Incubation HD — a renderer mod for Incubation: The Wilderness Missions (Blue Byte, 1997)

This project runs the original Incubation through a custom OpenGlide fork so you can replace the game's 256×256 textures with your own AI-upscaled HD versions, play in fullscreen at any resolution with proper anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, and tweak a few image-quality options — all without touching the game's data files.

It is a tool + renderer, not an asset pack: you extract the textures, upscale them with whatever AI upscaler you like, and pack them back. Nothing copyrighted is redistributed.

By Sonatix — what to build and what to drop, the testing, and the HD textures. The reverse-engineering, the renderer and the tools were written with AI assistance (Claude, by Anthropic).

Українською: див. README_UA.md.

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See it in action

Demo videos by Sonatix — the same renderer, textures upscaled two different ways. The mod is upscaler-agnostic, so use whatever gives you the look you want:

• ▶ Textures upscaled with Upscayl + Google Gemini (“Nano Banana”) — https://youtu.be/vm6WE56kJTo
• ▶ Textures upscaled with Upscayl — https://youtu.be/TSEZLvDdf0o

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What it does (done ✓)

• True HD textures. The game uploads every texture as a 256×256 image; our renderer intercepts that and substitutes an arbitrarily larger RGBA image at draw time. The game's geometry and UV mapping are untouched — you just get more texel detail.
• Fullscreen at native resolution, with a working mouse cursor and menus. Tested up to 2560×1440; any mode your monitor supports is selectable in the launcher.
• MSAA 8× anti-aliasing — smooths the hard polygon edges that make old 3D look blocky.
• Anisotropic 16× + trilinear mipmaps — crisp textures on floors/walls seen at an angle, no shimmering in the distance.
• 2D sharpening — a shader pass that makes the menus/briefings look less soft when scaled up.
• Experimental fake bump/normal mapping — adds surface relief to textures that have a generated normal map. Subtle (the HD textures already carry a lot of baked-in shading), but it's there if you want it.
• A GUI launcher that ties it all together: resolution, the HD toggle, sliders, and the whole extract → upscale → pack pipeline, with the display mode reliably restored on exit.
• Vanilla texture modding. tools/visn.py both decodes and encodes VISN in pure Python, so you can repaint the game's own textures and repack a texture.lib that the unmodified game loads — no DLLs, nothing of ours required to play the result. The launcher's Vanilla textures tab drives the whole loop (Part C).
• Format tools for the community: the texture format (VISN — fully specified in VISN-FORMAT.md), the UI sprite archives (Libs/*.LIB), and the game's scripting language (LCL) are all decoded — see MODDING.md.

What it does NOT do (limits — honest list ✗)

These are hard limits of a 1997 engine, not TODOs. We verified each one; please don't file them as bugs.

• It cannot raise the polygon count. The models are low-poly and that is baked into the geometry the engine sends. At the renderer we only receive already-projected 2D triangles with no surface normals, so tessellation would add nothing and can't round a silhouette. Repacking higher-poly models breaks the animation. HD textures on low-poly models = "great texture on a cube", and that's the ceiling for the shape.
• It cannot HD the interface per element. The game composites its whole 2D UI itself and hands the renderer only the finished ~640×480 frame, so individual buttons/icons/cursor never arrive separately and can't be swapped for HD art. The 2D is upscaled and sharpened, not replaced. (The UI sprites are still extractable for reference / native-size edits.)
• DLSS / frame-generation don't apply. They need per-pixel motion vectors and engine integration this game can't provide, and they reconstruct detail this game doesn't have.
• Editing a texture.lib can't give you HD. Repacking works and is a supported workflow (see Part C), but the engine's texture page is fixed at 256×256, so repainted art stays 256×256 however large you paint it. HD comes only from substitution inside the renderer, which is what this kit's glide2x.dll does.
• It does not ship textures. You make your own (that's the point).

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TL;DR — for the very lazy

1. Install the game.
2. Copy the contents of game_files from this repo into the folder that has launcher.exe and Incubation.exe (by default \GOG Games\Battle Isle Platinum\Incubation).
3. Copy the 2 DLLs from the Windows 10/11 patch into that same folder.
4. Run Incubation HD.bat — it creates every folder it needs.
   • Also run the original launcher.exe once: after that the original campaign shows up in the menu. (Not yet known which setting decides between the original campaign and the add-on with the network game.)

