[Wii][FHD] Donkey Kong Country Returns HD Textures Mod [v1.4]

[CTCaer]

v1.4 Released!

Please check OP for changelog.

If you come from v1.3, there's an update guide provided in OP and inside the package.

[coldnpale]

Just tried the v1.4! Everything seem to be working fine. I like a lot the new numbers-font even though I didn't really have a problem with the old style.
Good job!

[Khronikos]

Great job man, the fonts look better than what Nintendo put in there. The work appears cohesive and faithful to the original. It really makes the game come alive in the HD world. High five for sure. I'd donate a couple dollars if you had a page.

Is there anything else you plan to do for this pack? Any textures or anything? Or is it about done now? At any rate it makes this game perfect for the HD age and that is all that is important.

The sad fact is Nintendo hardware just sucks, and that includes the Switch. And we may never see anything that even gets this game to 4K with HD fonts and stuff in a remaster from them. Best you could hope for in their current schedule is a crappy port that runs on Switch. Maybe in ten years IDK. I doubt it. So emulation and improvement of these classics is something to be proud of participating in. Keep up the great work.

[CTCaer]

Well, I don't think that 2K/4K is needed yet, because only PC games mass use it.
But that's me. I don't care about it. My TV is 1080p, same with my multi-monitors.
My tv looks like a 400dpi because of the distance from it. Also the best dpi for my monitor, based again from the distance I have, is the quite low 90dpi.
Well monitors dpi can be easily fixed with bigger inches. But TV is a problem from my leaving room space.
Also with my AMD gpu, I can even play Witcher 3 with ultra+custom maxed graphics and with all Nvidia crapware enabled at 60fps. Thanks to my FHD resolution.
So I compromised resolution for the best quality with 60fps+.

Anyway for sure in the next years, 4K will be the mass big thing. But only for some digital distribution movies/series and ?many? games. No new disc format yet.
Gamecube was ok for it's resolution. But Wii, was completely wrong that came in a mass HD and later FHD era with SD graphics.
So with my mindset, Switch is OK to have FHD graphics. But it's wrong that they used HD for the display.
It's OK for it to not be very expensive because of 4K graphics, but 720p screen is only good in 4.5inches.
Well there's the battery denominator though, but could be easily fixed with bigger battery, or a powerbank, or a powerbank case.
That's my opinion though. I know some people that can't make the compromise and  go back to FHD since they tasted 2K/4K.

Anyway, the best solution for porting to newer consoles, for the devs would be this:
Make all textures with mipmaps and use a big resolutions. Then start to optimize to fit inside the discs. Don't make low resolutions from the start..
Then we could hack the games engine to render in higher resolutions, so it can load the bigger mipmaps.
But devs, don't care about emulation. Even though they know that the new console will probably have Virtual Console mode (forget PC emulators, they hate it).

---

About DKCR:
I don't know yet. For now the game went from crap (based on graphics) to playable (in my case enjoyable) for FHD resolutions.
A full FHD pack, or even the stationary/parallax backgrounds, are not currently viable options.
Users that use realtime texture decoding will have stutter problems, and user with even 16GB, will have problems with prefetching them.
Also the png pack can easily reach 5GB-10GB with these inside.
Lastly, I use a special trained profile for waifu2x-caffe. And this waifu2x fork doesn't support OpenCL, so to 1st upscale them, I will need days of constant CPU converting.

So, I don't know yet. If someone points something that is not in HD and looks crap 
or I already made it HD but doesn't look good, I can try and fix it.
But for now, this project will go to a hiatus as I now moved my effort to Wario Land Shake it/Shake dimension. 


BTW, to explain a little better about the end user's probable problems, I will tell you about Wario Land.
My original plan was to fully HDfy it. So when I did the 2 first levels, it was time to test it.
Oohh, it looked so good... But.. these only 2 levels were 3.3GB in prefetching. Without it, the game and especially the audio stuttered in many places.
So I took the decision to drop all stages and keep everything else. Maybe I will create an extension pack though.
Because of how it's graphics engine works, it creates blocks of maximum 404x404 for the background/stage elements. It doesnt use the real texture.
It cuts it to fit the internal resolution for the specific area you are. So it actually creates new textures for each cropped original texture. A complete nightmare.
Imagine a normal stage that creates around 400 404x404 blocks + their mask textures, so twice the textures. And then upscale them 3x. 
Then do it for 38? stages. Yeah you just reached witcher3, skyrim, you name it, size of data levels.
The game (2D), unlike DKCR (3D), really benefits from these though. So maybe I will create a 2x variants. It's still in it's infant stages. We'll see.

[Khronikos]

Yeah, I think the game holds up rather well without any more improvements. I don't see too many things that look off. You have helped it reach the point where it's totally viable even for 4K resolution. Your fonts look great at 4K internal downscaled to 1080p TV.

[StarTrekVoyager]

I like this pack, but I kinda miss the original fonts :p Would it be possible to have a version with original, upscaled fonts for the numver of bananas, etc. ?

[coldnpale]

I also think this pack reached a very good level. There are always things to improve but the most important are already covered. So I wouldnt mind if this was the final version!

If I had to think of something that looks a bit off, that would be the sky-cloud textures on "World 6-8, Clifftop Climb".... if i remember correctly. I am not sure how the whole retexturing works and if there can be done somethng to help it or its backdraws...
Have a look if you guys get some time. They show their age a lot

Other than that the game looks great on my 48'' hdtv.

[CTCaer]

About original numbers the only I can do is to tell me your region and revision and I'll make one texture for each font size.
Upscaled through waifu2x. But you need to make copies and change colors and names (46 total textures for one region+revision)...


About World 6-8, true. It's not even blurred it's jugged -.-
So these rock piles for the parallax effect are more than one texture that create these elements.
Probably easily fixable (except if the fault is a 3D model flattened by EFB). EDIT: They are jagged textures
If anyone have more requests where original textures are hurting eyes like this, please tell me.
With enough of these I can release an update.
But make sure to include the area and level numbers.

[Khronikos]

I'll definitely try and hunt down some jagged textures and get some screenshots.

[coldnpale]

I guess it's just those clouds that feel a bit out of the place.. the rest seems to be looking cool.
Recently got the 3ds version btw. Even though fps is reduced to 30, the awesome 3d effect makes up for it! Looking forward for the exclusive levels too!