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

[narcku]

Another small mod...
+Alvis

+Dixon



I'm not very good at this :/ , but here's the link in case anyone finds them good enough:
Download (Face&Hair)

[Bighead]

Looks great narcku! Finished the Fallen Arm, it ended up beyond a remake and falls more in the lines of a complete transformation. When I finished, it ended up so different than the original in some spots that I couldn't help but question if they created it from a beta version of the area and forgot to update it. There are some slight inaccuracies scattered throughout the map, but they are subtle enough that you have to really be looking hard for them to notice. There were a few things with the original map that bothered me that I fixed in this one.

- It was hard to tell the difference between a shoreline and a wall. Walls now have borders.
- Areas/platforms you can't access were shaded a light gray which appears to be walkable. This can be confusing to explore. I only filled in areas you can actually set foot on in one way or another.
- No village, it is now mapped out. It's far from perfect but it is mostly accurate. I couldn't with a clear conscience create it as a gray pixel blob like Monolith did.

Plus adding the usual missing stuff and accuracy improvements. I can't upload it to my site because it seems to be down atm so I'll try later. I wanted to at least come here and post a comparison shot for now.
http://i.imgur.com/2v3y0Qb.gif

At first I was using smoother edges like I do in most maps, but I didn't like it and ended up remaking a lot of it. The more rugged/jagged borders seem to better fit these Mechonis areas, and line up better with the actual geometry.

EDIT: Just for the heck of it....
http://i.imgur.com/e7rtj4r.png
Text was already HD, chat bubbles weren't. Sharper edges, less opacity.

[qazqi]

Sorry if someone's posted this, but searching didn't give back anything useful. Anyway, firstly, thanks a lot for doing this. I had no idea it was happening, let alone active, and now I can enjoy the game again even more this time.

I just got into the Bionis' Leg and one of the grass textures is causing pretty much everything past a certain distance away to turn blue. It looks a bit like there's water everywhere: http://i.imgur.com/oEgt7x7.jpg Walking close enough to the blue patches causes them to disappear. The only Dolphin settings that had an effect were changing the Texture Cache Accuracy away from Fast, and unchecking Load Custom Textures, both of which just result in the game's original textures. Switching to OGL from D3D9 fixes it, but OGL runs way too slowly to be of any use, unfortunately (laptops aren't typically meant for this stuff). Lowering the internal resolution seems to fix a couple of the closer patches, but doesn't help much (and lowers the resolution )

Now I went looking through the textures to see if I could pinpoint which was doing this, and surprisingly enough, I found it. Renaming SX4P01_88359245_14.dds in the 4.5U pack (I downloaded the PNG one, but the texture from the DDS one does the same thing) and then forcing the game to reload the textures results in http://i.imgur.com/E0dpMjw.jpg

Has anyone else had and fixed this problem or have any idea what it's doing? My tiny bit of D3D9 programming experience isn't coming in too handy for thinking of why this happens. Thanks for any effort spent. It's not a big deal considering it looks decent when excluding that one texture, but it would be nice to use the pretty grass.

[Flanqer]

(04-18-2014, 05:04 AM)qazqi Wrote: Now I went looking through the textures to see if I could pinpoint which was doing this, and surprisingly enough, I found it. Renaming SX4P01_88359245_14.dds in the 4.5U pack (I downloaded the PNG one, but the texture from the DDS one does the same thing) and then forcing the game to reload the textures results in http://i.imgur.com/E0dpMjw.jpg

You didn't mention what version of Dolphin you're running.

The PNG user pack contains a handful of DDS files, and that's one of them. Perhaps Direct3D9 has a problem with DDS files?

I don't think it belongs in the HD texture pack anyway because it's not HD. It's the exact same size as the original texture, 512x512. It's not higher detail, it's just more contrasty so the individual blades of grass are more noticeable. The same goes for SX4P01_50c1543d_14.dds.

[qazqi]

(04-18-2014, 06:23 AM)Flanqer Wrote:

(04-18-2014, 05:04 AM)qazqi Wrote: Now I went looking through the textures to see if I could pinpoint which was doing this, and surprisingly enough, I found it. Renaming SX4P01_88359245_14.dds in the 4.5U pack (I downloaded the PNG one, but the texture from the DDS one does the same thing) and then forcing the game to reload the textures results in http://i.imgur.com/E0dpMjw.jpg

You didn't mention what version of Dolphin you're running.

