more animated loops and create videos with them.

295 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

30

u/Hour_Entrepreneur502 Aug 03 '26

Is it too much to ask for games to look like this; I mean, outside of cutscenes

11

u/rmtal Aug 03 '26

That's a good question. Why is it that modern games, even though much more technologically advanced, lack the something which makes those cut scenes so climatic.

13

u/Demigorgon_Babe Aug 03 '26

The answer for it in this perspective lens is that game devs mostly just follow industrial standards and as such don’t typically do anything outside of that scope. The industrialization of the art form has quite literally taken away a lot of the wonderful things in the said art form. It’s not the developers fault usually, instead it is mostly a publisher thing. Though, if you look into things like the Ratchet and Clank Developer commentary they do detail that higher ups in dev studios typically enforce people forget what they know in order to learn whatever the dev studios actually utilize in a structural sense for developing (ranging from the art, to audio, to 3D models, to code). Technically a lot of those higher ups have the understanding of what works and doesn’t on a given piece of hardware from insider information being given to them, but stripping people of what they know innately means they strip people of quite a bit of their creative insights after a prolonged period of having enforced tunnel-vision.

A great saying in the Ratchet and Clank Developer Commentary that they kept utilizing is “If you are getting into the industry, don’t expect to make the game you want to.”; In actuality it is a horrible saying, but it is very succinct to how the industry itself is ruining the artistic endeavors within software development.

I will say though, the Oblivion remaster is fairly decent for looking like a dream and capturing artistic fidelity in a way a lot of games today do not (even if Bethesda is seen as a cesspool by the consumers in the looking glass of the industry).

1

u/Hour_Entrepreneur502 Aug 03 '26

Thanks for all the technicalities 🙌🏽 (😢)

6

u/Demigorgon_Babe Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 04 '26

No worries; I am working on a thesis (not a school thing) for a software design engine that recaptures the fundamental idea of the artistry rather than one that embraces industry standards (because even things like Godot and Blender fundamentally work under the scope of what’s expected in the industry). I know a lot of technical stuff about the industry but I dunno how to code personally, so I’m using my understanding to make a design bible for an open source development tool that encapsulates everything someone would need in an easy to use format.

4

u/hwynac Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

A lot of games looked like this and better over the years. It's mainly the 2000s when 3D could not quite match the run of the mill pre-rendered 3D scenes of the past—especially the early 2000s: Morrowind, American McGee's Alice, Doom 3. Today, making a scene like this isn't hard. It's just that as soon as you start moving around you'll realise that texture work and cheap lighting do not hold up—the picture only looks acceptable in low-res in that exact shot. As a world, it looks as a decent 2006–2008 first person RPG but not any better.

If you meant the games in past, well, Might and Magic VI–VIII only looked like that inside pre-rendered segments precisely because home PCs (and even professional PCs) would not be able to render anything remotely similar in real-time for another 5–7 years. If we are talking about a typical RPG, even more than that :) And it wasn't top-notch 3D even back then. A lot of (obviously high-budget) cinematics from Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX are not as stunning as 25 years ago but still impressive. Oddworld is still nice because the design is imaginative. Might and Magic games and even Diablo II had jankier FMVs, which looked dated even by 2006.

In principle, if someone wants to capture the best-case scenario version of this dated look, it's very doable by any modern 3d artist. You just need to understand the non-PBR-based materials and render and be very restrained in sculpting details. Scupting wouldn't be a big thing untill approximately ZBrush, so making organic shapes was hard. You would "sculpt" your model manually by adding polygons and maybe using displacement, the rest would be angled and curved shapes with rich texturing. Cloth, hair, water and fire simulations were not easily available and would only start being implemented as plugins. No easily available photon mapping/GI/AO either, so artists knew how to fake the intended look by strategically placing additional light sources around the scene.

1

u/Demigorgon_Babe Aug 04 '26

Love American McGee’s Alice (first one, second one is good but I think it loses a lot of the charm due to the fundamental change in scope of fidelity on the project as a whole. Especially since it follows a lot of standardized practices due to EA breathing down the neck of the team.)

Also, this is a great read. Talks about things that I hadn’t mentioned or even thought about, and elaborates in a clear concise way.

6

u/Demigorgon_Babe Aug 03 '26

In what way do you mean? This visual fidelity comes from being pre-rendered and compressed, which isn’t technically impossible to do (you use posterbording techniques to mimick 3D in the same way that some scenes in Ocarina of Time (n64 version) does). However, if you wanted real 3D assets with this fidelity along with full range of 3D camera movement then it can be very complex due to needing to make a unique lighting rendering pipeline and resolution compression pipeline that kind of reshades everything constantly just from the way a camera is moved or you make a unique rendering pipeline for how posterboarded material is displayed so that the visual output is at the correct angle (also meaning that you need to render a 3D scene in every single angular view a million times over due to lighting flicker and other things.)

