Doing 3rd phase:

• New Cupscale 1.39.0f1 - has a faster network to use and a better set of upscalers included by default
  • 4x_BSRGAN upscaler to be used on most textures (works to bring back some detail and retain colours a fair bit)
  • 4x_RealSR_DF2K_JPEG to be used on icons (seems to keep a nice lot of detail)
• Redo all files
  • Not going to desharpen but have used bc1 stuff on the DDS files
  • PLT files need a rework, see if they work better than before (using PNG middlemen - nope PNG conversion in nwn_crunch is not great apparently TGA it is! but we can use output PNG from CupScale to go back to DDS)
• Notes on some other bits:
  • Using PNG files now - seems to work with the modellers a lot better less errors then TGA! Also makes checking the files miles easier and takes less disk space (and may even improve timings a little since they're smaller to read/write).
  • The new mode is around 25% - 40% faster or so so well worth using called RealESRGAN (NCNN) but only works at x4. If we run desharpeners etc. don't use this.

We'll run the Cupscale on the entire image set twice using the first two models, and pick the best images from each. The DDS images already have gone through a pass of 1x_artifacts_bc1_free_alsa (thanks Loinne!)

Comparisons

The models compared below:

• 4x_ESRGAN - Original but not the best now, makes things rather blurry - see below for examples. It is worth keeping as a comparison since it what I was using in Test Phase 1 and 2.
• 4x_BSRGAN - Seems to be the best all-rounder and keeps the colours the most similar, but can wash out some finer lined details (see shield icons) but given the scale of the original icons it's not that bad. Time to convert: 23459 seconds or 390.98 minutes or 6.51 hours. About 1 second/image on average.
• 4x_RealSR_DF2K_JPEG - Seems to work to keep the detail on icons, like shields, since obviously its treating things as JPEG/photos by the name - thus in some cases it keeps too much of the original and is just a mess. Some things like faces can look a bit better with this.
• realesrgan-x4plus - Is a bit like 4x_BSRGAN, but does further smoothing. Looks a bit too different for my tastes and a bit too dark (see door below) but if you want smooth you can get it with this.

Comparisons (note of course there may be transparency lost):

Ignored Files

I went through and removed 518 files totalling 918MB of PNGs (pre-DDS) since they're pretty much:

• Broken - eg: fnt_ files (will break the game, TXI references pixel locations)
• Silly to include - eg: black.tga or any of the numerous single colour files which simply have no scaling to be done on them
• Very much unused - portraits and icons with TEMP on them, blank icons, etc.
• Palette files used for PLT - should mess up things but didn't seem to. Removed just in case they're very much pixel perfect grids.
• Credits - yeah the game stores tons of (highish) res files for credits. Majority of the space saved here.

Removed Files Due to Taste / Looks Odd and needs fixing

Some files removed due to taste, some GUI things scale weirdly.

Also some bugs in my process! Such as icons not doing transparency properly so this is odd and needs to be fixed. Weirdly the PNGs look fine.

The blank Inventory icons (except the shield?) looks odd. The inventory is also now black instead of transparent and the lines are thicker. This seems to be from converting TGA's to PNGs not an issue with the upscaler as such, but need to test after redoing from source TGA files.

Bugs and Fixes

Lots of crashes - because of course NWN is ancient and sometimes hates things. Things noted here:

Buggy and unneeded textures

Whole list of these! Egad so many that if present can even make other ones buggy (DDS overrides PLT!). To follow, but also removing ones that are not used by the game ("TEMP" icons for instance) or are buggy (GUI boxes above) saves even more time.

Transparency on some textures

trm02 textures and even usual rural is a bit buggy; alpha is probably the issue - try Test Phase 2 options for Alpha modes perhaps.

Doesn't affect all things with transparency oddly!

Transparency Testing

Testing on a multi-use texture plc_trans.tga used for blood and other things. This has to use the base ESRGAN (Pytorch) for the transparency options.

All are using 4x_BSRGAN model in Cupscale 1.39.0.