The PNG user pack contains a handful of DDS files, and that's one of them. Perhaps Direct3D9 has a problem with DDS files?

I don't think it belongs in the HD texture pack anyway because it's not HD. It's the exact same size as the original texture, 512x512. It's not higher detail, it's just more contrasty so the individual blades of grass are more noticeable. The same goes for SX4P01_50c1543d_14.dds.

Ah, sorry. I did give a Dolphin version when registering, so there was that at least, but it slipped my mind in the post. It's Dolphin 4.02. Anyway, interesting to know it's that similar to the original, thanks. If anything else seems to mess up like this, I'll see if it's a DDS file as well then.

[Bighead]

Those grass textures were part of the Skyrim pack, I forget who supplied it but there should be 14 in all. I'm pretty sure they are a direct rip from the game just renamed to work in Xenoblade. These textures were stubborn when trying to convert to PNG, the alpha channel for the vegetation is lost and at the time I didn't know enough how to fix it so I just left them as DDS files in the PNG pack. It doesn't really matter for the grass since there is no transparency, just didn't think to convert them at the time. Flanqer is right, they aren't fantastic but if you really want to use them then try these PNG versions: (Bottom of post)

Also, future downloaders try to stay away from the DDS pack from now on, in time I'm going to take it offline when I get closer to releasing an update. I want to get it out there soon because I have a few thousand more variations + a few new textures, I'm just trying to finish the game first and get it as close to "complete" as possible. Developer Neobrain informed me that DDS compatibility may be removed in the future a few pages back, and the PNG version of the pack has slightly better quality textures anyway. DDS dimensions must be a multiple of 4, and the stretching done by Aorta isn't so good and created a lot of blocks. It was probably a mistake to make a DDS version of the pack in the first place, but I was unaware it may eventually no longer be supported.

Edit: I have converted all these textures to PNG, since it will be need to be done eventually. There was a lot of garbage pixels in the originals as shown here: http://i.imgur.com/GGVivOK.png. I cleaned them up for the most part, but there is room for improvement. I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time on this. You should probably delete the DDS versions from your texture directory, I'm not sure which versions Dolphin will choose to load.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/uuvr66zjaej44vb/Bionis+Leg+PNG.zip

[frozenwings]

(04-14-2014, 02:33 AM)Bighead Wrote: Thanks for the info about the menu portraits. And yeah there's definitely quite a few, my total count thus far is 4189 (all characters normal + high tension), including a few names I found along the way. I'm near the end of the game and have balanced play time with my party quite a bit, so I don't think there are many more possibilities.

It will be impossible to figure out which of the 3700 old versions already in the pack are used where, I'm surprised you went to the extent that you did with over 300 of them. Still, it won't hurt to replace the lower quality versions with your much higher quality versions that use the same orientation (if they are misaligned, they will be misaligned either way). The only effects will be a nicer looking picture, Shulk having the same portraits throughout the entire game, and Sharla with her mole on the correct side of her chin.

I believe I'm to blame for some (or even most) of this problem.

I'm the one who dumped the thousands of IDs for the character portraits when I was working on my project to try and find all of the Menu file IDs. So in the case where there are like 100-800 versions of the same texture used repeatedly (skill tree "brackets", character portraits, menu icons, the little reticle around the map), it's more than likely my work. I'm not so great at texturing myself, I mostly just dumped and copied existing textures over the dumped file IDs. I did remake around 10 textures or so for the quest menu, and a couple other things that I felt were missing. I used quite a bit of Echoes work with character portraits, and I believe he took a liberty or two as well at some point. I just tried to go along with what was already included in the v4.1U pack to maintain consistency.

Anyway, my main goal was to use existing textures to flesh out all of the repeating file IDs in the game. It was a huge undertaking; I believe there were around 20 files for each of the main menu icon retextures that existed at the time, and I ended up with over 200 of each. In the end, a few of the menu icons weren't textured and I believe it was Flanqer who helped flesh the rest of those out. While dumping the menu and skill tree icons, I figured I might as well dump any character portraits I found as well. Here in lies the problem; there are a freaking ton of them. Regular battle portraits, high tension portraits, skill tree portraits, crafting portraits. It gets pretty insane. Along with the menu IDs I dumped and retextured/renamed around 12,000 files, I believe most of which were included in (and make up the bulk of) the updated pack (v4.5) on the front page.