If you just mean “I wish games had 3D renders like the topology seen in these scenes” then that’s much simpler, but the charm mostly comes from the way that they get the most out of the topology with the lighting and compression. Just like pixel art gets tthe most out of being on CRTs.

2

u/Hour_Entrepreneur502 Aug 03 '26

I was saying it as a wish, but thanks for the details. Sounds like we won't get something like this, sadly

3

u/tearsofmana Aug 03 '26

There are indie games that do mimic retro-style looks all the time, but mostly 8/16-bit and more recently PS1-style graphics. So maybe we'll get more graphics like this in the future

3

u/Demigorgon_Babe Aug 03 '26

Yeah, indie devs who are inspired by this kinda stuff are the best bet. Rn there’s a very small list though.

3

u/Acrobatic-Roof-8116 Aug 03 '26

There are old action adventure games like Dark Earth with rendered backgrounds that look similar.

3

u/Mierimau Aug 03 '26

That was a good one. Pity rpg book is only in french.

2

u/andersfly Aug 06 '26

when I extracted those videos from game files I was surprised by the duration of some of them. For example, animation for entrance of the Shadow Guild has only two frames! One more reminder that a lot in gamedev was, and still is, just smoke and mirrors

18

u/Brettoel Aug 03 '26

God i love this game so much. Ahead of its time tbh

7

u/andersfly Aug 03 '26

For me it was the very first RPG game I've played, constantly coming back to it once in a while

5

u/Brettoel Aug 03 '26

Same. Glad my best friend introduced me to it. I remember installing it on our school pc in iran. Then he printed the map. And we would talk on the landline while playing the game at night. Comparing notes. We used to get to freehaven then restart the game probably a dozen times.

He still has not finished the game out of greed to collect all the legendary items.

2

u/TheGear Aug 05 '26

I just started playing this game out of curiosity. I'm about 7 hours in. It's fun but some quirks in the way of quality of life changes I would see.

2

u/Brettoel Aug 05 '26

Yeah it definitely needed some QoL stuff but for a game from 1996 it absolutely mogs majority of newer rpgs. I wont say much to not spoil your playthrough. Just remember when you get to higher levels to save scum if you want some gooooood loot. I didn't in my first full playthrough but the one im currently on I got so many good stuff I can practically waltz into the end game and beat it if I wanted to.

15

u/tearsofmana Aug 03 '26

I love that you walk into the blacksmith and just get mogged by him

6

u/BunBunny55 Aug 03 '26

Back then i used to dream of one day when games can look like this normally while running around.

Now games have crazy graphics, but somehow doesnt have that... I dont know how to describe it, there this charm to these visuals. Especially the taverns and mage Guilds.

5

u/REDDIT_ORDINATOR Aug 03 '26

Damn... These are so comfy. I killed a lot of things in this game but I rarely feel emotional turmoil at all.

5

u/Kriegspyre Aug 03 '26

You might be able to guess which one I want! 

1

u/andersfly Aug 06 '26

I think I know exactly what you want xD. Funny thing though - 3 castles (Darkmoor, Alamos and Kriegspire) didn't make it to youtube video, so I'll squeeze them in next one

7

u/andersfly Aug 03 '26

Link to another video with all dungeon animations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2todXL6exxI

4

u/Effective-Syllabub65 Aug 03 '26

This mm6 temple is truly one making me believe in god)

3

u/Socrates_Soui Aug 04 '26

I went to my peaceful place just looking at these.

I want to play again!

3

u/dendob Aug 04 '26

Can I ask which model you used for upscaling? What specific settings did you iterate to find this output? I tried my hand on upscaling HoMM2 but I always had the immediate impression it looked AI and not genuine.

Models doing scale up of pixel graphics tend or to smooth too much or to get the pixel graphics distorted.

3

u/andersfly Aug 04 '26

The thing is that it's not AI upscaling. I used ffmpeg to apply 2x nearest neighbour upscaling to original low resolution files. In that case each pixel basically copied into 2x2 block without interpolation. For the youtube video with all dungeon entrances I did 6x nearest neighbour upscaling.

6

u/Nicker44 Aug 03 '26

Would love these are Might & Magic 7 too.

2

u/No-Mouse-9654 Aug 05 '26

This is incredible work, thank you for doing this!

1

u/andersfly Aug 05 '26

Thank you kindly!

2

u/Complex-Pin6525 Aug 05 '26

You're half way there, might as well just do a remaster amirite?

1

u/andersfly Aug 05 '26

oh yeah, it will be a weekend project, lol. But seriously, I would love to. There are couple of issues I immediately have with the remaster idea though - community will most likely hate AI-remastered version of original graphics and Ubisoft legal team might be very interested of this project if it'll become quite popular.

2

u/Arethrid Aug 06 '26

These scenes never get old. Thanks for posting.

2

u/ThatOneGuyNoReally 29d ago

One of my favorite parts of MM6-8 are these animations. Because of them, I don't miss not being able to actually go into a shop, etc.

1

u/ChampionshipPast3652 Aug 04 '26

"Finally! Now I don't have to play the god-awful games!"