Oh man, I love this! I use the battle section the most probably with my buddies, so this is great!
Sonic Adventure 2 Battle HD Project v2.3 (June 21, 2019)
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02-17-2019, 08:59 AM
amazing update, thank you so much! <3
CPU: Intel Core i7 3770 3.4 GHz (3.9 GHz with turbo boost) 4.23GHz with OC
RAM 16GB DDR3 [color=#009900]NVIDIA[/color] GTX 1070 [color=#000099]Asus[/color] Windows [color=#3333ff]10[/color] Pro 64bit Currently using Driver [color=#00ff00]WHQL[/color] 02-17-2019, 01:19 PM
Glad to hear you guys like the update! I don't think there will be another update for a little while, but when I do, it'll be one last major update tackling most of the Chao World/Garden UI. Since I was on a roll working on the Battle textures, I went ahead and dumped the chao world textures to see what needs to be done still... turns out there are still well over a hundred more textures to go through, haha. After that, it'll essentially be cleanup for this project, finding textures I missed, and maybe redrawing the various pickup items, story mode recap backgrounds, and finally the other character menu themes (because honestly, if I get that far, I may as well do all of them). So yeah, that's the full long term plan for this texture pack when I have time to work on it.
03-18-2019, 02:59 AM
Hey guys. Against the odds, I've actually been plugging away at this texture pack (and spending more time on it that I should probably be using for other more important things ) so I figured I would drop a small update/teaser. I've added a new tool to my repertoire in the form of the AI upscaler ESRGAN, the impressive Manga109 AI model, and some incredibly helpful scripts I found linked on reddit created by user rapka on github. So, what does this mean for the texture pack? I'll let the results speak for themselves (still WIP):
Spoiler: 03-18-2019, 09:34 AM
I'm loving the detail on the shoes and environment.
What are you doing with the Dreamcast textures? Are you straight-up replacing the GC textures with them, or modifying and changing the Dreamcast textures instead of the GC textures? 03-18-2019, 11:40 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-18-2019, 10:02 PM by Matrix2525.
Edit Reason: Too tired, can't figure out disc capacity
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When Sega ported Sonic Adventure 2 over to the gamecube, whoever was in charge of converting the textures used some horrible, lossy compression in order to fit everything onto the gamecube's smaller capacity disc ( whoops). While many environment textures aren't too bad, smaller and complex textures have horrible color and pattern artifacting. The gamecube's original resolution actually helped to hide many of the blemishes, but fast-forward to HD+ resolutions in dolphin and it's easy to see how bad some things look.
So, I'm going through and taking particularly bad or important textures from the gamecube release and replacing them with their Dreamcast equivalents that don't have all of the compression artifacts. I'm then using those textures as a base to upscale and/or edit. There are some exceptions. Interestingly, in the stages that have posters and advertisements (like City Escape), almost all of them were changed to new designs for SA2 Battle. Currently, I'm just upscaling the newer gamecube textures. But, conceivably, myself or someone else could do a visual comparison of those stages (and people conveniently have on various sonic-related wikis) and replace the gamecube posters with the original Dreamcast ones. And finally, where SA2 Battle added new content, I only have the gamecube textures to work with as there are no dreamcast textures for those elements. For fun, here's a visual comparison using Sonic's shoe texture: Spoiler: As a final note, the upscale comparison "technically" isn't 100% equal on both sides, but it's just fine to illustrate the point. The gamecube texture was scaled by a factor of 4 from 128x128 to 512x512, and then sized up to 1024x1024, as I'm rendering all of the character textures at 8x their original size. I ran the dreamcast texture through ESRGAN twice, going from 128x128 to 512x512, and then to 2048x2048. I then scaled that image by half, down to 1024x1024, and edited the image to try and fix some of the seams that show up on the front of Sonic's shoes. Hm, it's getting late for me here, and that's led to a pretty meandering explanation, heh. Hope I wasn't too long-winded. So yeah, basically, I'm using the Dreamcast textures instead of the Gamecube ones where they make a visual difference and don't differ between versions of the game. 03-18-2019, 04:52 PM
(03-18-2019, 11:40 AM)Matrix2525 Wrote: When Sega ported Sonic Adventure 2 over to the gamecube, whoever was in charge of converting the textures used some horrible, lossy compression in order to fit everything onto the gamecube's smaller capacity disc. GameCube discs actually have slightly higher capacity than Dreamcast discs. Maybe they had other concerns, like RAM usage. 03-18-2019, 05:59 PM
That's some real neat info!
I was asking because I remember some legal problems from another texture pack (rayman or something) that straight up ripped the assets from a ps3 version and tried to release as a texture pack, but they weren't allowed to host it here for legal reasons.. Since you're actually making changes I don't think you'll have the same problem, but someone who knows the legal license stuff better than me could give you better info on this. 03-18-2019, 10:09 PM
(03-18-2019, 04:52 PM)JosJuice Wrote: GameCube discs actually have slightly higher capacity than Dreamcast discs. Maybe they had other concerns, like RAM usage. You're absolutely right. I was getting pretty tired writing that last night and in my head I was comparing Gamecube discs to standard size DVDs used by the PS2 and Xbox, not to the Dreamcast's GDROMs. Oh well. As you say, it was either RAM issues, or they just really did a bad job for no good reason, ha. And KHg8m3r, yes I'm using the dreamcast textures as a base to edit and upscale, and not just including them as-is. |
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