While batch editing the portraits, it is completely possible that I crossed my wires a few times and is what has lead to these inconsistencies. I believe that since there weren't a lot of people playing, most people didn't notice it. Since I was doing this project as I was playing through the game, it is possible that I may never have ran into a repeat example of the erroneous retextures. So I apologize for anything that I may have screwed up.

Edit: I just looked at the files I contributed (I still have them in a folder on my PC), and it looks like all of my portraits are 100% consistent. I apparently also used the "old" v1 retextured portraits, usually in the 40-50kb file size range. I have no idea where those offset portraits came from, or the v2 portraits that Echoes released later. Could have already been in the original 4.1 pack.

Edit again: They weren't in the original 4.1 pack either. A mystery...

You can check out my last contribution (a compilation of all of my files) here if you want to compare files:

https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-hd-texture-project-xenoblade-chronicles-v4-5u-mar-14-2014?pid=286440#pid286440

Well damn, I just keep adding more. Okay, apparently there are actually three types of portrait textures in play here: The original, base level game-dumped portraits, the v1 retextures, and the v2 retextures which are nearly the same as the v1l retextures, just higher quality. There are actually no original raw portraits in the 4.5U file that I can find, only the v1 and v2 portraits. I have no idea why both versions are included.



In your pic of portraits, your "original column" are the base level game portraits that are dumped from the game. The new portraits column are either the original v1 retextures or the v2 retextures, I can't tell from the image. The 4,000 or so portraits included in the pack (by myself, so I feel responsible for any errors) are actually the v1 retextures, not the raw dumped files that you have pictured in the "original column". In fact, as far as I can tell, the textures in the original column of your photo aren't included in the 4.5U file at all. The pictures you used in the "Menu" column are actually the icons from the save/load screen. I believe when I retextured the menu portraits (for the skill tree, crafting screen, etc.) I used the portraits from your "New Portraits: Normal" column as the menu portrait as well. They looked better and the game seems to somehow "fit" them in where they should go. Also, the "combat" portraits are the high tension portraits. The regular combat and menu portraits use roughly the same image, except the menu ones are just "zoomed in" more. I believe I made a judgment call with Riki when retexturing his portraits, and decided to just exclude one of his images since he seemed to be the only noticeable difference. Perhaps this was a mistake.

So, to summarize the portrait thing according to the image you provided:



-All menu and regular combat portraits use the "New Portraits: Normal" v1 retextures.
-All combat: high tension portraits use the "New Portraits: Combat" v1 retextures.
-All save/load screen portraits use the "New Portraits: Menu" v1 retextures.

There should be no "Original" textures in the 4.5U pack, at least from my quick glance. There shouldn't be much of a point trying to separate menu from regular combat portraits, since the game seems to be able fit the new portraits just fine without any weird clipping and they use very close to the same image anyway. Also, I don't think it would be too big of a deal just to take all of the v1 retextures from the the 4.5U pack and switch them to the v2 textures. The only issue I could see is that you would end up with nearly triple the file size for character portraits, which may or not matter.

Also, after reading the thread more thoroughly, it seems you're finding some new file IDs (what you call missing names, I think). I'm glad to see someone trying to finish that. I played through the game twice, constantly dumping all of the missing IDs I could get my grubby little hands on. Obviously, I missed quite a few. I'm sure you're familiar with the process by now, reloading different maps, entering different areas from other areas, etc... It gets old and there is no way to know if you're missing any. So, it makes me happy that someone else is trying to finish this off. I'm actually contemplating a fresh playthrough and I look forward to seeing what new contributions have been included by yourself and others. Especially those maps, yum.

*I also want to make clear that I'm not taking credit for actually creating these portraits, I believe all of that goes to Echoes. I just applied the images to the different IDs I found while dumping. So when I say I "retextured" these portraits, I more or less just renamed a ton of stuff. The only images I created were menu related, no portraits.

[delroth]

By the way, one of the reasons why DDS is smaller is because it's a lossy compression format, aka. like JPEG (but the S3TC algorithm used by DDS looks worse than JPEG at the same size imo). It's kind of a waste to use HD textures if it's to get lossy compression applied to it, in my opinion.

Regarding loading times and stuttering due to loading and uncompressing HD textures from disk, there are a few things that could be done to improve it, but afaik nobody has the 6-12h to spare on that project at the moment. I will try to get to it at some point just because <3 HD textures, but no promises/timelines.