To mod the game:

5. Install 32-bit Python.
6. py -3-32 -m pip install Pillow
7. py -3-32 -m pip install numpy — optional, only for generating normal maps.

Everything should work now. If not, read the loooong part written by Claude below.

(OPTIONAL) You can copy Glide2x.dll and ddraw.dll from dgVoodoo into \Battle Isle Platinum\Incubation\dgVoodoo\ (the launcher creates that folder at step 4) — it will use them in Vanilla mode only.

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Part A — Get it running (fullscreen + anti-aliasing) · ~10 minutes

This part alone gives you fullscreen at your monitor's resolution, anti-aliasing, and sharper texture filtering — a real upgrade even before you touch the textures. No image skills needed.

You need: the game, and Python (the launcher runs on it).

1. Own & install Incubation — from GOG ("Battle Isle Platinum") or your CD. This mod ships none of the game; you provide it.
2. Apply the Windows 10/11 patch — do this first. Stock Incubation hangs at startup on Windows 10/11: the process sits in Task Manager with no window. The community patch (part of the 25th Anniversary Mod) fixes it by replacing audio.dll and sound.dll. Download it, unzip, and copy those two DLLs into your Incubation folder, overwriting. → https://www.moddb.com/mods/incubation-blue-byte-25-years-anniversary-mod/downloads/incubation-windows-10-patch (The launcher checks for this and warns you if it looks missing — but without it nothing runs, so do it now.)
3. Install Python for Windows from https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/ — any version 3.8 or newer, but it must be the 32-bit build ("Windows installer (32-bit)"). On the first setup screen tick "Add python.exe to PATH", and leave "tcl/tk and IDLE" ticked — that is the launcher's window toolkit; without it nothing can open. (Why 32-bit: the HD pipeline calls the game's Eng3d.dll to decode textures, and a 64-bit process cannot load a 32-bit DLL. Why 3.8: the tools use os.add_dll_directory, added in 3.8. The vanilla texture tools in Part C are pure Python and run on any bitness.)
4. Copy the files. Open the game_files/ folder from this download and copy everything inside it into your Incubation folder (the one containing Incubation.exe). Overwrite if asked.
5. Play. Double-click Incubation HD.bat → the launcher opens → on the Play tab pick a resolution → click ▶ Launch HD game.

You're now playing in fullscreen with anti-aliasing. The HD textures switch is on, but until you do Part B there's no HD pack yet — so you'll see the original art, just full-screen and cleaner.

Incubation HD.bat finds Python by itself: the default install folder first, then the py launcher (py -3-32), then whatever is on PATH. If it can't find a 32-bit Python 3 it tells you so instead of failing silently.

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Part B — Make your own HD textures · the upscaling pipeline

This is where the "HD" comes from: extract the game's textures, upscale them with an AI tool, pack them back. Redo it anytime, texture by texture. Everything below is buttons in the launcher's HD textures tab — no command line except one install step.

You need (on top of Part A):

• Pillow, the Python imaging library — it does every PNG read and write in the pipeline. Open Command Prompt and run: py -3-32 -m pip install Pillow Add numpy too only if you want the experimental bump effect (it is the maths behind "Generate normal maps"); everything else works without it: py -3-32 -m pip install numpy
• An AI image upscaler. Easiest to start with is Upscayl — free, a normal app window: https://upscayl.org . Any upscaler works (Real-ESRGAN, chaiNNer, Topaz, even an online one) — the mod doesn't care which.

Steps:

1. “1. Extract textures.” Writes 306 PNGs to hd_work/source/ (button “Open source” opens it).
2. Upscale them. In Upscayl: set input folder = hd_work/source, output folder = hd_work/upscaled, pick a model and scale (×4 is a good start), run. Keep the file names — 025f4383_out.png is fine; the 025f4383 part is what the renderer matches on.
3. “2. Pack upscaled.” Builds the live HD pack in hd_pack_hd/.
4. Play (Play tab → ▶ Launch). Your HD textures are now in the game.

Next time you tweak a texture: re-run “2. Pack upscaled” and launch — that's the whole loop.

Also on the HD textures tab:

• 2D sharpen (0–0.6) — sharpness of menus/briefings; ~0.15 is gentle.
• Bump strength (0–2) — fake surface relief; only affects textures you first give a normal map via “Generate normal maps”. Optional / experimental.
• HD textures switch — turn it off any time to instantly compare against the original art.
• Manual button — every control on the tab explained, in English and Ukrainian.

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Part C — Edit the game's own textures (mods for the vanilla game) · optional

Part B makes the game look better through our renderer. Part C changes what the textures actually are, inside the game's own texture.lib — so the edit shows up in the plain, unmodified game, with no DLLs and no launcher of ours. That is how you make a texture mod other people can just install.

Two limits, up front: it stays 256×256 forever (the engine's texture page is fixed), and the codec is lossy, so a re-encoded texture is a touch softer than the original. Your painted content stays crisp. This is about texture content, not resolution.

Steps — all on the launcher's Vanilla textures tab:

1. On the Play tab, switch the mode to Vanilla. (That single switch is the master control: in HD mode this tab is greyed out, because our renderer would substitute the HD pack and hide your edit.)
2. Library → pick one. World_A00 is what the first campaign missions use.
3. Extract textures → every texture in that library becomes a PNG.
4. Select one → Copy to edits + open in editor → paint on it → save as a 256×256 PNG.
5. Install into game. The pristine originals are backed up once to backup/<World>_TEXTURES.orig/; only the textures you edited are re-encoded, the rest are copied byte-for-byte.
6. Play tab → ▶ Launch vanilla game.
7. Restore originals puts everything back whenever you want.

The Manual button on that tab has the full step-by-step and explains every control. tools/visn.py does the same thing from the command line (info / decode / encode / repack / verify).

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Downloads — official sources only

Get each component only from its author's own site/repo below. Avoid look-alike sites and "free download" mirrors.

Component	Needed for	Why exactly	Official source
Windows 10/11 patch	required, Part A	stock Incubation hangs at startup on Win10/11; this replaces audio.dll+sound.dll and fixes it. From the 25th Anniversary Mod.	https://www.moddb.com/mods/incubation-blue-byte-25-years-anniversary-mod/downloads/incubation-windows-10-patch
Incubation (Battle Isle Platinum)	everything — Part A	this is a mod, not a game; you supply the game	https://www.gog.com/en/game/battle_isle_platinum
Python for Windows — any 3.8+, 32-bit	launcher + tools — Part A	the launcher is a Python program. 32-bit specifically because the HD pipeline loads the game's Eng3d.dll to decode textures, and a 64-bit process cannot load a 32-bit DLL. No particular version is required — the launcher probes for any suitable one. Keep "tcl/tk and IDLE" ticked during install (that is tkinter, the window toolkit).	https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/
Pillow	textures — Part B and Part C	all the PNG reading and writing: extracting textures to PNG, loading your edited PNGs, thumbnails in the launcher. Nothing texture-related works without it.	py -3-32 -m pip install Pillow · https://pypi.org/project/pillow/
NumPy (optional)	only normal maps — Part B	used by one feature: "Generate normal maps" for the experimental bump effect, which needs per-pixel gradient maths. Skip it and everything else still works — the tool just says so and moves on.	py -3-32 -m pip install numpy · https://pypi.org/project/numpy/
Upscayl (easiest, GUI)	AI upscaler — Part B	makes the bigger textures. The mod only substitutes images; it does not generate art. Any upscaler works.	https://upscayl.org · https://github.com/upscayl/upscayl
Real-ESRGAN / chaiNNer	other AI upscalers — Part B	same job as Upscayl, more control	https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN · https://github.com/chaiNNer-org/chaiNNer
MinGW-w64, i686	only to rebuild the renderer	compiles glide2x.dll. Must be the i686 (32-bit) toolchain — the game is 32-bit, an x86_64 build produces a DLL it cannot load.	https://winlibs.com · https://www.mingw-w64.org/

What is in the package, and where its source is

Fair question when a download contains a .dll. The answer here is short: the package contains exactly one binary, it is ours, and its full source is in this repository.

File	What it is	Source
glide2x.dll	the renderer: our fork of OpenGlide. Receives the game's 3dfx calls, substitutes your HD textures, adds fullscreen, MSAA and anisotropic filtering. 350 720 bytes, SHA-256 222db7cd748fb2112ce9ffd29dfeef34302d9e19d774ecd13f6250b650239d85	source/openglide-src/, with build and verification steps in source/BUILD.md. Upstream: https://openglide.sourceforge.net/ · fork https://github.com/fcbarros/openglide
Incubation HD.bat	starts the launcher	plain text, open it and read it
tools/*.py	the launcher and the texture tools	plain-text Python
OpenGLid.ini	renderer settings	plain text
dgVoodoo.conf	settings for dgVoodoo, if you decide to use it in Vanilla mode. A configuration file only; it contains no dgVoodoo code	plain text
docs/*.md	the manuals	plain text

Verify the DLL you downloaded:

certutil -hashfile glide2x.dll SHA256

source/ also carries code that is deliberately not shipped as a binary: ddraw-wrapper/ (a DirectDraw logging proxy from the reverse-engineering phase; in -3dfx mode the game never calls DirectDraw, so it is not needed) and setres.c (a display-mode helper for the legacy .bat launchers; the launcher changes modes itself).

Optional, not bundled: dgVoodoo 2 (Dege) — the stock wrapper, with far more display settings than we expose. Its licence forbids redistribution, so get it from https://dege.freeweb.hu/ and drop both 32-bit DLLs from its MS\x86 folder into the dgVoodoo\ folder the launcher creates. The file names do not matter; the launcher checks the contents.

The game takes its renderer from the command line, and the Play tab's Vanilla via switch chooses which one Vanilla mode uses:

	Renderer	With dgVoodoo you get
DirectX	Incubation.exe -directx → ENG3D.DLL, the game's own software rasterizer, presented through DirectDraw. This is the path the GOG launcher uses.	the dgVoodoo logo, and the mouse works
Glide	Incubation.exe -3dfx → ENG3DFX.DLL, the 3dfx renderer the game was built around — the better-looking one, and the one our HD fork replaces.	the 3dfx logo, but a misaligned cursor

Why the mouse depends on this. The game reads the cursor in screen coordinates while assuming a 640×480 screen. dgVoodoo's cursor handling lives in its DirectX path — dgVoodoo.conf documents SystemHookFlags as x86-DX only — so on the Glide path nothing converts those coordinates and the whole game screen maps into the top-left 640×480 pixels of your display. Prefer DirectX when you run dgVoodoo.

ddraw.dll is copied into the game folder only for the run and removed again afterwards; anything that was there is kept in backup/ and put back. A crashed run is repaired at the next start.

Vanilla mode works without dgVoodoo too: it then runs our renderer with the HD texture pack paused for that session, which looks like the plain game and is what matters for A/B comparisons and for seeing vanilla texture mods. The pack is switched back on when the game exits.

Tip: always back up your Incubation folder before copying files in (or at least any existing glide2x.dll).

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Antivirus false positive — reported and removed

Windows Defender used to flag glide2x.dll as Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.B!ml. It was a false positive, it was submitted to Microsoft, and Microsoft removed the detection on 24 July 2026:

"At this time, the submitted files do not meet our criteria for malware or potentially unwanted applications. The detection has been removed." — Microsoft Security Intelligence, submission b6fe44bd-7335-49f6-a29e-6230d7fe2f46

If your Defender still flags it, your machine is using cached definitions. Update them: Windows Security → Virus & threat protection → Protection updates → Check for updates. If it persists, run this in an administrator command prompt:

cd "c:\Program Files\Windows Defender"
MpCmdRun.exe -removedefinitions -dynamicsignatures
MpCmdRun.exe -SignatureUpdate

Why it was flagged in the first place

Worth knowing, because the same reasoning applies to any small unsigned mod:

• The !ml suffix means a machine-learning guess, not a match against known malware. Wacatac.B!ml is Microsoft's generic bucket for "this looks unfamiliar". Every other engine on VirusTotal reported the file as clean throughout.
• The DLL is unsigned (a code-signing certificate costs money we are not spending on a 1997 game mod) and rarely downloaded — prevalence weighs heavily in those models.
• It genuinely hooks input APIs — ClipCursor, GetCursorPos, SetCursorPos — because the game hard-codes a 640×480 mouse area, and without that remapping fullscreen would trap your cursor in the top-left corner. Malware uses that technique too; here it is the entire reason the mouse works in fullscreen, and you can read it in source/openglide-src/input_remap.cpp.
• It was also an anonymous binary until shortly before the submission: no version resource at all, and MinGW debug sections still attached. It now carries a proper version resource (product, company, description, version, source URL) and is built stripped.

