With all of the crazy decompilation/modding stuff going on, I thought I'd try something silly with the LibreLancer code by trying to jam everything into Unreal Engine and use some of those features to improve the old Freelancer graphics.

I tried a few things here:

1) Taking the old models from a few different angles and then doing an AI upscale pass of their textures, then converting those images into replacement models with a higher polycount. This did...OK. Sometimes it made changes that were too radical (like adding a second engine to the Starflier), but as a proof of concept it works fine.

2) Replacing the particle effects from the old Alchemy engine with Unreal Engine's Niagara engine. This just looks better. The shield effects and their collapse were really straightforward upgrades.

3) As a hail mary I tried converting the character models to Unreal Engine Metahumans...that process needs some work. The last shot shows a rough preview but it's pretty awful looking to start with.

Given that a full Freelancer decomp just dropped today, I wanted to share this as I'm sure there's FAR more talented modders out there which could take that decompilation and really run with it. I'll keep plugging away on this, but wanted to make sure folks knew that you can go waaaaaay beyond just decompiling this stuff if you throw enough tokens at the problem.