I've had some discussions with regards to this before. However, I would like to bring this to a wider audience in the hopes somebody out there might be able to help.
Basically, I want to alter the memory allocation for models/animations. Right now, I know that the model memory is handled by RedEngine, and that there are two hardcoded limits: one is a 'lower limit' of 16MB. Once this is surpassed, any additional models loaded start changing into their low-res formats. The upppr, absolute limit is 32MB. I found this out thanks to SPTest, which thankfully is not as encrypted as the main executebale.
Is there anybody with the know-how who can change the values to something a little more compatible with modern systems? I was thinking 80 MB lower limit with the upper limit of 96. That should be sufficient for using much more detailed models. This used to be the sort of thing BattleBelk could do but he has long since disappeared and we have no way of contacting him.
The only advice I can give is learn to use Cheat Engine. Personally CE doesn't make a lot of sense but others seem to pick up on it pretty well. You can look for and edit things in real time, and map things out to their offset in the exe file if you want to make a permanent edit.
Has there been any more progress on this? Its really one of the few things holding the game back.
I swear, one of these days I'll figure out how to bypass these limitations.
No. At this point it should be accepted that the limits we have are the limits we get.
theres also the fact that we dont have the source and sadly probably never will. the best thing to do in my opinion is to mod both bf1 and bf2 that way you get the best of both worlds.
There is a guy working on a sort of 'clone engine' for SWBF2 in Unity. IIRC the source will all be released and that can be used to make a version for SWBF1 perhaps, but that's a ways off. Clone engines are probably the best way to go since we'll likely never get the original source nor learn enough about the exe to modify anything meaningful.