Note that the removal applies to this exact binary (the SHA-256 above). If you rebuild glide2x.dll yourself, your build is a different file and a heuristic may object to it again — that is normal, and the same submission route is open to you.

If you would still rather not run an unsigned DLL from the internet, that is a completely reasonable position: the complete source is in source/ with the exact build command in source/BUILD.md, so you can build it yourself. Or add an exclusion for the game folder. Or not run the mod at all — we would rather explain the situation than have you run something you distrust.

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Troubleshooting

• Game starts in a small window / software mode. That is the -directx path: the game's own software rasterizer, which is what bare Incubation.exe and the GOG launcher use. For HD and for the 3dfx renderer, start from Incubation HD.bat — the launcher passes -3dfx.
• Weird colours or "restart with dx5". The game didn't accept the 3Dfx renderer — make sure glide2x.dll from game_files/ is in place and you're on the 3Dfx path.
• Only the add-on campaign and network game appear in the menu. Run the game's original launcher.exe once; after that the base campaign is there for good, including through our launcher. What that first run initialises is not yet known — if you find out, tell us.
• The mouse does not line up in Vanilla mode with dgVoodoo. Switch Vanilla via to DirectX on the Play tab and put dgVoodoo's ddraw.dll in the dgVoodoo\ folder. See the dgVoodoo notes above for why.
• Two cursors / a frozen cursor after lots of resolution switching. This is a transient Windows display-state glitch, not the mod. Reboot and it's gone. (We chased this for an hour once; a reboot was the fix.)
• “1. Extract textures” fails with a Python/DLL error. You're on 64-bit Python. The HD pipeline loads the game's Eng3d.dll, which is 32-bit — use a 32-bit Python. (The Vanilla textures tab is unaffected: its codec is pure Python.)
• Different libraries seem to extract the same textures. They partly do: all nine World_* libraries carry the same 28 alien/unit textures byte for byte, and each world adds only 1 to 19 of its own. The list marks the shared ones with = and the status line gives the counts.
• Incubation HD.bat does nothing at all — no window, no error. Older copies of this file handed straight over to pythonw.exe, which has no console and therefore dies silently on any startup problem. The current one runs a preflight first and tells you what is wrong. To see the raw error yourself, run from a terminal in the game folder: py -3-32 tools\launcher.py The usual causes: Python installed without "tcl/tk and IDLE" (so tkinter is missing — re-run the installer, choose Modify, tick it); the tools\ folder not copied along with the loose files; or the files copied somewhere other than the folder holding Incubation.exe.
• NVIDIA overlay flickers. Cosmetic; disable the NVIDIA in-game overlay.
• Fallback: if our renderer misbehaves on your system, put dgVoodoo's DLLs in the dgVoodoo\ folder (the Debug tab has a file picker for it) and play in Vanilla mode — no HD, but a different renderer entirely.

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For modders

The reverse-engineered formats — textures (VISN), UI sprites (Libs/*.LIB), palettes, and the LCL scripting language (which holds all unit/weapon/equipment/terrain stats in plain text) — are documented in MODDING.md. The texture codec has its own complete write-up in VISN-FORMAT.md — enough to build a decoder or an encoder from scratch. That's also the starting point if you're thinking about a full remake on a modern engine.

Building the renderer

The renderer is an OpenGlide fork; its full source (plus our added files) is in source/. See source/BUILD.md. Shipping the source keeps us compliant with OpenGlide's license.

Questions, bugs, ideas

• Project home: https://github.com/Sonatix/Incubation-HD-Renderer
• Report a bug or ask something: https://github.com/Sonatix/Incubation-HD-Renderer/issues — say what you did, what happened, and paste OpenGLid.log from the game folder if the renderer is involved. Please check the limits list above first: the things marked ✗ are verified engine limits, not open bugs.
• Two open questions where help is genuinely welcome: what the game's original launcher.exe initialises on its first run so the base campaign appears in the menu, and whether the Missions/*.lev map format can be cracked (see MODDING.md §8).

Credits & licenses

See CREDITS.md. In short: built on OpenGlide (Fabio Barros et al.); this project's own code and tools are provided freely for the community. Incubation is © Blue Byte / Ubisoft — this mod ships none of it.