[HD Texture Project] Xenoblade Chronicles (v5.0U - May 17, 2014)

[frozenwings]

(05-03-2014, 05:21 PM)StripTheSoul Wrote: If you're having issues with the emulator, have you already tried out Tino's Dolphin build? The latest one works perfectly with costum textures for me (You can just use it in another folder. It has recent core changes merged and will use your Dolphin Emulator user folder as well)
Just keep in mind that the shader cache might give you a few little hiccups on your first run (and maybe every time you get into a new environment).

All of the problems I was having was outside of playing the game itself. Usually when starting emulation or ending, so it was fine. If dolphin wants to crash every time I exit the game, whatever. I'm done playing anyway.

But, the newest version 4.0-1516 x64 seems to handle everything like a dream. No crashes, nothing so far after a good solid 8-10 hours of playing.

(05-03-2014, 08:27 PM)narcku Wrote: +Danban (Hair)

To be honest, it looks like crap: (Show Spoiler)

.. but it looks decent on the jungle headgear.

Only tested on Journey Diadem and Hierax Cap.
Other headgears seem to have different IDs.

Back hair has alignment problem as usual, but not too noticeable unless you zoom in.
If it still bothers you, use the smooth version(less opacity, less detail).
If it still bothers you, use the original hair, since it already looks good(if not better) anyway.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/t5lgrllb33o2dga/danban_v0.5.zip

Edit:
I just love Mechonis Field, the lighting and the music are so good
http://minus.com/i/H9pq8aZYz6Zc

Edit 2:
Hair works on Jail Cap as well. May work on a few others as well, idk I just used the IDs from messiahgov's dump.

I think it looks really good. It's a shame that there are so many hair IDs for one character.

If texturing all of the IDs for a characters hair is something you'd be interested (not sure how hard that would be, I have no idea what the process is for doing something like that) it would only take me 15-30 mins to dump all of the headgear IDs for a playable character. Just tell me which characters you want and I'll dump them. There's a cheat that makes it so you can "rotate" through every item in the game at any store. It just replaces the top item, and you can use a command to go through them. It takes FOREVER since you can only view/toggle one item at a time, and there are thousands. It's a pretty game breaking cheat, but it's useful for dumping certain things. I used it to make sure I had every weapon and armor icon ID in the game for my dump.

I've considered getting all of the armor dumps in the game for each character anyway, however I doubt someone is going to go through and retexture any of the gear. Maybe someone could make an overlay of some sort for once piece of gear, then put that overlay over all of the recolored looking pieces. I have no clue.

Anyway, I don't want to talk about Mechonis Field :p. That place is a nightmare for dumping repeating IDs. And I'm almost there.

[narcku]

I'm not sure. I think Dunban is a special case.
Other characters(Shulk, Reyn, Sharla) only use 1 hair file(well Shulk and Reyn have a few duplicates, but afaik they're hardly used) for all their headgears.
Melia has many hair files as well, but at least the number is limited according to the headgear types (Understandable as well, since her hat and her hair are in one file).
Only Dunban is the strange one. Headgear of the same model seems to use different hair ID.

Well, for now I don't think I will be working on anymore hair (at least not main protagonists).
But if you can, maybe you can dump some of Dunban's hair? (if you think the hair is good enough, I'm personally satisfied with just modding a few.. that way I can switch between original and modded anytime )
Just try out any headgear he has, the hair file should be the same, so you can just batch them afterwards.

As for retexture of armors, well I think I have bad news
Last time when I retextured Shulk's... main jacket, I ran into a problem.
Thing is.. you can't retexture 2 of his jackets at once(you can only have one active).. because of some color palette problem.
I'm not really sure what's causing it, but seems like all 3(? or 4?) of his jackets share the same palette or something.
So if you load the game with Shulk wearing modded Jacket A, it will load fine.. but if you change the jacket afterwards, the color will be messed up.

Edit: Aah.. another bad news Not really important but I thought I'd clarify. Remember the orb effect thingy for the monado mod?
Well, turns out, those orbs affect Dunban's Mech Sword as well .

Edit 2: Yesss! Again, not important stuff, but just thought I'd share Finally found the saber trail texture
I've attached the red saber trail texture if anyone wants to try.

[frozenwings]

Sure, I'll get to dumping all of Dunban's hair sometime in the next couple of days here. I'm going to be a little busy this weekend, so I'll probably spend most of my free time just dumping repeating IDs. I really want to finish that before I take up too many more side things, but if it's only Dunban's, I should be able to get it in soon.

And that sucks about the jackets. I'll have to experiment more with that when I feel like I'm good with the repeating IDs thing.

Also, I've been using your Monado Wii for a while now. It's so awesome. I love it.

Edit:

Nice! I'll definitely try that out later tonight when I get a chance to play again.

[narcku]

Wait.. that was the wrong one. Mann.. I always made a mistake
Gotta learn to be patient next time. I tested out 2 textures at once.
This is the correct one.

I'm gonna find buster texture too if I can. I'll edit once I find it.

Edit: Ok found buster ID as well
Use it with Monado [color=red]Blaze[/color]-R.

Edit 2: Weird. After I add 1 more ID (SX4P01_ce840f8f_14), all Dunban's hair seem to work for me.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/kkawm68t8ba48t9/danban_v1.0.zip

[Bighead]

I hopped on over the "DX9 final build" board last night to figure out some things about custom textures, especially the performance issue that StripTheSoul has been reporting using the PNG versions. Tino was kind enough to clear up some of my concerns, and here is what I found out.

PNG textures use up a lot of VRAM especially since we create them in RGBA + the large dimensions. Game developers often improve performance by using Indexed/Alpha channels as opposed to RGBA. There are three things that can be done about this:
1.) Convert all textures to use IA channels instead of RGBA, which have a 256 color limit.
-- To me, this is not even a valid option.
2.) Scale down all textures so that they are equal to or not much larger than how they appear on the screen.
-- This can probably be done for some textures.
3.) Offer a DDS pack that doesn't have these problems for people with limited VRAM.

So to me, a little bit of 2 and all of 3 is the best course of action. PNG performance can be improved somewhat on our end by scaling down some of the ridiculously huge textures, but Dolphin's custom texture loading also needs some love from the devs somewhere down the line. This is low priority for them, I'm definitely not going to nag anyone about it, and I see no harm in creating another DDS version for those with older hardware. We'll just have to keep this in mind and hopefully get poweredbykimchi to update the front page about the differences between the two packs. Something like....
PNG - Higher quality, slower performance, requires more VRAM
DDS - Lesser quality, faster performance, requires less VRAM

Short and simple is always the best. Also, I'm not pretending to be an expert on this, so if any of this is wrong don't hesitate to correct me.

Edit: Scaling down even the littlest things such as menu palette textures may or may not help. Right now, many of them are using varying dimensions. For example:
Arts/Inventory: 140x140
Heart2Heart: 152x152
Achievement/Affinity/Change Time: 172x172
Area Maps/Arts&Skills/Items: 200x200
Gem Crafting: 240x240

And honestly, in game all of them look of equal quality to the Heart2Heart, Arts, and Inventory icons. So basically were wasting a bunch of hard drive space and VRAM by having them scaled anything above 140x140 especially since there's 1000's of these. Of course, in game tests should be done before deciding this to make sure there is NO loss in quality. Also, I'm certain the way we would scale them down, will have a better overall look of how Dolphin or the game is scaling them down currently.

The problem, is keeping everything organized and having to rebatch everything. So frozen, if you are willing to rebatch all menu palette textures and whatever else I might find, I will rescale these, run in game tests, take screenshots to post here, make comparisons, etc.. etc.. etc.. Skill tree bars are another thing that could come down in scale. They are about 500% bigger than how they are displayed in the game.

This may seem like a big task to undertake, but it shouldn't be bad at all. Just have to do it in steps, do certain ones at a time, and document what's been already done. And to add one last thing to this, in the grand scale of this operation, it would most likely reduce the overall file size of the texture pack by a large margin.

Final Edit: Menu palette icons at 4xIR-1080p consume a screen space of approximately 88x88 pixels. I'm not sure how of how large this would be at higher screen resolutions (plz send me a screenshot of the menu palette at the HIGHEST resolution possible). Here is a quick comparison shot:

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

As you can see, there is no visible loss in quality when scaling down, even when cutting the dimensions in half (Edit: Looking at it closer, there is a slight loss along the inner border at 100x100 where the curled up part meets the flat part. But this is most likely due to the interpolation when downscaling and could be manually smoothed). Again, the effect is unknown at higher resolutions, a test would be needed. A resolution of 128x128 or high as 140x140 might be a sort of "safe zone". I have included the 100x100 BASE frozen. If you will, take a screenshot of the current 200x200 version, and then the 100x100 version and we'll see how it fairs at your screen resolution.

.....also including 128x128 and 140x140 just in case. Even seeing them lined up across the bottom of this post I see no differences.

[frozenwings]

Wow, that's a lot of work. Resizing I mean. I don't think I have a grasp on the resolution part as much as you do (I could make them weird sizes).

So if you want to resize things (the smaller repeating files like menu palette, borders/corners) and send me the base files (like you did here), then I don't have a problem rebatching whatever needs to be done and testing them out at higher resolutions and taking some comparison screen shots. I'm on my phone right now, so theyall look tthe same to me atm. I won't be home for another 6 hours or so you're going to have to wait til them for testing. :p

[Bighead]

(05-04-2014, 06:24 AM)frozenwings Wrote: Wow, that's a lot of work. Resizing I mean. I don't think I have a grasp on the resolution part as much as you do (I could make them weird sizes).

