| JA2 1.13 with Upscaled HQ Textures[message #362542]
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Thu, 25 February 2021 09:27 
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 MrStitch |
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Messages:21
Registered:September 2018 |
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I have wondered for some time if it were possible to extract the textures in the game. I know they are stored inside the .sci files and have been able to use the SCI editor to do a bit of edits to some of the textures but mostly just to change some minor things. The way the textures are stored is in a container that holds other textures on other frames or pages if you like. kind of like a slide show.
I recently stumbled upon ESGRAN Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks. It uses some algorithms to Upscale images to get better resolution quality. I know it was used recently to upscale the sprites in Project Diablo 2. I have used a similar technique in other games where i would extract the game textures, batch process them with added effects to get a better quality image and then converted those images back to their original file type and plugged them into the game. I wonder if something similar could be done with the JA 1.13 textures and give the game a bit of polish. Anybody be interested in trying this together or know if or how it could be done?
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Private 1st Class
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| Re: JA2 1.13 with Upscaled HQ Textures[message #362546 is a reply to message #362543]
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Thu, 25 February 2021 13:09 
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| Asdow |
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Messages:143
Registered:August 2010 |
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I've had similar thoughts while working on the new animations and it's possible, but not without changes to the code because as seven mentioned, a lot of UI components are hardcoded with absolute pixel positions.
The "easiest" solution might be to forgo support for low resolutions, substitute all the artwork with higher resolution versions and modify the code to work on them similarly to original graphics. Say, if the lowest usable resolution now is 640x480, double it and the all the artwork sizes, the relative size of everything should look the same except with more details.
Best solution would be to rewrite a lot of the UI code to use relative positions and make it work regardless of the resolution/artwork size by scaling the art. That's a big undertaking though, and another issue is tactical rendering. IIRC the tileengine has a hardcoded assumption that one tile is 20 pixels wide, and that assumption is used quite extensively in the rendering codes, at least pertaining to zbuffer from what I remember about reading the code.
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Sergeant
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| Re: JA2 1.13 with Upscaled HQ Textures[message #362748 is a reply to message #362542]
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Thu, 25 March 2021 08:10
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| nrmmyth |
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Messages:1
Registered:April 2006
Location: Croatia, Split |
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Would it be possible to make a proof of concept that proves upscaling with neural net is possible and we know how to execute it? Could we get one game screen upscaled or anything really?
Thinking that a successful PoC would excite devs and encourage expensive code changes. 
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Civilian
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