Star Wars Battlefront II (2005) - Space Kamino Restoration (WIP)

Here's what I've been working on for the past few days. I took what was left of the Space Kamino map and added the missing objects (such as the rest of the Venator) and re-positioned the Imperial Hangar so that troopers won't fall into space upon spawning. I initially just used the actual script from the beta but in the end, I decided to decompile what I could from the script using tools from cbadal and did a bit of reconstruction to get it fully functional. Interestingly, the way the Venator turrets, hangar, and comms array are placed seem to suggest that at some point in development, the entire Venator was present on the map but was removed for some reason.

You may notice that in both this version and the beta version, the communications array is referred to as "shield generators". Well, judging from the voice overs I've extracted, the communications array was never even supposed to be an objective. Instead, you'd have to destroy the shields, the sensor relay, and finally the engines. I'll probably go with that instead of the communications array since the mission is pretty short anyway.

What's really neat is that the mission is actually fully voiced, although getting the voice overs to actually work was a real pain. Adding the missing sounds for the Republic and Ki-Adi Mundi (obviously not seen in the video) were pretty easy to do but that method didn't seem to work with the Space Kamino voice overs. I would have to remunge the actual streams into a new .LVL file. However, it seems there's been little success with extracting sound streams from the PC version's GLOBAL.LVL. This meant that I had to resort to extracting the streams from the PS2's GLOBAL.LVL, which was a bit of a challenge. I had to go through multiple tools (my first attempt led to an 789 MB file being converted into a 30+ GB file, and I'm not gonna try to work with a file that large) but it all worked out in the end, as you can hear in the video. Since the PS2's GLOBAL.LVL is larger than the PC's by about 85 MB, it's possible my first attempts weren't working because the voice overs are only present in the PS2 file. Or maybe I just did something wrong. I dunno.

When do I plan on releasing this? I don't quite know yet. There's still some stuff I want to do with it (add the objective text pop-ups seen in the rest of the campaign missions, fix the music, change the last objective so that it matches what is described by the voice overs, etc.) and I may include some other cut content along with it such as the Coruscant Hunt mode or the Jabba's Palace Hunt mode that's present in the game's mod tools. But I don't think any of this should to be tough to do. The hardest part would be to try and re-integrate Space Kamino into the game's campaign and that's mainly because nobody has ever done that before (to my knowledge anyway). But I also have to think about whether or not I want to restore everything that's there. I recall restoring a cut objective for Geonosis a few years ago which had you steal the Death Star plans as a Clone Trooper. Stuff like that don't really make much sense and had good reason to be cut. So we'll see what happens.