NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

[King of Worms]

Is there any way I can tell if textures in a folder can fit 4096x4096? Do I need to count that manually? I do it in excell now :/
Does this limit apply to animations atlas as well?

This limit is very hard :/ for example archive 183 (noble) ... thats the 22 important NPCs.. to fit them, I need to go to 25% of original scale, and that hits the quality - we cant even have 22 of those NPCs at 1024*1024 resolution So 512x512 here we come? I understand that somehow at the exterior flats, but here... sounds restricting as hell.

Or 176 dark brotherhood with animations... theres 49 images... some will have even more - will we be going to 512x512 resolution like in a a stone age? In that case any upscaling/remake is out of question. I think for NPCs the atlas size should be increased, question is, if its possible to have two kinds of sizes? Damn, this complicates everything

Also considering that the archive 183 noble has just 10mb after my upscaling and I need to downscale it to 25% to fit the atlas is just ridiculous it feels like we still in 1996 in some areas :X

Im on hold until this gets clarified Too bad as my time is very limited and now I have a chance to do something for Daggerfall and that will change very soon. Well...

[TheLacus]

Its surprising to me, because I always thought that the size of the file in terms of bytes is what matters the most - and that was the thing I kept my eye on here - doesnt matter as I can fit those flats in the atlas anyway, I will just resize the biggest ones.. one evening of "work"

Resolution is totally what you should look for. Disk size may have an impact on loading times but i don't know when you would start to notice an appreciable difference. You may want to try, but i'm not sure there are any benefits going over something like 1024x1024, you should just check in game how it looks and stop when you don't see any visible improvement.

XML part is interesting, I think some flats are too big and some too small in size - would be nice to be able to play with that, unfortunately, I read everything on the link you posted and could not find any info about it, not even it the subtopics
"Textures and Models and Flats". Not sure where to look for it.

Here, Billboards section Basically you can provide a value for x and y to scale the mesh.

Is there any way I can tell if textures in a folder can fit 4096x4096? Do I need to count that manually? I do it in excell now :/

I think using excel is a good idea, you can see and confronts all textures in the archive and decide what needs to be adjusted etc. so resolutions are all proportionated. By the way, what i remembered of my old tests of texture replacement lead me on the wrong track, looks like atlas packer is actually able to scale down textures But after a few tests i confirm you don't want to rely on that (it takes longer and give unwanted results when mixing high and low resolutions) but choose all resolutions so they don't go above the limits.

Right now i don't have time to answer to the other topics you raised, i'll get back to you in the next few days

[King of Worms]

Thanks for replies Lacus!

I managed to fit most of the sets in the atlas. Gave me a chance to hand touch some of the textures, which was beneficial! Writing manually the resolutions of all textures in a set to excel is a no-go tho Did that few times but its very time consuming. So laters I went with just a estimates based on experience I gained before... hope it will work.,

But the NPCs... thats hard - as described above. We need something else for those. OR maybe have something different for interior and exterior flats - that would be ideal. Also, if the set has animations, that increases the number of textures dramaticaly - no chance in hell to have good results with 50+ NPC textures in set. I have hard time fitting 20 Noble NPCs in the atlas - and I mean it. To get them there it requires a very noticeable reduction of quality - that was not a problem with originally low res statues, but those are the main NPCs, much more detail than originally low res statues.

PS: that 3rd script I wrote about in a PM, will it be possible somehow? I need that for upscaling those 500+ RCI files with portraits

Thanks in advance!

[King of Worms]

Are some archives LINKED???

ARCHIVE 212 is STRANGE. IF I use only two textures from it (212_15-0 and 212_16-0) and those are the only textures in streaming assets, they get rendered in full res. If I add the rest of my upscaled textures which all fit the damn atlasses - BUT NOT A SINGLE ONE MORE TEXTURE FROM ARCHIVE 212 - these two 212 textures get reduced to dust. HOW? THEY ARE THE ONLY TWO TEXTURES FROM 212 ARCHIVE BEING PRESENT AT THAT MOMENT.

What is going on here? How can textures from other archives influence this 212 archive?

That damned 212 archive must be linked to some other archive, there is no other way.

This is getting incredibly frustrating :/ I spend my time on technical aspects only. Stuff I cant do anything about.

Please Lacus help me from this misery, I cant take it no more

[TheLacus]

But the NPCs... thats hard - as described above. We need something else for those. OR maybe have something different for interior and exterior flats - that would be ideal. Also, if the set has animations, that increases the number of textures dramaticaly

Interiors, exteriors and mobile characters are handled differently. I'll give you more details and write the script when i can.

Are some archives LINKED???

97, 205, 211, 212, 213, 301 are in the same "MiscFlats super-atlas" with size 2048. I'll see if i can increase it like the others.

[King of Worms]

But the NPCs... thats hard - as described above. We need something else for those. OR maybe have something different for interior and exterior flats - that would be ideal. Also, if the set has animations, that increases the number of textures dramaticaly

Interiors, exteriors and mobile characters are handled differently. I'll give you more details and write the script when i can.

Are some archives LINKED???

97, 205, 211, 212, 213, 301 are in the same "MiscFlats super-atlas" with size 2048. I'll see if i can increase it like the others.

Thanks GOD for a fast reply Im loosing it here Im sorry about that but I have everything but a patience and calmness, I know its only my problem and I try to work on it I swear, counting from 1 000 000 to 0 backwards while imagining beautiful beach and christmass songs etc But its a nature of a necromancer, maybe you as a ancient lich can relate...

Ok ok, I will just go on and hope this gets solved. I can work with 4096x4096 frame. And thanks, those additional specs are much needed. I will wait for those. Thanks for a cooperation Lacus!

[King of Worms]

I finally got thru the 10s of hundreds and Im at more interresting part and that is archive 182 and 186.
These are basically two versions of the same important NPCs. Archive 182 is used ingame, archive 186 is mostly not used. Thing with a archive 186 is, that

1st) those npcs have higher resolutions (thus the full name is "test big flats")
2nd) they sometimes are simply different versions. Usually, the version in 182 is more polished lets say, but it lacks the resolution. Or its simplified to be easier implemented I guess - sometimes that is questionable tho! I will get to that in more detail later.

And sometimes the NPCs are just same in both archives and 186 is higher res than 182.

Anyway, this mess is complicated even more. Because for ex in archive 357 (sentinel people) there is this dude:

5-0.PNG (3.25 KiB) Viewed 2246 times

resized he looks like this

357_5-0.png (252.4 KiB) Viewed 2246 times

And if I use the flat from the archive 186 and resize it, we have the best possible result (as we use the higher res flat as a baseline)

357_5-0 0.png (364.91 KiB) Viewed 2246 times

So I will ofc use this flat, as we get better deffinition and 100% vanilla... This one is easy choice, others will not be so easy, but I will inform you on the decissions Ive made, I think I can improve the game a tiny bit with those. My bottom line is ofc 100% vanila feel, no BS, so u dont have to be affraid.

[King of Worms]

This is a guard at Sentinel. (all pics are 50% downscaled adn converted to jpg for the purpose of this web thread)
Original after resize:

01 357_11-0.jpg (84.41 KiB) Viewed 2241 times

The resized flat I will use from the high res archive, some of the differences are that he is more oiled and his nipples are not so detailed (and one is missing )

1 OutputImage.jpg (102.71 KiB) Viewed 2241 times

And final version will be the last pic. I do these kind of changes in almost every flat. The upscale algoritm has one problem, and that it at the edge of screen it creates unnatural straight lines. I can make it look like its supposed to with a simple rubber tool. Here u can see it at the top of the hair and on the right side of the picture on his shoulder and hand - maybe. I do, and that is what matters anyway
I also removed the triangular spike on his left rib and added the left nipple back.
Here is the final flat which will be used in-game from now on in my texture pack:

1 OutputImage 2.jpg (103.63 KiB) Viewed 2241 times

Now after this process, all I can say is, welcome back, Arnie!!! (He looks like barbar conan to me)
I consider this a improvement of the game, but Im open to opinions

[EpicSpellsword404]

So who is the best waifu anyway

[King of Worms]

So who is the best waifu anyway

waifu.png (64.35 KiB) Viewed 2158 times