High Quality Townmaps

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.

 

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.

 

Wow! I'm speechless.

 

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

 

I'm incredibly impressed.

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

 

What the four posters above me said.

Nice work!

 

Looks absolutely amazing.

 

Wow...very good work.

 

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]

 

One word: DAMM!

 

I've always thought so.

 

Damned Bloodlines and their bugs. It never worked properly for me. Laggy 'n' shit!

 

Never got the black screen. I've installed the patch. I've even installed the unofficial patches. I never got very far, since it was even worse on my old PC, which I had a couple of years ago when I bought the game. And even that one exceeded some of the requirements.

Trying every tweak and advice posted on the internet, I've managed to reduce the lag, but it still annoys the shit out of me.

I'm planning on buying a new PC this winter, maybe ridiculously new technology like Quad core processors will be able to handle it, but I doubt it.

A question for all of you native English speakers... Is the phrase planning on buying a correct and existing phrase in the language? I've written it a few sentences back, but since my English is degenerating rapidly from not speaking it, I'm generally insecure in my knowledge of English grammar.

 

Please stay on topic.

 

Sorry, got carried away. :teeth:

 

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?