This was true, but I am the author of Retera Model Studio. I like to believe I can do anything.
I happened to see this thread Friday night and I've been busy with other stuff irl but I tried to modify Warsmash so that it would incorporate the missing elements and more closely match the original game as far as I know. In particular, the only missing element I was aware of in my ability to render these files outside the official game was the Fog Filter, so I programmed in a Fog Filter. Then I played with screen recording software. And I did all of this on Linux rather than going back to Windows, so that I could be a rebel.
Now, if you really wanted to screen record these old menus in the easiest way, which I have done before as
@Homor mentioned (I am the "the Warsmash guy") the easiest way to do these screen records on Windows that I know of is by using a setup I created but don't particularly want to share with folks, I guess. Essentially
@StormKnight asked me for a technology to turn any custom campaign 3D background into a webm for this same reason as the issues you guys are facing, so I hacked up some old War3 install (probably a Patch 1.29 spinoff) so that the only thing the war3 install did was launch to a menu with an icon for each campaign, and when we click the campaign icon it launches to the menu background of that campaign from the Campaign menu but with all the buttons deleted off the screen. And, it probably also could load custom campaigns.
So that tech would be a near perfect way to get a 1 to 1 recording of these backgrounds, but I forget where I put it, and if I go into my backups and locate it still I guess I'm not sure that I want to be the one responsible for it and sharing it. I think I might've made
@StormKnight agree not to say he got it from me at the time. Basically, I don't want to be a distributor of Warcraft 3 game installation files, because I want to be a distributor of the source code of Warsmash and one of the ways to be legally in the clear about being a distributor of the source code of Warsmash (as far as I know) is to be clear about the fact that I am not a distributor of the Warcraft 3 game.
With all that as it is, I spent my spare time earlier this weekend trying to see if I could help you in my own way that entertains me instead of digging up that modified 1.29 client that StormKnight might have, which would be the way that helps you the most in the way that you want most likely. For myself, I patched Warsmash and made its out-of-game render look even more like the original game.
I recorded Friday night a 1 hour video that talks about the evolution of my out-of-game rendering technology and how I can almost render this stuff without the game. Below is a sample of my out-of-game program rendering a few seconds of the Frozen Throne menu on a 4K display with the sides cut off to honor the original 4:3 resolution design:
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But because I'm on a linux computer doing my own renders with the Warsmash program, not on Windows, and not using the Blizzard Entertainment warcraft 3 code, I have full control over the render to do anything I want with it. So, for example, I can render the same in 4K with the black side bars removed:
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This creates the question: would we want the same visual with the sidebars removed? You can see where the water on the right hand side cuts off, and you can see that the two icebergs on the left are copies of each other and cut off past the 4:3 resolution.
Also, I am not a wizard. I do not know everything. I recorded these videos using OBS saving to mp4 or mov files, then used ffmpeg to convert the mov files to webm. This is not a lossless conversion. So although I am recording at 4K resolution with a custom program, I am not entirely capturing in a lossless way the full and exact output of that program. It might be that you don't care, or it might be that you want a more perfect (and probably much larger and slower to download) background video. I am using a weird Linux variant that cannot run Wine because it fights against proprietary software, such as Windows. This Linux variant also does not have as good of drivers for my graphics card. From what I could tell, trying to use a program like OBS to do a screen capture in a lossless way created lagged frames in the video and generally made things worse. To be truly lossless, I would need to change my OpenGL program that renders this visualization to render much slower than 60 fps probably, and render out to a video file of some sort, which would in theory create a perfect render that was perfectly lossless. Because the program creating these visualizations is not Warcraft 3, I have the access to make those changes. However, they might exceed my attention span.
Speaking of things exceeding my attention span, originally I had in mind that before I replied here I could probably prepare screen recordings of all RoC and TFT campaign backgrounds as 4K webm files, and maybe a second copy with those black bars inserted to make the video look 4:3. But I did not create those yet. It occurs to me that it might save me time to ask which one is preferable to you -- or if you would want visualizations produced by an independent program at all (rather than the game itself).
What resolution(s) would you want? 1080p? 4K?
Do you want black bars?
Edit: another short sample, trying to prove to you that out of game render can work (although for production I would make & convert longer renders than these):
View attachment 467263
Edit: I noticed that in the above render versus a picture that I found on the internet, the Z order decisions about blend mode components appeared to be incorrect in my render versus the original game. I found that with a trivial code change, I could modify the center-right palm leaves so that the
Vines (Cliffside)
doodad equivalent thing did not write over them visually and show on top in an insane illogical way.
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