HD pack 1.3: the battle animations in HD

HD pack 1.3 is released with 0.5.3. In HD 1.2 only the cut-ins and the props of a battle were in HD; this version fills in nearly everything else in the battle animations. HD 1.3 needs Marchwind64 0.5.3 or newer; the reason is at the end.

The battle animations in HD

The battle pictures grow from about 740 to about 6,900, all upscaled from the original pixel art by a local model, keeping the original shapes and colours and the same size on screen:

• Weapon effects: the fists, blades, missiles, shells and flames of the weapons themselves.
• Beams: the shape follows the original strictly, frame by frame; only the inside takes Super Robot Wars Z’s look, a solid white core with a narrow rim that runs from pale to saturated. Beam rifles, mega particle cannons, funnels, Gatling bolts, twisted lasers, lightning and more, 99 sets; frames the original fades keep their fade.
• Follow-on frames: the sequences and after-images after a hit, including Gundam Rose’s rose bits at every turning angle.
• Hit effects and kill explosions.
• Defences: shields, barriers and the other defence effects, and the reaction frames of a unit being hit.
• The map’s combination and transformation movies.
• Special moves: the brush characters on screen and the aura and nebula backdrops scrolling behind them.
• The landing shadow becomes a soft circle, no larger than the original’s.

Unit poses

• 26 poses with artifacts are fixed; Guncannon, God Gundam H, Gundam Heavyarms Kai, Hambrabi, Marasai, Bawoo and the GP03S Stamen are redrawn whole.
• Master Asia is redrawn whole.
• Dancouga’s body is redrawn, in both stances.
• Giant Robo gains the frames it never had: two poses, the pilot in a space suit in space and on the moon, the frames with the pilot for the rocket missile and the bazooka, and the status page’s picture without the pilot.
• The new pictures are brought back to the original’s brightness, so they do not stand out next to the other poses.

Map unit icons

• The red and yellow rings of the enemy’s and third party’s icons are gone. From 0.5.3 your units face left and the enemy’s face right, so the sides are told apart at a glance.
• An acted icon greys at 60% instead of 85%, so a white or grey unit visibly changes after acting.
• The GP03 Dendrobium and the Qubeley are brighter before they act, and the GP03’s blue edge is deeper.
• Giant Robo’s icon loses its pilot, as in the original.
• Dancouga’s icon takes the newly drawn head.

Other changes

• The story world map’s name plates come in Korean too, for the Korean language.
• Unchanged: the portraits, the intermission backgrounds, and the base images of the story world map and the tactical maps.

Why it needs 0.5.3

In this version, pictures that are identical share one file, and the program colours each use by its own palette; an older program cannot tell them apart, so several colour variants come out alike. The icons’ facing, the shadows of ground and flying units and the double-move mark on the pilot pages are changes in the 0.5.3 program itself and are there without the HD pack.

Download and install

• Computers and Android: download Marchwind64-HD-1.3.zip from the install page and replace the whole old hd folder; on Android, import the zip in the app.
• Switch: download Marchwind64-HD-1.3-switch.zip and extract it to the SD card’s root.
• Both are also on GitHub’s HD 1.3 release page.

The battle effects and the poses are upscaled from the original pixel art by a local model; the poses redrawn whole and the beams’ inner look were drawn by an image model with the original pictures as reference, and are AI-generated content. How the rest of the HD pack was made is in How the HD art was made.