OpenTESArena 0.7.0 Released!

[Jukic]

Well done! Beating Arena is proper work but a beautiful adventure. With Your project, you will just begin to touch upon all the magic that is Arena gameplay You still have time to generate lots of memories

[BansheeXYZ]

Is there a tool out there for extracting art and tiles from TES1?

Of course, it's probably planned for the new engine to externalize this data into pngs for modders at some point. Just thinking it would be fun to tinker on this game's art as we wait for the engine to mature.

[Narf the Mouse]

Looking forward to playing Arena at v1.0, myself.

Confession time: I've never played it before. Or Battlespire.

[afritz1]

Is there a tool out there for extracting art and tiles from TES1?

Of course, it's probably planned for the new engine to externalize this data into pngs for modders at some point. Just thinking it would be fun to tinker on this game's art as we wait for the engine to mature.

I don't have any tools with my project for that yet, but there are a few existing ones that other people have made (that's why I don't have any myself yet). Just look at the Arena files page on the UESP: http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Files#Misc_Utilities

BSATool should let you do what you want to do (convert .IMG to .PNG, edit, then convert back to .IMG). I haven't tried it myself yet, though.

Someone else also made some changes to the game's art for fun, so you can get an idea of what's possible: https://artinpinkerton.com/tag/tes-arena/

[MrFlibble]

In the meantime I played around with waifu2x scaling and figured out that you can get decent results for many VGA mode game screenshots if you blur the image a bit before processing. Here's the results I got for Arena using official screenshots from the preview:


To get these results I followed these steps:
- open each image in GIMP, convert to RGB, apply Gaussian blur at 0.7x0.7 pixel radius, export the result
- scale up 4x the blurred image with waifu2x
- open the scaled image in mtPaint, apply Kuwahara-Nagao blur at 2 pixel radius with Protect details enabled, Gamma correction disabled
- resize the scaled image in mtPaint to 640x480 using sharpened bicubic interpolation without gamma correction
- load the palette of the original indexed image in mtPaint, convert the 640x480 image to indexed mode with this palette and no dither

NOTE: The goblin sprite in the first image has come out so well because it apparently uses the original sprite dimensions and is not scaled up or down depending on the distance. However this means that theoretically waifu2x can be used to scale up monster sprites as well as other art assets for the game.

[MrFlibble]

I wasn't satisfied with my previous results so I tried another method of smoothing the source images without blurring. For this I ran each screenshot through xBRZ ScalerTest to scale it up at 4x the original size, then loaded the result in GIMP, applied the pixelate blur filter at 4 pixel radius and reduced the size to the original 320x200 with nearest neighbour. The rest of the steps are as described above, and the results are much smoother without being blurry: