Quinnocent

Thanks for the reply! I guess I agree with most of what you're saying. Maybe it's better if it's something done by the community, at least as a proof of concept. And yeah, I actually had the same thought about ground textures and the like that are designed for tiling. I do feel like these techniques have sorta "arrived" visually, at least to the extent that they're a noticeable visual upgrade without excessive noise or need for hand curation. I suggested this specifically after being impressed by the real world results of similar projects for games like Morrowind. Even HL1 isn't bad, I don't think? This is the full video that the still you linked is drawn from, right? Left is stock and right is ESRGAN? I'm not sure how legit this is, but it certainly looks consistent with ESRGAN results I've seen from other games with a similar age. The upscaled side looks way better, to my eyes. Maybe I can figure it out myself, to test it out? Would that be possible for an individual to do? ESRGAN is open source, and there are guides out there to help newbies use it, and my computer is powerful enough to handle doing the crunching necessary, if I'm willing to let it sit there and work for a long time. I also know there are already user-made texture mods for CoX, and we now have a mod manager in development to make replacement easier, and there are tools to unpack the textures (not really sure how to repack them). There are even guides like this one: https://wiki.ourodev.com/view/Texture_modding. I guess the biggest question I have is this: can you even substitute a texture for a higher-resolution one, via the simple replacement that texture mods use? Like is that possible at all? I've been Googling it, and some people say you can't. Those are all super outdated posts, though, and I have no idea what the Homecoming client is capable of.

Ideally, there would be no real negative effects. Basically, this can be used to create higher resolution textures with a much greater degree of clarity than you'd get with existing non-AI upscaling algorithms. This is really useful for people with a little extra performance headroom who want better visuals. Since CoX is such an old game, most people with remotely modern GPU's likely have enough VRAM headroom to enable higher resolution textures. If this were to be implemented, we'd most likely see existing texture options left in place. So for people who don't enable this mode, they'd get the existing textures and existing performance. The real downside would be a decently larger install size, which is a problem with adding any high-resolution texture pack. Some people in areas with strict bandwidth controls might not appreciate that.

Sure. Look at the before/after pictures in the examples shown in the article I linked above. Here are some. Morrowind upscaled with two different neural network algorithms: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/45247 https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/46221 The original version of Final Fantasy 7 with neural network upscaling of some of the background art and textures: https://captrobau.blogspot.com/2019/01/ff7-remako-hd-graphics-mod-beta-released.html Doom: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/99021-doom-neural-upscale-2x-v-10/ You can honestly find lots of mods like this. Like most Bethesda or Bethesda engine games have these mods. A bunch of other classic games have mods like this too.

These techniques use machine learning-trained algorithms to generate upscaled textures at a much higher quality level than traditional upscaling and sharpening techniques. This could be used to dramatically improve the quality of all of the game's textures while remaining more or less 100% vanilla-friendly and true to the original design. I believe City of Heroes is right in the sweet spot to make good use of this. There are open source algorithms available which work very well. Doing this would be compute intensive, but it would be free. All you would need is one developer with a fairly recent nvidia GPU. The results are mostly good enough to not really require after the fact editing, in my opinion, or you would need to do only minimal cleaning of artifacts. So it wouldn't really be labor intensive. Modders have already made extensive use of these techniques, and lots of older games have AI upscaled texture packs which look really good. r/gameupscale's Getting Started guide describes better than I can, so I'll just post it here. This subreddit focuses on this kind of conversion. This guide lists the most commonly used techniques, and it gives examples of such techniques in action in existing game mods.