High Quality Townmaps

Drog Black Tooth · Guest

Another big improvement!

I've always felt that townmaps (maps for local areas) were poorly done. Indeed, they were downscaled with nearest neighbor type resampling, the most primitive technique, thus they looked jagged and pixelated.

Finally, I devised a more complex way of generating townmaps, and I've regenerated them all using bilinear resampling (probably the best resampling method that doesn't cause any artifacts).

Here's a side-by-side comparison of old and new townmaps, just three examples.

Now they look much better!

Townmaps take a plenty of space, so this won't be included in the UAP, but will be a separate download. And it's already available!

DOWNLOAD (112 Mb):
Mirror 1 (courtesy of Terra-Arcanum.com)
Mirror 2 (courtesy of ComputerGames.ro)
Mirror 3 (courtesy of Patches-Scrolls.de)
Mirror 4 (Megaupload)

P.S. Since it's just a graphics change, it won't cause any incompatibility issues. It also fixes the missing "K'na Tha 2" townmap and many other inconsistencies (they never bothered to update some townmaps, so they had old graphics/objects/layout/etc). All in all, there's absolutely no reason to not use this pack.

Dark Elf · Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2008 4:48 pm Post subject:

Why did Troika hire a whole team, when all they would have needed was one Drog?
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Frigo · Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2008 5:43 pm Post subject:

On a side note, I have implemented a general kernel-based filtering class, and several filter kernels (bell, box, cubic /including cubic b-spline and catmull-rom/, gaussian, hermite, lanczos, linear, sinc and sink), as well as 2x1D resampling, radial resampling and bilateral filtering. I can help if mathematically precise resampling is needed.
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Dirtman · Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2008 6:38 pm Post subject:

Wow! I'm speechless.
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The_Deathsangel · Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2008 7:59 pm Post subject:

... how in the heck did you manage that?

frosted ambassador · Expert Joined: 16 Apr 2008 Posts: 74

I'm incredibly impressed.

Perhaps you could inform us as to how you went about doing this?

Dark Elf · Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2008 8:12 pm Post subject:

Are there any noticeable differences in performance? Not that I expect there to be any, but for the poor people out there on low-end machines...
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rroyo · Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 12:00 am Post subject:

What the four posters above me said.

Nice work!
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Hans Maulwurf · Journeyman Joined: 08 Jan 2008 Posts: 37

Looks absolutely amazing.

Arthgon · Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2008 3:03 pm Post subject:

Wow...very good work.
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GrimmHatter · Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 7:42 am Post subject:

It does give them a nice, polished look, especially the sprites of light sources in dark environments.

[Offtopic] I just noticed...is Drog's avatar the bartender from Bloodlines?[/Offtopic]
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FourHorsemen · Water Merchant Joined: 12 Jan 2004 Posts: 573

One word: DAMM!

magikot · Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 4:10 pm Post subject:

Dark Elf · Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 5:20 pm Post subject:

Yup, that's the fat, ugly vampire at the Asylum.
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Those who forget the pasta are doomed to reheat it.

Dirtman · Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 5:54 pm Post subject:

Damned Bloodlines and their bugs. It never worked properly for me.

Laggy 'n' shit!
_________________
and when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
perhaps I may become a highwayman again
or I may simply be a single drop of rain
but I will remain

Dark Elf · Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 5:59 pm Post subject:

The only problem I've ever had with Bloodlines is the ridiculous black screen you get if you're above 60 hz. Have you installed the patch?
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Those who forget the pasta are doomed to reheat it.

Dirtman · Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 6:31 pm Post subject:

Drog Black Tooth · Guest

Please stay on topic.

Dirtman · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 8:58 am Post subject:

Sorry, got carried away.

_________________
and when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
perhaps I may become a highwayman again
or I may simply be a single drop of rain
but I will remain

Peter Quincy · Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 1:54 am Post subject:

Thanks for the continuing improvements, Mr Black Tooth. Am I the only one who thinks the new townmaps now look like the sims 1's neighborhood veiw?
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krille · Journeyman Joined: 01 Oct 2008 Posts: 29

Thanks for spoiling Bloodlines for me guys. Appreciated.

These textures, while much less intense (which means so much easier on the eyes and the brain), the bilinear filtering looks really blurry and dull, almost sterile. Hmm... have you tried trilinear filtering, using the as original map as the second mip map? Might make it appear slightly sharper (worth a try at least). Or maybe not. In fact, unless you're into graphics yourself, Drog, I think you should pick up Frigo on his offer. Maybe he's got suggestions on a sharper and better filtering method? Don't you, Frigo?

Still, splendid work as usual Drog! Were you in any way affiliated with Troika or the (official) development of Arcanum at any time?

Frigo, I can nothing but agree with your avatar. These are worrying times, the future even more.

Frigo · Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2008 7:52 pm Post subject:

I don't know what program Drog used, but most of them are bugged in some way or other, so I think those artifacts were the result of these bugs, not the properties of the filters themselves.

Irfanview, for example, has a COMPLETELY bugged Lanczos downsampling algorithm that's more like nearest neighbor filtering. Especially visible with sharp, small-scale contrasts (I've noticed it at the clothes of the "barbara" image). Probably the result of the miscalculation of the filter radius or the inverse projected boundaries.

Photofiltre shrinks and darkens resized images, probably the result of faulty coordinate calculations, and neglecting the division by the sum of the sampled values of the filter.

Xnview was doing fine as far as I've tested it.

Paint Shop Pro is also bugged as I hear, taking random noise from outside of the boundaries of the image.

I usually use Lanczos, and "sink", my own FFT-derived filter, with a filter radius of 3.0. They're general use, medium speed, sharp, and their artifacts are noticable only in extreme conditions, like in the case of long filter radius, high upsampling ratio, or excessive edges.

If Drog provides me an example image he had trouble with (preferably in 24 bit PNG), I can show the results of the various resizing filters, and give him a simple resizer program he can use.
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Drog Black Tooth · Guest

Townmaps are generated by WorldEd. It takes screenshots of a map in small chunks, each being 256x128 pixels. Each chunk is downscaled to 64x32 with nearest neighbor resampling and saved. 8 bit bitmaps are used. That's what the game uses, 64x32 sized 8 bit bitmaps.

To generate high quality townmaps, I made a hacked version of WorldEd that outputs full size pixel perfect (1:1) townmap images, each chunk being 256x128.

This way, all images can be processed with a 3rd party program. These new townmaps were batch converted by Photoshop. Basically, you have to convert each image from indexed to RGB color, then downscale it to 64x32 and convert it back to indexed.

Bilinear was used since it doesn't cause artifacts, e.g. bicubic produces a light outline on an image, and since townmaps consist of small tiles, it would be very noticeable.

I don't really think you can produce much better results than this pack, since sharpening will just distort the original images. But feel free to try. Here's a full size townmap for Qintarra, you can try processing it with your filters. When done, create a 'townmap' folder in your "modules\arcanum" folder and put it there to check the results in-game.

Frigo · Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2008 10:15 pm Post subject:

The 8-bit causes some inconvenience, but I'll give it a try.
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stylex · Expert Joined: 16 Jul 2008 Posts: 89 Location: Lithuania

Umm...I...WOW!!
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