[narcku]

Small update for Alvis.

Click to zoom


*Ignore the clothes

Cleaner face for Alvis in Cutscene, closer to Red_Schism's style(still nowhere as good, but I did what I can). The eyes are still different though.
This time I tried to reduce the noise instead of blurring and smudging everything.

Download v1

[Bighead]

@frozenwings - It took awhile but I got them all sorted and updated to v2 of Echoes' portraits. I made a script that can filter out files by searching for an exact size in bytes so that sped things up. Your dumps were extremely helpful because its 1000's of IDs that didn't need to be found again, and I basically just picked up where you left off with the rest of the stuff as well (menu palette icons, skill tree bars, quest icons, etc..). I'm also searching for gem crafting stuff like "Heat" and "Mega Heat", the "New" text in tutorials, and a few other things. I don't believe you screwed anything up, everything was pretty consistent from the start and quite frankly you did a tremendous job. It was actually your work, Echoes' portraits, and Flanqers HD maps of Colony 6 and Tephra Cave that really got me interested in updating this project to hopefully near completion (in terms of missing IDs for existing textures + some new stuff). Add to that a love for game modding, and also when I started to realize there were some IDs not in the pack and maps starting with Bionis Leg were back to being pixelated. I was now too spoiled, and started dumping textures from that point and learned how to use GIMP. I've gotten a lot better since I started, my only previous experience with image editing was hours and hours of Mario Paint back in the 90s. I can draw really well with my hands, but this is the first time doing it in a computer program. It's actually much easier.

The only major difference between v1 and 2 of Echoes portraits that was slightly confusing was the reversal of Shulk, I just had to take that into consideration when organizing them. Converting them all to v2 did increase the overall filesize of the texture pack but only by a few 100 MB, which is well worth it to have the best quality versions IMO. And you are correct when you said "I'm sure you're familiar with the process by now, reloading different maps, entering different areas from other areas, etc... It gets old and there is no way to know if you're missing any." Haha, all too true.... I also noticed u can get different names for the menu palette just by saving the game, shutting it down, and loading up the game. And walking through a door from one area to the next is != to fast traveling between them. Loading a save state can also sometimes seem to generate IDs as well, but I'm not going that far as to saving/loading constantly.

So far the entire pack that I have yet to upload is 1.22GB uncompressed, which isn't too huge considering modern hard drive capacity. Yes there are no low quality versions in the pack. That pic I linked from before was from the old texture pack forum and I was just using it as an example for Shulk's reversal. I have everything pretty well organized ATM to avoid personal confusion, so far I'm up to 17,164 textures broken into 32 category folders. I only have a few areas left in the game to finish, and a few maps left to make (and 2 to remake), and probably some new IDs to find along the way. It shouldn't be much longer before I put a new pack online, hopefully no more than 2-3 weeks. All depends on how much free time I have, this project has been gobbling it up.

I also found a number of textures in the pack that were not actually HD or even a remake for that matter so I removed them. I made sure to triple check that they were indeed the original dumps before making this decision. If they are in the texture pack, then they will never get dumped for those in the future that may want to make HD versions. None of them were major, and were mostly paletted textures (the _9 suffix) that would probably require 100s-1000s of variations anyway.

@delroth - I was hoping to ask a dev this eventually. According to degasus in this post here (#9): http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/issues/detail?id=6845 textures with dimensions of a multiple of 4 in RGBA format yield better performance. I was wondering if this still holds true? I took the extra effort to rescale most textures so dimensions are divisible by 4 just in case.

And if anyone is concerned, there is no quality loss or abnormalities, I rounded to the nearest multiple for best results. For example: 125 becomes 124, and 127 becomes 128. 126 would be whichever way I felt like going and had the least impact on the image. But honestly, 1 or 2 pixels isn't even noticeable without an overlapping comparison. The DDS pack is already using x4 dimensions, but with much lesser quality.

@narcku - That looks great narcku. I'm wondering... which point in the game you are at with Alvis? In makna forest, there is a small segment where Alvis is in your party with Shulk to battle a Telethia. No HD portrait was ever done for that fight, and I don't have the IDs because for awhile I was dumping and deleting periodically and it didn't cross my mind at the time. I would like to make a portrait for that segment, so if you or anyone has the IDs then I want them.