[Phredreeke]

Then let's bend the rules.

In the linked upscales, I used 16x16 tiles where each tile is limited to the colors of the corresponding 8x8 tile in the original. lets expand the area it is allowed to pick colors from.



https://imgsli.com/Mzc2NDg
https://imgsli.com/Mzc2NTA

[MrFlibble]

Looks like an improvement! Cool!

[Phredreeke]

I forgot to post the link to the imgur gallery. https://imgur.com/a/HvZGMS7

This has all the maps and all the NPC backgrounds upscaled.

I have an idea how to fix the miscolorations in some of them (the wall above the door in Kong Kollege for example) but I've not come up with a way to automate it, and there's little use of these upscales unlike other projects of mine.

[MusicallyInspired]

So an individual by the name of Myles Johnston has forked his own version of ScummVM he entitles ScummVM-X to support 4x graphic asset replacement for Sierra's SCI engine games. I used my ESRGAN/Manga109 upscaled backgrounds of Space Quest 4 and played through a bit of it. I didn't upscale the sprites, but those are also replaceable. Currently there is no aspect ratio correction, sprite transparencies use 1-bit alpha channels ("on" or "off"), it doesn't support SVGA SCI games, and there is no colour cycling, but this is huge for high resolution gaming on oldschool 2D adventures! This even works with EGA SCI games like Space Quest 3, King's Quest 4, Police Quest 2, Leisure Suit Larry 2, etc making VGA-ifying EGA Sierra games all the more easier. He also plans to add AGI support (King's Quest 1-3, Space Quest 1-2, Police Quest 1, Leisure Suit Larry 1, etc). I'm beyond excited for this and fully intend on working on some HRPs for Sierra games.



EDIT: I was incorrect about aspect correction not being possible. You can get it by going to ScummVM's options in the Graphics tab and selecting "Fit to Window (4:3)" from the Stretch mode dropdown menu. Here's KQ4 running in ScummVM-X with a few VGA-ified backgrounds people have made over the years in attempted KQ4VGA remakes. Just dropped into a folder now and bam: instant remake!

[Phredreeke]

[Aristotle Gumball]

Hehe doodoo

[Phredreeke]

[MrFlibble]

Actually that looks rather meh for an upscale. Lots of noticeable noise and some blurring too.

[Phredreeke]

have you seen the original?

[MrFlibble]

That's exactly my point. The upscale did only to underscore the deficiencies of the original image.

If you want a real HD of that one it's easier to recreate it yourself, it's not like original GameBoy is a rarity these days.

[Phredreeke]

I'm not gonna remake old prototype tiles for Shadow Warrior, I chose those particular tiles because it was funny (I did them while waiting for other tiles to finish processing)

And emulating the look of the original image, with deficiencies, is the whole point of my dedither and repalettisation scripts.

[MrFlibble]

Phredreeke, on 03 March 2021 - 08:25 AM, said:

And emulating the look of the original image, with deficiencies, is the whole point of my dedither and repalettisation scripts.

I may be wrong but personally I think that with the upscale, the deficiencies become a whole new kind of bad, because the low-res original at least had the excuse of being low-res and produced back in the early-mid 90s.

Basically what you're doing is depixelising the original image, not bringing it up to a new resolution. Look at the outline of the back of the left hand in the original image. It's all jittery with little to no anti-aliasing, and your upscale happily reproduced that. In the animation you posted, there's a notable artifact near the knuckles, pixels go back and forth in a shape that would not be there if the same two-frame animation were produced from a higher-resolution digital image.

BTW, here's an idea that seems worth trying which I keep forgetting to tell you about: take a high-res 8-bit texture or sprite, try to scale it down to a resolution more comparable to stock Duke3D textures (64x64,128x128), and then upscale it as if it were an originally low-res image with your method, then compare the result to ground truth. Earlier you mentioned a certain "unresize" model which I gather makes a downscaled image more like as if it were originally created at that resolution? If yes, this would much simplify the task of making a low-res texture from a higher-res one.

[Phredreeke]

Nah, unresize is an image sharpener

As for doing it on a downscaled image, here. I used the same workflow as for the gameboy image above. https://imgsli.com/NDI4Mzg

Pretty crappy result, would probably have been a little better had I applied the unresize model prior to repalettisation

[MrFlibble]

Did you downscale that to 25% of its original size or to 50%? At any rate, this is the kind of image that would inevitable lose a lot of relevant information.

Ideally, it would be a good test if there was a texture set let's say twice as large as Duke3D's stock textures, e.g. 256x256 that could be scaled down to 128x128, then re-upscaled to 256x256. Textures should have enough large detail to survive such downscale in essential features, or maybe even not lose that much.

Some time ago I did try this with a couple of Mac Wolf3D textures, but a) this was in the CartoonPainted era and b) Wolf3D textures are either not very detailed to make this interesting, or the Mac versions have too many differences from the PC counterparts to qualify as reliable test material.

[Phredreeke]

(upscaled with Bigface v3 clean, then interpolated between original and upscale using mvtools)

[Phredreeke]

Therapist: AI upscale Randy can't hurt you, he's not real
AI upscale Randy:

[William Beavis]

wow. Gotta love modern day tech.

[Phredreeke]

Duki Nuki

[NightFright]

This is stuff that belongs into Blood, not Duke3D. Creepier than anything in the Blood artfiles.

[Phredreeke]

[MrFlibble]

Hopefully as as a little break from the ongoing freak show, here's some really high-quality upscale of FMVs from Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun - Firestorm:

The originals are already at 640x480 resolution but it's still very impressive. The same channel/author also has a similar set of original Tiberian Sun upscaled cutscenes.

The author doesn't say if this is ESRGAN but I'm assuming it is.

[Ninety-Six]

i regret opening this page


i am not sleeping for days

[NightFright]

Before you look at Phredreeke's last post, you better make sure to have your shitpants on.

[Phredreeke]

The Blood painting? What's bad about that?

[MrFlibble]

Well, perhaps you'd tell us what's good about that so that you decided to share it?

It's the eyes, right? Those deep, captivating eyes.

[Phredreeke]

The Blood painting is funny bad, I was talking disturbing bad.

[NightFright]

Oh yeah, the next entry in the freakshow.

[jkas789]

Had to upload it to youtube because the forum the "insert media" and "insert image" thing was not playing ball with me today.

[MrFlibble]

Phredreeke, on 05 May 2021 - 08:40 AM, said:

The Blood painting is funny bad, I was talking disturbing bad.

I actually like this face. It looks like a sketch of an ape-like humanoid. The only "disturbingly bad" part is how this model that you used produced something completely different from the source material.

BTW, I was wondering, as there seems to be no limit to how ESRGAN can transform/mangle images, perhaps it would make sense to train a model on sebabdukeboss20's high-res vanilla Duke3D enemies against their original low-res counterparts? Are the new sprites exactly twice as large? The number of animation frames should be sufficient for a large enough sample to train ESRGAN on.

[Phredreeke]

The face is from a different upscale. I put them together because I thought it'd be funny



The AA sprites are far too different from the originals. What could be done would be if sebab did two renders at different scales, with the lower resolution renders being used as LR.