Re-texturing the HUD of Twilight Princess

[emu82]

Hallo,

I've been trying to make the HUD of Twilight Princess less blurry when playing in 1080p.

Naturally, I first looked for an existing texture pack that could solve this, but it turned out there isn't really a texture pack in existance that provides a high-quality HUD while maintaining the original art style.

So, I am now on course to do it myself. My idea is as follows: I edit the original HUD elements by simply adding a larger canvas around them (for example, I take a 40x80 pixel PNG image from the dump folder and enlarge it to 60x120 by adding transparent pixels around the existing image). By doing this, I am effectively making the HUD elements smaller, because Dolphin will not zoom them as strongly as it did before. The original images are not modified by me and therefore don't lose in quality (except for the quality loss coming from the conversion to PNG).

This has the double benefit of making the HUD elements smaller and less blurry (visual improvement, in my opinion) and giving more free view of the actual game (I always found the HUD in Twilight Princess to be a little too large to begin with).

So far, so good. But I've run into a problem. This is what I want to ask you about:


While most HUD elements have a consistent file name, *some* of them are dumped under a different name for each area where I use them.

For example, this is the Slingshot:

tex1_40x62_845fe9fec72c4909_7e1279542e8616f8_9.png
tex1_40x62_845fe9fec72c4909_324c5ca3d5fed9e4_9.png
tex1_40x62_845fe9fec72c4909_e4ae380cc77f288b_9.png

As you will notice, the first half of the hash is always the same, while only the second half changes.

Now, I considered running through the whole game and dumping all the files, but as it turned out the second part of the hash not only changes by the area of the game, but also by the button that the item is put on, and, worse than that, even by the number of shots that I have on the Slingshot (0-50).


Now my question is whether I am overlooking something to solve this. Is there an easy solution? Or does Dolphin need to have a new function implemented? Because as I see this, it could be easily solved from a technical perspective:

If Dolphin would allow me to place a file called

tex1_40x62_845fe9fec72c4909_$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$_9.png

into the Load folder, whereby $ would be a wildcard to allow any number or letter, then it would use this file to replace any instances of the image of the Slingshot, no matter in which area or on which button I use it.

Another tell-tale sign that the images are identical is that they all have the same size of 3,362 Bytes.

Really, there should be some way to solve this, shouldn't there be...? The first parts of the file names are already identical, it's a pity that Dolphin is bothered so much by the second part being different.

Edit: I should add the information that I have the Texture Cache Accuracy set to "Fast". Using Dolphin version 5.0-8596.

Edit 2: I looked into a few existing texture packs and none of them have solved the HUD item issue satisfactorily. When I applied those texture packs, the HUD items remained very incomplete. I can't say whether those packs ever worked satisfactorily and then compatibility broke with a recent Dolphin version. The textures of the surrounding world seem to be working fine, though, so it's apparently just the HUD items causing an issue.

[Bighead]

This reminds me of the paletted texture issue from long ago. The new format mostly fixed it, but it seems there are still some C8 (tex1_dims_hash1_hash2_9) paletted textures that are dumped multiple times. While working on Wind Waker, I noticed there is a dungeon key that exhibits the same behavior. Like the insane person that I can be, I just decided to go on a dumping spree trying to find (mostly) every situation it pops up.

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

I never reported this because I thought it might be the only game affected. But if it's more widespread then hopefully it is possible to fix without changing the hashes of every other texture.

Edit: Also trust me when I say that you will never, ever, find every instance of every texture. When the issue was prominent in Xenoblade, there were 121 textures where the hashes would constantly change. We spent 100s of hours and dumped over 2000-4000 versions of each and still never found them all. I went for this key because its only 1 texture that is affected out of dozens. The fix you mentioned does sounds like a nice work-around if a "proper" fix would change current hashes.

Also, created an issue for it: https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/11358

[emu82]

Thank you for creating the ticket. I can confirm your observation from Wind Waker that the "texture hash" always seems to be identical, while only the "tlut hash" changes. I've ran through lots of different areas in Twilight Princess and put the items on numerous different buttons, and so far all the textures that showed the same picture would also receive the same texture hash, I haven't spotted a break from this rule. The textures are completely identical, byte by byte, which explains why they receive the same texture hashes.

So in our case, an ability to ignore the tlut hash when Custom Textures are loaded would fix things.

I hope there'll be a fix for this *some day*, because I am content with Twilight Princess otherwise and don't need to go for the Wii U version with better textures, but blurry HUDs are a bit bothersome to me. I don't know if my stance on this is unusual, but as long as the HUD is fine, I can even stand replaying old games like Super Mario 64. I'll just always make sure to load a texture pack for a hi-res HUD - which unfortunately doesn't work for Twilight Princess.

[emu82]

Speaking about how prevalent the issue is within the game: Out of the circa 20 items that Link carries in Twilight Princess, at least the Slingshot, the Hawkeye Mask and the Morning Star are affected, and I've only gone through half the items so far, so there may be some more.

[Bighead]

A fix was just posted in a PR. Here is a direct link to the test build.
https://dl.dolphin-emu.org/prs/pr-7349-dolphin-latest-x64.7z

Can you confirm this fixes the issue? The PR can be found here:
https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/7349

Just name the second hash with a $ like:
tex1_48x51_53403146169829a2_$_9

[emu82]

I'll test it in the next few hours.

[emu82]

I've tested the wildcard that has been newly introduced in the recent developer build of Dolphin, and it fixes the problem.

Please take not that the following applies to the Wii version of Twilight Princess; as the Gamecube version has a very different HUD, things might be different for that version.

I have loaded multiple savestates from throughout the game and went through all the items that Link can equip to buttons. The following ones require a wildcard to be used:

Slingshot: tex1_40x62_845fe9fec72c4909_$_9
Hawkeye: tex1_48x45_b0e063510a4f1e9e_$_9
Morning Star: tex1_56x47_f5d5a5148193e7a1_$_9
Spider Bomb: tex1_56x45_2117f87b166cc69e_$_9

Please note that I am only modding the HUD; there are actually additional graphics that will require a wildcard which I've spotted, but which I don't intend to mod.

Edit: I don't think it's worth sharing the results of my modding, as it's a job of just a few hours and I'm also under the impression that the PNGs are not ideally handled by the software that I use (paint.net), as the resulting colors have either 0% or 100% transparency, which makes the edges of the graphics a little sharp. I don't intend to dive deeper into it and learn how to modify DDS files or such.

[Jack Frost]

Thanks for the feedback!

And, actually, we've had this wildcard feature for the past 3 years; but it was incompatible with Windows (and only worked on Linux/macOS) since it used the asterisk * as wildcard character.