Well I know we have a thread about all the competing game launchers and Hades was mentioned in the Steals thread just yesterday. That only leaves no one really talking about Ashen so I don’t know man. You’re obviously not spending every spare moment of every day reading every post on this website tut tut.
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We do?
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We’re in that period where we’ve got a golden age of high-quality indie games and budgets and production values are rising and everyone’s more unstable than ever.
It’s weird! And it almost makes you wish for a crash just to have time to poke through the rubble and discover everything you’ve missed, but really we’re just starting to unleash human potential to make interesting games through easier tools and expanding access and we just have to accept gnawing anxiety
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Hades does seem like one of the only surefire deals from the current epic sale
It’s early access though and I have a thing about that
The M2 documentary is up:
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An AI Upscale project for Resident Evil 2. The current results are a little over sharp. But, the overall results are impressive. and it would probably look great with either a subtle softening shader or a CRT shader which was tuned to look like a 1024x768 monitor or something.
Sonic Adventure 2 AI upscaled textures mod (not yet complete)
I’ve already played a good deal of the RE 1 and 2 classic rebirth mods, curious how this stacks up. IIRC those make a lot of subtle tweaks in other areas while this seems like it’d be the big visual winner.
This… does not look very good to me. It looks way more photoshopped and filtered. Whatever the FFVII guy is doing seems to produce much better results. I guess AI Gigapixel takes some skill to use to get appropriate results.
Aside from being a little too sharp in many shots ---- it looks on par with most of the A.I. upscales I have seen.
I do not know the details. But, I have gathered that there are things to tweak, to change the output from the A.I. For instance, this one here doesn’t seem to be set to approximate and add extra details. Instead, it pretty well preserves the details of the original image. And they have managed to avoid warping and other anomalies, which was a big problem with the first attempts at FF7 and is still an issue in certain shots for the FF8 project.
Also, it looks like RE2’s original backgrounds may have been a consistent resolution. Whereas Final Fantasy games had varying resolutions for the backgrounds.
I feel like it has this washy quality, like it can’t quite interpret what should be a straight line as a straight line, so the image takes on this kind of “water color” characteristic. The description mentions that it’s a combination of AI upscaling and manual adjustments in photoshop, and I almost wonder if the latter is causing this problem.
I think you’d probably notice that in other AI game upscale projects
I feel like it’s not nearly as noticeable with remako but it might also be because that game’s visual style is more cartoony and so what washiness there is is a better fit.
pipes and handrails seem to be some of the most difficult for AI. Here’s some examples of the “warping” I mentioned. Its pretty minimal, here. FF7 had it really bad, in the first couple of attempts.
Right in the middle of the image, the railing splits open, around some large, green pipes. Look at the railing to the immediate left of the green pipes. Its got some warping going on.
Again, pipes on the left of the screen. One of them has a flat spot in it, almost as if someone hammered it down. it looks as though the original image probaly had some extra shadow on that pipe, there. And the A.I. squashed it.
Left side again, computer monitors. Warped.
This sort of stuff is pretty common with the current crop of A.I. upscales. However, the examples here are pretty minimal. And considering the game as a whole which this is based on (old, low res, dithered, etc), I wouldn’t even flinch about it, in game.
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It’s really the unstable, organic quality of these artifacts that bugs me. I’d called it ‘wormy’ when looking at the DLSS upscaler on FFXV earlier and Broco just talked about that as the official name – and it really bothers me a lot more than pixelization or dithering.
But the pace at which this is getting better is encouraging.
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this stuff wouldn’t bother me so much if it were actually common for LPs of dos or old console games to actually look close to the way they were originally supposed to to begin with instead of always stretched to 16:9 and blurry or upscaled or with smearing filters. I just looked up monkey island 1, kq 6, and ff7 on youtube and the first lp’s listed all looked like ass.
If there are even any screenshots of sierra games on the entire internet that are in the right aspect ratio they’re buried deep somewhere
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I wonder if there’s a browser extension to squash youtube video to a different aspect ratio