Rats can easily improve the graphics with an open source upscaler ESRGAN (Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks)

[madrebel 524]

yeah I was looking for "can it add normal maps/bump maps" or anything along those lines but doesn't appear it does. still interesting though, the ground textures are 'dated' and anything that may add contrast/clarity there - stellar!

[jwilly 971]

8 minutes ago, Nick said:

Of course, it's never going to add detail, it can only use what data is already in the image but it could still improve things until we can get an artist to create new textures.

Toto did a lot of the current ground textures, didn't he? Does CRS still have his original art files, before downscaling to the low res textures in use?

[jwilly 971]

Possibly an earlier instance of "we seem to be unable to find some files we now need":

[odin67 0]

So...should we invest emotionally in digital plastic surgery and a boob job or not? I'm not used to good news. I got a wife and young kids...

[Nick 92]

1 hour ago, jwilly said:

Toto did a lot of the current ground textures, didn't he? Does CRS still have his original art files, before downscaling to the low res textures in use?

I don't know, now and again @XOOM finds old stuff kicking about.

[Merlin51 1,221]

2 hours ago, madrebel said:

the ground textures are 'dated' and anything that may add contrast/clarity there

I am going out in the yard, get on a ladder, and take pictures of my ground

[madrebel 524]

19 minutes ago, Merlin51 said:

I am going out in the yard, get on a ladder, and take pictures of my ground

only acceptable if european grass ... ;-)

[jwilly 971]

43 minutes ago, Merlin51 said:

I am going out in the yard, get on a ladder, and take pictures of my ground

Be sure to select a 16k x 16k area that repeats smoothly across your yard.

[Merlin51 1,221]

27 minutes ago, jwilly said:

Be sure to select a 16k x 16k area that repeats smoothly across your yard.

If you can pretend the ants are actually tiny opels on resupply missions?

[Kilemall 1,271]

13 hours ago, HATCH said:

Not even close.

I don't even remember what the top of the line video card was when we started this, but we had a very limited poly budget at the time. A few vehicles and terrain objects have been reworked over the years, but with the exception of a few newer models that do have higher resolution texture maps, nothing has happened to the bulk of the texture maps over the years besides being converted from bmp to dds.

As an example, the last terrain build Doc did was 2012, and it didn't make it into the game till just this last year with Merlin, Sniper, and Frisbone's dogged determination to figure out how to make it happen. So that's a good timeline with nothing being done terrain wise in all that time. That means the majority of the textures covering all the octets making up a supercell on the ground are likely 256X256. The airfields, the entire airfield square 256X256. ALL the objects on the terrain probably the same (not counting new bunkers and barracks). Vehicles? The same as well except for the latest few, Bmbm would probably have a better idea.

I think what you might be thinking of is the new infantry and small arms models. Those are incredibly high poly and "baked down" enough not to bring the client to its knees, and that goes for the new crewmen on the towed guns that have been replaced as well. If you want another good example vehicle wise, go look at any of the ships in external view, or at any of the crewmen or pilots in the vehicles. Most of that is original artwork.

So yeah. This could be an amazing gain for the game for a little amount of work. Score!

I got that from people I know who took CRS HQ tours and they were told/shown that.  So, not arguing you aren't right, just that I didn't make it up out of thin air.

[kase250 155]

7 hours ago, madrebel said:

had to be voodoo3 as the original geforce1 wasn't fast. at launch, geforce3 had likely just hit the market.

everyone's cell phone has a GPU significantly more capable.

Good times

[HATCH 204]

9 minutes ago, Kilemall said:

I got that from people I know who took CRS HQ tours and they were told/shown that.  So, not arguing you aren't right, just that I didn't make it up out of thin air.

No one said you did  guy. I even guessed that it was in relation to the new Inf models of which I know that to be the case. As far as what I know of that we have available to work with in the repo, it's all pretty low poly and low resolution texture maps. I'll pass it along to Xoom and see if he might know where the models you refer to ended up.

[Merlin51 1,221]

I think @Kilemall referring to the external art renderings they used to post and what not back in the day.
Before the thing went into the game itself.

I remember several models they had rendered up but not using the small compressed in game textures
They looked great, but also looked like death to a voodoo3 3000

[HATCH 204]

Regardless, I'm going to throw some textures together for a couple of models to see if Markec might be interested in passing them through at 4X current res and then post some before after screenies... None of us have had the extra time to get the thing working yet with all the python/VS ,etc. dependencies. But that would tell the tale.

Markec, you game?

[markec 0]

12 hours ago, jwilly said:

 

As I said above, this doesn't "add detail to every enlargment just like a real artist".

It "just", via excellent engineering, upscales and sharpens the detail the original artist / image creator put into the original-limited-resolution image. 

