Mazioman
Landlubber
So I was messing around in GIMP last night improving the down-and-out James Norrington texture to my taste (looks a bit less dead inside now) and an idea came to me when I used GIMP's antialiasing and image enhancement tools: Use AI upscaling to improve nearly every texture in the game. If you don't know what that is, Google can show you a lot of results specific to gaming as a medium where AI-upscaling makes a huge difference. I'd recommend looking at r/GameUpscale and Morrowind Enhanced Textures for some very good examples. Anyway, after looking into it, I don't think I have the CUDA-cores I'd need to actually upscale anything for NH/POTC at present.
That being said, while I think it's a good idea for somebody (potentially me...eventually), There are some caveats and concerns that come to my mind: This would probably work best on land, building, and ship textures. I'm not sure if the character textures are at 512x512 (if memory serves) due to engine limitations or in order to ensure good performance. If the reason is the latter, well, most modern graphics cards should be able to handle 1024x1024 without any issues if we could reliably upscale to that degree and keep quality. If it's the former, the only solution would be to see how it fares on Maelstrom maybe? Also, I'm not sure if TGA files are the best to upscale or if there would be issues brought on by compression when converting back to a tga.tx file.
All of that would be moot anyway due to the biggest hurdle that came to my mind with making something like this: Permissions. Given the 'Perpetual Stew' nature of modding Storm Engine games, with so many contributions from so many people over so many years across so many modpacks, it would probably be impossible to ask every original texture artist if it would be fine to re-release their work after running it through an upscaling program. If the permissions and any potential engine limitations vis a vis texture size/conversion/compression can be worked out, I think this could be an excellent idea at least for keeping the game looking modern and crisp going into 2022 and beyond. From a cursory look, I think the amount of time and work it would take is mostly dependent on checking the upscaling for quality and any visual artifacting—I think the actual conversion can be executed in a program or with a script in batch format so you could conceivably knock out an entire folder in one pass if you had the time and HDD space, but I could be completely misinterpreting what I read about how one method uses Python scripting. All in all, I think this idea has enough merit that I should bring it up and if anyone has any experience with upscaling, they could chime in. Thanks everyone.
P.S. Have a slightly edited James Norrington for your time:
That being said, while I think it's a good idea for somebody (potentially me...eventually), There are some caveats and concerns that come to my mind: This would probably work best on land, building, and ship textures. I'm not sure if the character textures are at 512x512 (if memory serves) due to engine limitations or in order to ensure good performance. If the reason is the latter, well, most modern graphics cards should be able to handle 1024x1024 without any issues if we could reliably upscale to that degree and keep quality. If it's the former, the only solution would be to see how it fares on Maelstrom maybe? Also, I'm not sure if TGA files are the best to upscale or if there would be issues brought on by compression when converting back to a tga.tx file.
All of that would be moot anyway due to the biggest hurdle that came to my mind with making something like this: Permissions. Given the 'Perpetual Stew' nature of modding Storm Engine games, with so many contributions from so many people over so many years across so many modpacks, it would probably be impossible to ask every original texture artist if it would be fine to re-release their work after running it through an upscaling program. If the permissions and any potential engine limitations vis a vis texture size/conversion/compression can be worked out, I think this could be an excellent idea at least for keeping the game looking modern and crisp going into 2022 and beyond. From a cursory look, I think the amount of time and work it would take is mostly dependent on checking the upscaling for quality and any visual artifacting—I think the actual conversion can be executed in a program or with a script in batch format so you could conceivably knock out an entire folder in one pass if you had the time and HDD space, but I could be completely misinterpreting what I read about how one method uses Python scripting. All in all, I think this idea has enough merit that I should bring it up and if anyone has any experience with upscaling, they could chime in. Thanks everyone.
P.S. Have a slightly edited James Norrington for your time: