KoW - D.R.E.A.M.

[Merlkir]

Wow, really splurging there, whole 5 USD?! I hope that didn't stretch his...yes, 170k/year salary too thin.

[King of Worms]

Wow, really splurging there, whole 5 USD?! I hope that didn't stretch his...yes, 170k/year salary too thin.

Yea well I agree... was not really that generous still he is the 1 in 1000 who sends at least something so.. but yes.. when u know his background and that he bothered himself to even click that donate button, one might think he would add a extra zero behind that still...extremely hard to judge, because he at least send something. But... yeah..

[MrFlibble]

I keep checking out this thread from time to time (rather infrequently I have to confess) and I'm loving a lot of the improvement in art, like the lovely NPC sprites with realistic faces. They have a very professional feel to them, I guess that if a paid dev team was tasked with remastering Daggerfall to HD quality without resorting to 3D modelling for new sprites, they would come up with something similar. Great job Izendel!

I know this is being done piece by piece, but could you please tell how many NPCs have already been given such treatment?

OTOH, the upscale of the beta defeat screen shown here has not been very kind to the poor skeletons; the ones in the back are all messed up.

[King of Worms]

Thank you

The faces were done by Vomitaburger, I contacted him and got a permission to use them in the game, than I had to do a lot of adjustments for it to become a reality.

This is not about NPCs tho, but about your character you can see in the inventory aka the paperdoll. Around 80-90% of the faces are done. Id say 60% in this kind of quality. And it was done by various authors, including me.

Please provide a better upscale That image is beyond the mere upscale tho, so IF you can do better, I might switch the ribcages of the skeletons in the background. I can see now its the old version, here is the most recent one used ingame:

[MrFlibble]

Something like this )

Spoiler!

357_0-0.gif

I wonder if you could use an ESRGAN upscale of the sprite as a base instead of the xBRZ upscale? I tinkered a bit with ESRGAN models and I think this is a pretty decent result (as a base that is):

I made this using two models by LyonHrt, reboutblend and lollypop:

1. Upscale raw sprite (no preprocessing but make sure that the sprite's edges don't touch the canvas edges, add an extra line of pixels at the border) to 4x with reboutblend.

2. Scale the result down to 2x. I used Paint.NET's Best quality option.

3. Scale this 2x image with lollypop.

I guess you could try scaling up the reboutblend result straight up with lollypop to get a 16x image but I did not try that as I'm on CPU only. I doubt it will contribute to increased quality anyway. I actually scaled up one 8x results up 2x more using the XBR scaler from Image Analyser, it looks pretty decent I think (view image).

I've attached all three upscaled frames of the courtier lady.

[MrFlibble]

Apologies for double-posting, but I experimented a bit more with other models for the second step, and it seems that CleanPixels produces a sharper result:

I've attached all three frames processed thus.

Please provide a better upscale

How about this?

gameover_TGM_L_08.png (1.48 MiB) Viewed 1064 times

This was made using an interpolation of ThiefGoldMod and lollypop at alpha = 0.8 with no preprocessing of the source image.

Out of the models I tried, this was the best result in respect to the figures in the background.

[King of Worms]

Haha man... I asked you so many times in the AI upscaling thread to use your algos on specific animated sprites, Ive send em to you, made a list.. I will not rework the static NPCs or NPCs with 3 animation frames. Too much work in them, doesnt make sense to start again. Its nice result you presented, dont get me wrong... but what I have now is better than that.

But the animated dancers etc, theres many of them... There your input would actually help.

Add the DIE image.. makes no sense to replace anything from that image to my version of image. That ribcage is just different kind of bad And with all the manual input in my image, its just on another level than AI can do. Just compare the images

[MrFlibble]

I asked you so many times in the AI upscaling thread to use your algos on specific animated sprites, Ive send em to you, made a list..

I'm sorry, I have only so much spare time for the upscales, and without a powerful NVIDIA card uspcaling is a painfully slow process.

Besides, with the field constantly evolving I wanted to find a method that makes the best possible results. The results I showed in my previous post, well, I came up yesterday with that and only tried out today. It's not like I was hoarding some perfect upscaling method out of spite or something.

but what I have now is better than that.

You really believe that xBRZ upscale tops a neural upscale? (I'm talking specifically about the courtier woman shown in the post I quoted; some other NPCs have already received so much manual editing they look excellent, as I mentioned earlier)

But the animated dancers etc, theres many of them... There your input would actually help.

I'm reluctant to make promises when I'm not sure if I'd be able to deliver. Over the past year my PC's performance became increasingly unstable, I had to reinstall the OS twice and then to re-seat the HDD into a different slot because I would constantly get BSODs.

I'd love to help but I try not to overstep my limits. Would it be better if I told you that I'd provide everything you ask, and then did nothing?

Today I ran a few experiments with the prerendered small NPC sprites like the dancers. This is with CleanPixels on both steps, if you're okay with these results I'll try to produce more in my spare time:

makes no sense to replace anything from that image to my version of image. That ribcage is just different kind of bad

At least the skeleton looks like a skeleton and not like blurry smudge. And here's an idea, I think it would be possible in Photoshop to make both figures in the background look out of focus, that would conceal the fact that they're imperfect.

And with all the manual input in my image, its just on another level than AI can do. Just compare the images

Certainly the skulls could be re-added to another upscale if you wished so.

[MasonFace]

I'm sorry, I have only so much spare time for the upscales, and without a powerful NVIDIA card uspcaling is a painfully slow process.

I've still got my upscaling environment set up, so I could batch the upscales for you.

Your greatest contribution to the upscaling efforts has always been your painstaking trial-and-error experimentation, and you should be proud of all the results you've discovered.

If you can provide me with a URL to the model that you used, any interpolations and pre-processing steps that are involved, and if KoW would be so kind as to provide the URL again for the animated sprite collection that he bundled, then I can knock out those upscales in no time.

[MrFlibble]

Your greatest contribution to the upscaling efforts has always been your painstaking trial-and-error experimentation, and you should be proud of all the results you've discovered.

Thank you for your very kind words!!!

If you can provide me with a URL to the model that you used, any interpolations and pre-processing steps that are involved, and if KoW would be so kind as to provide the URL again for the animated sprite collection that he bundled, then I can knock out those upscales in no time.

As I mentioned above, this time I've not been using any pre-processing or model interpolation. It's just scale up the raw sprites, shrink them to 2x with Paint.NET best quality, scale up again.

The dancers I've shown above were created by using the CleanPixels model for both upscale steps, which can be downloaded here. Links to lollypop and reboutblend are available from the Upscale Wiki, but reboutblend seems to work a lot better with manually drawn NPCs like the courtier lady I've shown, rather than pre-rendered ones.

Thank you for your willingness to help! I have to be honest though, I'm not entirely happy with how the temple dancers in my post above came out. I tried a couple more frames with different dancers from texture.181 and they're no better. Maybe with an artist's touch-up they'll be fine though. It is y understanding that the dancer sprites were originally created at a higher resolution and then these sprites were scaled down (as opposed to making the sprites at that res from the start). Two of the higher-res animations were preserved here. This means that the sprite quality is already bad.

I might try other model combinations and/or pre-processing for these sprites but so far they're not super good.

I'm also not sure what resolution King of Worms is targeting (4x, 8x, 16x?).