 

 

The makers of ESRGAN say this

'It is an upscaling method that takes an low-res image and adds realistic details to it. By doing it over several passes with the goal of fooling its adverserial part, it will usually produce an image with more fidelity and realism than past methods.'

[markec 0]

7 hours ago, HATCH said:

Markec, you game?

 

Yea, I can try, although i'm no expert

 

link me a private message

Edited January 9 by markec

[XOOM 918]

I'd like to provide some cautious optimism here. Some things that sound too good to be true, typically are. However I am very interested to see where this goes and what sort of results are produced.

I'd also like to take a moment to point out that artwork is indeed a skilled technical discipline that is unlikely to be replaced by software / robots. 

[Pittpete 403]

Is this similiar to what NVIDIA does? 

https://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/dsr/technology

 

Our new Maxwell architecture introduces a raft of innovative, exciting technologies that make your games better in dramatic ways. Of these new features, Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) will have largest impact, enhancing any game that supports resolutions above 1920x1080. What does DSR do? Simply put, it renders a game at a higher, more detailed resolution and intelligently shrinks the result back down to the resolution of your monitor, giving you 4K, 3840x2160-quality graphics on any screen

[madrebel 524]

10 minutes ago, XOOM said:

I'd also like to take a moment to point out that artwork is indeed a skilled technical discipline that is unlikely to be replaced by software / robots. 

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

https://hothardware.com/news/ai-generated-pictures

https://www.iflscience.com/technology/ai-creates-rather-wonderful-art-that-fools-critics-its-not-humanmade/

 

In a few years ... who knows.

 

Edited January 9 by madrebel

[xanthus 168]

26 minutes ago, Pittpete said:

Is this similiar to what NVIDIA does? 

https://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/dsr/technology

 

Our new Maxwell architecture introduces a raft of innovative, exciting technologies that make your games better in dramatic ways. Of these new features, Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) will have largest impact, enhancing any game that supports resolutions above 1920x1080. What does DSR do? Simply put, it renders a game at a higher, more detailed resolution and intelligently shrinks the result back down to the resolution of your monitor, giving you 4K, 3840x2160-quality graphics on any screen

Nope, not the same.

 

DSR just allows you to render a game at 4k (or 8k or whatever res) on a lower resolution monitor. This makes a really big difference because while it isn't the same as magically transforming a 1080p monitor into a 4k monitor, you DO get a much sharper, crisper, clearer image with excellent antialiasing; by increasing rendered resolution and then "squeezing" it to fit into whatever your monitor's res is, the increased *rendered* pixel density essentially fills in the jaggies (the level of DSR AA is controlled using a slider in the control panel called "smoothing," which is basically OGSSAA). FWIW, this is how I play WWIIOL.

 

TLDR: DSR really has nothing to do with better textures. It's just Nvidia's official version of the downsampling hack: https://www.legitreviews.com/force-ogssaa-nvidia-driver-trick_141687

 

Edited January 9 by xanthus

[xanthus 168]

33 minutes ago, XOOM said:

Some things that sound too good to be true, typically are.

 

This is an exception; it's 100% real, and the results are awesome.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.00219

[markec 0]

In a few years ... who knows.

Yep, it's already starting

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayPqjPekn7g

[aismov 339]

So if I am understanding this correctly, what this does is take a very large texture resolution, and compresses it down efficiently so you lose as little of the fine detail as possible. So you get away with having to load fewer GB worth of textures into your frame buffer (or conversely allows you to have a greater number of textures).

[markec 0]

Quote

So if I am understanding this correctly, what this does is take a very large texture resolution

 

Other way around.

You take for example 256x256 texture and make  4096x4096 out of it,  with every detail added by the AI neural network which acts as the artist in this case.

 

The point is to have better graphics, and you need bigger textures for this.  If you just upscale a 256x256 'manualy' it will be all blurry without details, if you use ESRGAN, it will be sharp with detail.

 

On left is 4k with ESRGAN and on right is 'manual' 4k upscale without any upscaler.

 

Edited January 9 by markec

[xanthus 168]

Just realized a potential problem as I was looking at video I've taken of the game....

 

We might want to restrict this initial pass with ESRGAN to player models/weapons (e.g. infantry, vehicles, small arms, etc) and buildings only. These *should* definitely be improved after being altered by ESRGAN.

 

Unfortunately, we've got a problem when it comes to the ground textures. There's a tiling effect with ALL ground textures currently in the game, and it becomes more visible at higher resolutions (and further LOD). I know this because I play at a high resolution with tweaked LOD (so that higher LOD textures appear further away for me). Using ESRGAN *will* give us much sharper ground textures, but I believe it will also increase the tiling effect so that the ground will look like fake wallpaper. This is just the way the original ground textures were made. The only way to fix this would be to create new ground textures from scratch that blend better (without obvious tiling) as in modern games.

Still worth trying on ground textures just for the heck of it, but I'm worried about the tiling effect....

Edited January 9 by xanthus