Note Alpha Depth of Binary or Tertiary just cuts a load of alpha out. Don't use for the blood one. Might work better when we want to eliminate the "white edges" in grass and leaves above since it leaves a hard edge in the final result.

The options are described a little in cupscale but in more detail here: https://github.com/JoeyBallentine/ESRGAN/blob/master/README.md

• --alpha-mode 1: Fills the alpha channel with both white and black and extracts the difference from each result.
• --alpha-mode 2: Upscales the alpha channel by itself, as a fake 3 channel image (The IEU way) then combines with result.
• --alpha-mode 3: Shifts the channels so that it upscales the alpha channel along with other regular channels then combines with result.

Might try to redo all the scaling with transparency on and using mode 2 with 8 bit transparency.

Issues on Blood

Looks weird - transparent! Edit: Found the issue (or at least what it could be) the TGA source I used was beta files which were altered for Final. Probably should redo the TGA source using the game TGA if it is the highest (or equal highest).

Winter Tileset

Oddities...

Effect Oddities

Original / 4x has a weird thing with flares:

DDS flippy flip

The DDS → TGA in crunch does not flip the file. This means when doing (intermediary upscaled PNG) → DDS you do the opposite of your other textures. The results need to be "upside down" when the DDS file is viewed. It causes some wild issues otherwise, of course!

Distort TXI option

Distorted textures cannot exceed 256x256 resolution apparently - needs fully testing since one "shinywater" below is bigger than 256 already This is the TXI option "distort 1". This means primarily water but also other things like lava! Also look out for "arturowidth" and "arturoheight"

List of files:

Note I also removed basically all the "txxXX_water" files - just in case!

Mipmaps

Don't use DDS without mipmaps will crash - all mine have mipmaps mind you, even ones that don't really need it (icons for instance don't need mipmaps, the game has them at a set distance always on the GUI for maximum quality, but hey why not).

Portraits

The smaller the portrait the worse the upscale of course, the tiny ones turn out rather awful. So the easiest way is to redo the top biggest one and the others just reuse.

For creatures:

For placeables since they lack H and L (mostly! there are 1 or 2 that have them, perhaps since the portraits are reused on creatures for some reason).

Oddities for the different options below:

• po_plc_rainbw_h - Placeable but has h and l versions
• po_plc_bbl_sm_m - This one has ONLY the medium one for some reason
• po_msc_ - several placeable ones not marked "po_plc_" for some reason
• po_levelup - only file, used in the top right for levelup (Equivalent I think to "m")
• po_gi_x0horse_m - I think a placeable one, has only m/s/t
• po_door01_m - placeable or door but not named po_plc_ so has only m/s/t
• po_pause - solo file like levelup that has just the "m" sized variant
• po_timestop - solo file like levelup that just has the "m" sized variant
• po_unknownpc - Special solo file
• There's also a few default portrait files not prefixed po_ likely used in some cases

Can remove:

• po_plc_x0_syt_s and po_plc_x0_tyt_t are the same item, no "m" version, and thus misnamed or the only ones. Neither appear in portraits.2da (syt/tyt). Looks to be a destroyed version of po_plc_x0_myt_m.
• Unused due to odd names not sure why they're even there:
  • po_pwc_mage_001_
  • po_pwc_post_001_
  • po_pwc_rubl_001_
  • po_pwc_rubl_002_
  • po_pwc_rubl_003_
  • po_pwc_sand_001_, po_pwc_sand_002_, po_pwc_sand_003_ and po_pwc_sand_004_
  • po_pwc_sieg_001_, po_pwc_sieg_002_, po_pwc_sieg_003
  • po_pwc_skull_01__
  • po_pwc_tabl_001_, po_pwc_tabl_002_
  • po_pwc_torc_001_

PLT work

Okay this is pretty simple now with Symmetrics tooling:

• Flatten PLTs
• Upscale PLT files
  • Likely use JPEG one on the icons but we'll see
• Recreate PLTs

Outcomes:

Looks great this bit!

Bit blocky on the colour front here;

Symmetric is a god and may be able to add some basic magic to smooth it out a bit.