Last week, we informed you about a Star Wars Rogue Squadron fan remake in Unreal Engine 4. Since this project looked really cool, we got in touch with ‘Thanaclara’ in order to find out more details about it.

Thanaclara and his team aim to remake the entire single player campaign, meaning that this remake will have every playable ship and level from the original game including the bonus missions. It’s a huge task but Thanaclara believes that his team will be able to pull off.

DSOGaming: Do you plan to release this project to the public since it looks so cool?

Thanaclara:  I can’t comment one way or the other right now but if we choose to release it we have a few options that we’re exploring that we believe would make it so that we would avoid copyright infringement. But we’ll let you know when we know. Until then mum’s the word.

DSOG: How long did it take you and how much of it is complete? Any timeframe on when it will be finished?

Thanaclara: It’s been in developement for a couple years so far but we’re confident we can get everything that was in the original game finished in a reasonable amount of time. Certainly less than a couple more years I would hope. Things beyond that like multiplayer and coop and whatnot are another story but that’s one bridge we’ll cross when we get to it. We’re focused mostly on finishing the campaign for the time being.

DSOG: Which level/levels/ships will it include?

Thanaclara: Well obviously it’s going to have every playable ship and level from the original game including the bonus missions.

But the bigger plan is to try to get as many other ships from the Star Wars cannon and notable non cannon ships into the game as we can stomach. It’s a relatively easy process to make differing playable craft so if you’re thinking of a specific ship you want to see in the game, as long as it’s a fun ship to play, I suspect it could make it into the final game.

As for new levels, I can’t say for certain they’ll be in the final game but the aim at least is to try to make new levels and missions if we can get to it. I find the idea of coming up with our own original scenarios for missions fairly exciting. And who would pass up the chance to fly a mission as the empire in a TIE fighter battling rebels?

DSOG: What graphical features of the Unreal Engine 4 have you implemented? 

Thanaclara: Well I mean there’s lots of stuff I could go into. One thing the team and I have been most excited for over the past couple months is Unreal’s volumetric fog. For one it simply just adds a ton of atmosphere to any level we drop it into.

With its ability to interface with Volume Materials it essentially has solved our realtime volumetric cloud challenge, that we’ve been scratching our heads over for quite awhile, basically over night.

The level “Battle Above Taloraan” is a mission that has no terrain in the original game on the N64 and is depicted with prerendered clouds on the skybox. While we were certainly keeping the idea of clouds rendered to the sky sphere in Unreal as an option it really wasn’t preferrable and we thought it would be really cool to have something a little more up close and personal. One of my biggest goals was to make it so you could actually fly through a cloud and have it look good while also not completely annihilating the framerate.

The newly released volumetric fog allowed us to actually achieve this!

So Yeah, in my opinion the volumetric clouds really flesh out what could potentially be a completely empty and lifeless void of a level.

It’s going to take some work to get it optimized but we’re impressed with how fast it already runs, even on Unreal’s “Epic” graphical setting.

In order to stay up to date with this remake’s progress, we strongly suggest subscribing to its reddit page.