High Quality Townmaps

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

The 8-bit causes some inconvenience, but I'll give it a try.

 

Umm...I...WOW!!

 

Nice pack man Its really nice to know that you are still interested in improving arcanum but as I said before the best thing will be to have a full source codes working with disassembled version is endless...

What about combining 1024x768 patch with this pack ? I mean by changing hardcoded resolution constants for textures from 64x32 to 256x128 pixels ...

Like new games using 8192x8192 textures this will be great improvement than using resampled textures only.

Or you might add antialiasing filter to that,because final texture is more than 3x smaller than original (adding new section with disassembled version of antialiasing filter function that points to memory buffer,or maybe direct x mod is needed),but its probably not worth to do that....

 

Great work Drogg!I thank you for or your improvments of Arcanum xD

 

Great work Drogg!I thank you for or your improvments of Arcanum xD

 

Omfg...Sry for DoublePost...I'm not so used to this forum xD (i'm new)

 

So am I new to forums...

 

If you double post, there's always the "Delete" button.

Anyway, welcome to the forums.

 

I never see the delete botton when I want it.
Or is it only good for my posts.

 

Yeah, it tends to magically disappear. Little bastard!

 

I wanted to thank you for improving this great game.

 

First, thanks for this and all the other awesome improvements to this game.

I'm having a bit of a problem with this one fix though: the game no longer starts after I install the high quality maps. I did a vanilla install and then the official patch, unofficial patch, and the high res patch. I was playing the game fine with no glitches, but then I installed the high res maps, and now nothing I do can get the game to execute.

Edit: I think the high resolution patch was the culprit, as I changed my video card recently. A clean install of everything worked fine.

 

You've probably selected a resolution not supported by your videocard/monitor, thus the game wouldn't start up.

 

That's precisely what happened - I had to manually add the resolution from the graphics card control panel. Thanks - Sorry for my idiocy.