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

[Echoes]

(05-04-2014, 07:02 AM)Bighead Wrote:

(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.)

Alright, I'll let you be the judge then, hahaha. For most of my textures, you can just devide by 4 and multiply the result by 3, to get the resolution they need to be resized to with hopefully minimal loss in quality. An easy, but time-consuming process...

Thanks!

[Bighead]

I honestly don't think I'll go below 4x. Right now StripTheSoul is using DDS with all the original dimensions in tact and having very little issues. Small textures such as menu palette textures can match or be slightly under 4x because of how small they are.

But larger textures such as something at 2056x812 or something would have a lot more care taken. And usually, there's only one so it's not critical to even alter those as much, if even at all since they are probably mostly menu elements and not on the screen at all times. The main focus is those damn paletted textures (_9) that show up 1000s of times, and are consuming much more hard drive space than necessary.

Larger textures that have anything other than a _9 I probably won't alter at all.

EDIT: Just to be clear, here is an almost complete list of textures in my scopes: menu pallette, skill tree bars, borders, green/brown/blue bars, quest icons. small irrelevant things that not much attention will be paid to, but shaving a few KB of each will help loading times and preserve space

EDIT AGAIN: Scratch borders, they are already fine. TBH, menu palette and skill tree bars are the only textures that are larger than they need to be.

Here is a little more in-depth of what I'm thinking here. In this pic, I seen how many pixels the entire texture actually takes up in-game.

First, standard texture is dumped at 107x52. It's actual screen space on my monitor is about 256x128, give or take. Our current HD texture is 524x260 which seems like overkill, and all it's doing is getting smashed down to fit that space anyway. At higher resolutions it will most likely take more pixels to fill that hole, so it will want a larger texture to look good. It sucks there's so much to take into account lol. It's an imperfect world here.

[Echoes]

Good point, the real problem are the paletted textures. I wonder how many games have this problem...

[frozenwings]

Well I hope they look okay at 1440p. I have my doubts at going from 140x140 to 100x100 textures.

[Bighead]

(05-04-2014, 07:42 AM)frozenwings Wrote: Well I hope they look okay at 1440p. I have my doubts at going from 140x140 to 100x100 textures.

Yeah me too. 100x100 is too low. While I was in the shower a thought hit me, and I realized that I've been an idiot this whole time over complicating the situation. We should go NO lower than 4x like Echoes mentioned with every texture. I've been too concerned with the varying monitor resolutions and how textures scale to them that I wasn't thinking straight, when really I should have been thinking about how they scale to the internal resolution BEFORE it is scaled to monitor size, and if we could actually see every pixel. Unless Dolphin increases the internal IR (which really, would be impractical), then going no higher or lower than 4x the original texture doesn't make much sense to account for every scenario.

So image quality should not improve with icon sizes above this at any resolution:
original - new
28x28 = 112x112
34x34 = 136x136
40x40 = 160x160

Some menu palette icons are 40x40 (the outer ones) and the sub menus are 34x34. I will toss together a pack with different sizes and original backups just so you can test out my theory.

[frozenwings]

Okay sounds good, I'm just going to make a backup of everything when I get home so I don't mix anything up.

[Bighead]

(05-04-2014, 08:18 AM)frozenwings Wrote: Okay sounds good, I'm just going to make a backup of everything when I get home so I don't mix anything up.

Good idea, and here is the pack of new scales. I also included a backup of the original bases as well with it. I have tested all icons at these new scales, and on my end it looks no different than before. Every texture is smaller, except the system wii it is now bigger. The icon used for it was 112x112, so I increased it to 160x160 and made it a bit sharper so it falls in line with his brothers. I have to leave now for a few hours, so if this works out we can worry about other textures later.

[StripTheSoul]

Heh, I love seeing you guys doing your thing. You would be a great workforce in "real-life" at whatever you guys would do

[frozenwings]

(05-04-2014, 08:56 AM)StripTheSoul Wrote: Heh, I love seeing you guys doing your thing. You would be a great workforce in "real-life" at whatever you guys would do

Haha. Bighead's scripts give us the flexibility to do this work without "much" hassle.

But, yeah. Everyone seriously involved right now is very good at communicating and reliable. That's the hardest part: getting everything to work together and staying organized. Everything else just takes time (dumping, texturing.)

Anyway, on topic. I'm home and I'm copying stuff and getting things ready to compare these new textures. I'll post back in a bit.

Edit:

What I did was put these screen shots up in photoshop, the new textures image layered over the original image. I then turned the new texture layer off and on to spot the differences. Pretty much like a .gif or whatever. I've included the screenshots below in a 7zip. They are kind of big since they are the full screenshots, I didn't clip them. I kind of wanted the whole thing so I could get a feel for it.

Okay, these are my notes -

Looks worse -
Item (backpack) Icon - Loses a little detail
Gem Crafting Icon - gets a little blurry
Skill Tree Icon - gets a little blurry

Looks better -
"Other" (Clock and question mark) Icon - clock portion looks better
System Icon - looks better

Not Sure-
Save / Load Icons - Looks a little different... not sure if better or worse.

Verdict is: I'm indifferent. You really have to look close to tell the difference. I compared at 100% zoom (which I guess is how I normally see it :p) and really had to look to see the difference. If you had them side by side, instead not alternating off and on, I would have not even seen the difference for most of them. The immediately noticeable things were that the gem crafting icon did lose a little quality and the system icon looks a lot better.

If you want to use the new icons, I'm okay with it. (These ones, I'll have to see the others too before I decide on them.)

Edit again: This only shaved 35mb off my 2447.36mb load folder size. That's not that much. I'm not sure if this was worth the effort for that :p. Even if you're trying to save people GPU RAM, 30MB isn't a lot (if this even directly correlates with that.)

http://www.mediafire.com/download/fuat3ma955ab1jc/Screenshots.7z

Edit: For Echoes: Did you dump those minimap clock parts using japanese audio? I'm concerned because I don't have either of the two "sets" in the zip you uploaded, and I have 631 sets of clock IDs dumped.... disheartening. And an extra "big clock" ID too, when I've only had the two and I've never seen it not textured nor dumped a new ID.

Edit again for Echoes: They look really awesome, btw. I'm excited that EVERYTHING matches now. So. much.

[Echoes]

Yeah, I've always used the Japanese audio, so don't worry. Is there really a difference then? It's also always been re-textured for me, if I remember correctly. I think that new one appeared when I was messing around with save states and trying to dump a texture for the little moon or something. I added it just in case.