So if you want to resize things (the smaller repeating files like menu palette, borders/corners) and send me the base files (like you did here), then I don't have a problem rebatching whatever needs to be done and testing them out at higher resolutions and taking some comparison screen shots. I'm on my phone right now, so theyall look tthe same to me atm. I won't be home for another 6 hours or so you're going to have to wait til them for testing. :p

Resizing will be easy and won't take long at all (20 seconds or less per texture unless they need fixes afterwards), and I'm in no rush to do this today but it will be good to get it out of the way ASAP. The big concern here is not getting them all resized, that could be done in probably less than an hour. The big issue is what to resize them to. So when you get a chance, take a screenshot of 2 things for me: the menu palette, and the skill tree. This way I can see the pixel counts at your resolution, and scale them slightly bigger than that to account for even a slightly higher resolution.

The most work will be rebatching them. Also, I might have to do some stuff with my family sometime today (maybe soon), so I may not be around for part of the day. So yeah no rush here, we got plenty of time to pull this off considering I still have more maps to do and more dumping to be done.

[Echoes]

Well, I personally make most of my textures be four times the size of the original (32x32 would be 128x128, 64x64 would be 256x256, etc.), except in cases where I need space for better detail, although in these rare cases, I may re-size the end result anyway, or when the original is way too small or way too big. 2 times the size would be too small and a waste of time, since they'll look kinda bad at 1080p, and I don't even want to imagine them at higher than that. 3 Times the size of the original should be alright, with maybe some textures looking a bit blurry at 1080p, I guess. 4 times the size is basically perfect for 1080p and beyond. 5 times or more would be overkill though, except in some specific cases, like I mentioned before.

Speaking as someone who has crappy hardware (I would have upgraded had it not been for real life foiling that plan), I can definitely understand wanting a DDS pack at 3X the original resolution, and I do think it would work wonders. But it should be an alternate download, leaving the png ones at 4x resolution as an "ultra setting" of sorts.

That out of the way, here's the minimap at last!!! When batching these, I really advise being careful not to confuse the icons used for the HUd one and the menu one, as they are of difference sizes and are aligned differently, especially the golden ring. Also, the moon icons Alekzanderk made are better off replaced with mine to avoid confusion since, at least in my files, they are the same resolution, making them hard to tell apart and they caused issues with the glow and such. No need to replace the Sun though.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/e145z4cc472a79j/Minimap.7z

[frozenwings]

Meh, rebatching them is easy. Just drag and drop and run your script :p.

I also had a good idea just now. If there is a difference in texture at quality at resolutions above 1080p, we could release a "1080p+ patch" that is basically just a copy of every folder we already have including their base file and a version of your current script. Just have someone copy that into their "1080p version" folder and click merge folders. Then have them run your script (set it up so the script has to be in their load folder and only effect those folders). That should retexture everything to the higher version. Granted this will force the main version having to use our folder setup as opposed to the "everything in one folder" setup.

[Bighead]

(05-04-2014, 06:54 AM)Echoes Wrote: Well, I personally make most of my textures be four times the size of the original (32x32 would be 128x128, 64x64 would be 256x256, etc.), except in cases where I need space for better detail, although in these rare cases, I may re-size the end result anyway, or when the original is way too small or way too big. 2 times the size would be too small and a waste of time, since they'll look kinda bad at 1080p, and I don't even want to imagine them at higher than that. 3 Times the size of the original should be alright, with maybe some textures looking a bit blurry at 1080p, I guess. 4 times the size is basically perfect for 1080p and beyond. 5 times or more would be overkill though, except in some specific cases, like I mentioned before.

Yeah like I mentioned, I would definitey make sure there is ZERO visual loss in image quality before even considering to keep a smaller scale of any texture. I have a good eye for detail, so even a bit of smudge would drive me insane. Also, minimap looks great as always. Like the menu palette icons are default at 32x32 and 40x40. Even 128x128 is slightly larger than 3x, and I seen no difference.

(10 edits in 10 seconds. Jeezus.)

(05-04-2014, 06:57 AM)frozenwings Wrote: Meh, rebatching them is easy. Just drag and drop and run your script :p.

I also had a good idea just now. If there is a difference in texture at quality at resolutions above 1080p, we could release a "1080p+ patch" that is basically just a copy of every folder we already have including their base file and a version of your current script. Just have someone copy that into their "1080p version" folder and click merge folders. Then have them run your script (set it up so the script has to be in their load folder and only effect those folders). That should retexture everything to the higher version. Granted this will force the main version having to use our folder setup as opposed to the "everything in one folder" setup.

The goal of my resizing operation would be that there is no differences.