gamophyte on 14/9/2019 at 18:47
Quote Posted by Akven
I found an external object viewer. I will just try to look through every object in the game with new textures in that viewer and see if there are strange transparency issues which I will fix with PNG transparency channel.
For now I am finishing Thief 2 ESRGAN Video pack (SD and HD in 30 fps) which looks much better than vanilla videos. Also I fixed some interlace glitches in original movies for CS10, CS15, B16 and INTRO.
The "Dark Engine viewer - Thief: The Dark Project 20th Anniversary Edition" right? If not I would recommend, but also what are you using in that case?
Akven on 16/9/2019 at 09:00
Could you provide a link to this viewer?
P.S. I found it already)
gamophyte on 16/9/2019 at 12:58
Sorry I put it in quotes hoping it would be easy to find as I was running away. (
http://forcesw.com/)
What are you using then?
Akven on 17/9/2019 at 08:43
Yes, I use Dark Engine viewer - Thief: The Dark Project 20th Anniversary Edition now.
I started to fix transparency, found some issues.
For example:
(
https://imgsli.com/NjY3OQ)
This flower was already bugged in vanilla game with no transparency in texture. I added transparency so black box is not visible on flower. But model still looks strange with texture flipping on the corners where the black box was.
But it still looks better than with no transparent texture, so I think I will leave my variant.
About all the trees and bushes had this issue in model.
Akven on 17/9/2019 at 13:57
Well, it seems viewer does not support gif palette transparency, so I had to guess
Akven on 19/9/2019 at 09:28
Little note to myself. I really hate Thief engine:D For the past time I had to guess too many times of how exactly it works. So few commentaries:
1. All the FAM textures use external palette with color information. Palette is located in each folder with textures family in file full.pcx and it alters how the texture looks. If there is now full.pcx in folder, when textures use their own internal palette and do not need to be applied with external palette. Thief Gold uses one same palette for every texture except folders with no full.pcx. Thief 2 uses separate palettes for every folder but sometimes uses Thief Gold pallette.
2. For easy tiling of textures after upscaling I made additional script which firstly expand image with overlapping pixels from opposite side. And after upscaling cuts this additional pixels. In this case you do not need to manually tile every texture in game. Cause subjective neural upscaling breaks tiling, but saves it if there are additional overlapping pixels present prior to upscaling.
3. Textures in MESH and OBJ uses their own internal palette and do not need any palette applying.
4. As I could see, only OBJ textures use transparency. Transparency for textures in Thief is based on palette of the texture. First color is always rendered as transparent. So you could open texture in graphics editor and look if texture use this first color or not.
5. Currently neural networks do not support transparency or masks. So you need to edit every upscaled transparent texture manually by deleting areas or creating masks based on original texture. Nightmare. Object viewers for Thief do not support correctly drawn transparency, so looking for palette information through graphics editor is the only way (I wrote to Force to update his viewer on russian forum, maybe he will fix this in future).
PinkDot on 19/9/2019 at 11:57
Quote Posted by Akven
5. Currently neural networks do not support transparency or masks. So you need to edit every upscaled transparent texture manually by deleting areas or creating masks based on original texture. Nightmare.
An idea - if you know, that a texture is using transparency, then you may change the first colour in pallette to something standing out, like a strong pink or something. And then use colour selection in your converted image to get the upscaled mask, by selecting those pink colours. It may work or may not - depending what the algorithm is actually doing to these images, but if it does, it will save some time on masking out the transparency.
Akven on 19/9/2019 at 12:26
Quote Posted by PinkDot
An idea - if you know, that a texture is using transparency, then you may change the first colour in pallette to something standing out, like a strong pink or something. And then use colour selection in your converted image to get the upscaled mask, by selecting those pink colours. It may work or may not - depending what the algorithm is actually doing to these images, but if it does, it will save some time on masking out the transparency.
I was thinking of it but no. It will blend solid pink color into different shades with intercrossing between pink parts and main image. It will require about the same time in graphics editor to separate as fixing original black color. Maybe one day someone will improve ESRGAN algorithm.
Shimonhead on 19/9/2019 at 16:02
Just a thought...could the final release of the ESRGAN'd Thief Gold Videos be linked into this first page? They should be included as part of the final 1.3 release texture downloads, right? To make a complete Thief Gold ESRGAN package?
Akven on 20/9/2019 at 16:36
Good point. Will link them