Pathologic 1 in Unity

[u/kkragoth]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gx1iqHH7Vw

8 hours ago I had idea:

Everyone says Pathologic 1 has ugly graphics. But it has exceptional art style - it just needs better lightning + volumetric fog + whole map visibility. I saw LLMs are now really good at decompiling games and I thought - let's reverse engineer game assets and mechanics and do engine port to unity (edited wrongly talking about decomp in original post)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gx1iqHH7Vw

Testing visual improvements - I feel they enhance p1s atmosphere

Edit 2: I get so many downvotes because of AI - I want to be transparent about it and not omit that fact. "Make pathologic 1 in unity" - this can take you only so far, LLMs are great on Reverse Engineering projects in mere 20 minutes but they don't have like human taste and produce AI slop - this is interactive process of me getting my vision on visuals, feelings, ambiance like during night/gloaming. With LLMs - extracting whole map and getting this into unity - 1-2h of time. Getting good ambiance/feeling/visuals - 7-8 hours of my time iterating stuff, feeling it, reviewing output, tweaking values, keeping performance in mind

"If it looks good, this is more matter of my personal choices (vision) and not: AI MAKE PATHOLOGIC LOOK GOOD"

[u/SurDno]

Recompiling and porting is not the same as decompiling. Both are possible with LLMs, but the second is a much harder task and requires finding the original compiler, all the flags and iterating on every single function of the game until you achieve an exact match down to every assembly line and every register.

If anything, a decomp would be infinitely more useful for the community than a Unity port. That would open up modding for the actual Patho 1.

[u/kkragoth → u/SurDno]

Byte identical decomp is not my goal, reverse engineering game's systems like vm, questing, dialogs etc to rewrite it in unity and then it's easier to add modding there. My goal is to get better visuals, better pathfinding and fix clunky combat, keeping all quests the same

edit: I updated post body, I was wrongly talking in description about decomp in original post

[u/ThanaticaIntern]

Damn, last post I saw of yours I thought 'unreal' cuz it's the one I used back when I worked with it, BUT IT'S UNITY. SORRY, I GOT IT WRONG.
It looks AMAZING, I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Def would replay it with this look.

[u/bleeerghh]

This looks actually super good

[u/Pucabunny]

This looks great. Please do keep us updated on progress, I'd love to play this!

[u/kkragoth → u/Pucabunny]

Thank you! I seriously have no idea why i'm getting so many downvotes, for me this is just so cool and flying through the town is awesome

[u/distinctvagueness → u/kkragoth]

Some people hate anything AI/LLM

[u/kkragoth → u/distinctvagueness]

I kinda also hate AI, I coded manually for 13 years and this year it has changed - this is just prompting and reading. And i've been struggling to find a job due to AI - a friend is helping me with work. But on the other hand in just 10 hours I've got results that I really like. At work I need to understand and be responsible for what I deliver and if I had money/time/people like game studio I'd polish every little thing here. But this is matter of compromises - this is for fun and it has to look good

So I present something that doesn't look like ai slop

[u/Moth_Goth000]

Ugh, I was impressed until I saw it's AI

[u/kkragoth → u/Moth_Goth000]

So OP here, I get so many downvotes cause of AI usage, but I want to be transparent about this. By usage of AI it might seem like: "do pathologic 1, make no mistakes" - that gets like 80% right stuff but then I play around and I see cathedral is rotated, blank spots in maps, other issues. It is an iterative process.

LLMs can in 20 min figure out and reverse engineer whole assets/scenes/etc ,spawn out in 2sec whole python codes to extract stuff - but getting whole ambiance / mood / all like important stuff that is matter of taste - well this needs human in the loop still and interactive process.

And that leaves me to focus on important stuff - i.e. after importing at night polyhedron wasn't glowing at night - in distance I want it to give like folumetric fog glow etc. Fine tune strengths of glows/distances. Fine tuning city lanterns to make it look somehow good, feeling like fog ambience etc. This comes from human - especially my personal taste.

Getting good night/day light ambient this is not a one shot prompt - I play around, feel something is off and missing and prompt it. So this is more like I'm game producer and just tasking like people to do stuff in my liking. And this becomes more like my imagination thing + reviewing that outputed stuff isn't doing anything stupid that will tank performance - i.e. I want like fake 3d windows parallaxes.

So if it looks good, this is more matter of my personal choices and not: "AI MAKE PATHOLOGIC LOOK GOOD". And this isn't something like I wouldn't be able to do without AI - but it'd require me to have like so much time/money/whole teams of programmers working on that. Not something I can grab a beer on a friday night and tackle it myself.

This is just a fun thing for me, I wanted to see P1s world in modern engine and try out my skills in making good ambiance

[u/Previous-Ad-1542]

this is so cool! thank you for sharing

[u/Electrical-Lab9147]

This is awesome