Rune Factory Frontier Upscaled Texture Pack
Introduction:
Rune Factory Frontier has always been a really comfy game for me, but being a game released more than a decade ago on the Wii it is a bit lacking in the graphics department. I've been working on AI upscaling the in game textures for a while now and I feel like I have enough going here to release it in this incomplete state. My main goal here was to use AI upscaling to increase the size and detail of most textures while maintaining the game's original art style, an art style I really like.
Imgur gallery of comparison screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/xNR24UP
Honestly the screenshots don't exactly do the changes justice imo. The main change is that the UI is greatly cleaned up and so are many of the 3D models and character art. Most landscapes and items look better as well, the only issue I really have is that some textures refuse to noticeably change when upscaled and that above a 2x upscale the differences look very negligible to me. From my understanding this is due to said textures being atlas textures, which is many small textures layered on a spreadsheet. These can be upscaled to 2x and 4x but the appearance of them is almost completely unchanged.
Current Progress:
Some work remains to be done here, I estimate I'm roughly 90% done with the textures of this game.
Due to the way textures are dumped it requires me to actually have the textures loaded on screen somehow, and with a game as long as this you can imagine how much of a pain that is. All landscape textures for every season are complete, all dungeons, monsters, and bosses are complete. Roughly all of the character portraits and models have been upscaled with the exception of one or two beach outfits. This is a long game no matter how you slice it, so work on this texture pack is still ongoing.I will be subscribed to this thread so if anybody has any errors to report or has something they need upscaled I can be reached that way or through PMs. I will try to make this into an actual Resource Pack when it is closer to completion, for now it is a pack of PNG files that just needs to be unzipped and dropped into the load folder for Dolphin.
Changelog
- September 26th 2021: Completed textures of all of whale island and all of the snow ruins, actually looks pretty good I think. These textures took to the upscaling quite well.
- October 10th 2021: Been a while, completed textures for every season and dungeon. Special thanks to forum user Kupo for providing me with monster textures. I expect to be done with this after I complete my playthrough and most textures will be completed.
Download
P.S. if you have texture dumping enabled in your settings, you might want to turn it off while a cutscene plays in game. It considers every frame of the cutscene to be a texture so it will dump a snapshot of EVERY frame into your dump folder and can lead to slowdowns. I actually did decide to test if upscaling these snapshots would improve the quality of a cutscene, so I upscaled every texture for one of the cutscenes (said cutscene had over 1000 of these textures despite being only 30 seconds in length). The difference was negligible if it even applied at all, so as of right now I have no way of improving the animated cutscenes and again recommend you turn off texture dumps while viewing them.