Vapourware Daggerfall Unity isnt Vaporware

[ADL]

Damn, this will be the TES VI

Wouldnt be surprised if Todders shut this down quickly when Daggerfall sales suddenly starts to threaten Skyrim 2's sale figures.

Yeah, especially given that DF has been freeware since time immemorial.

Keep in mind, "Freeware" is in no way the same as "Public Domain".

I mean this is a clear cut case of reverse engineering. They're not distributing the assets so I don't see how anyone could make a legal argument to shut this down. If they were to pursue this, they'd have to do the same with OpenMW, which they've given the okay for on record (which is why it's the ultimate trojan horse for fans being able to make TES/nuFallout competitors).

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

If they were to pursue this, they'd have to do the same with OpenMW, which they've given the okay for on record (which is why it's the ultimate trojan horse for fans being able to make TES/nuFallout competitors).

Copyright law is not like trademark law. There is no "active enforcement" legal theory. At any time, Bethesda is free to withdraw their consent, cease offering the free downloads, and C&D any fan projects.

 

[Nilz]

Copyright law is not like trademark law. There is no "active enforcement" legal theory. At any time, Bethesda is free to withdraw their consent, cease offering the free downloads, and C&D any fan projects.

...And fuck over what little community good-will they have left.
I mean, they're stupid, but not THAT stupid.

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

...And fuck over what little community good-will they have left.
I mean, they're stupid, but not THAT stupid.

For now. We were discussing legalities, not customer relations.

 

[Nilz]

For now. We were discussing legalities, not customer relations.

You're right of course. I just don't think it would ever get to that point, unless perhaps Beth wanted to do a remaster of their own for those games. A terrifying notion.

 

[Luzur]

 

[Luzur]

So, i might have tipped them off with that AI texturing thing...

AI Upscaled Textures

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Unread post by MasonFace » Fri Dec 21, 2018 11:06 pm

By suggestion of Luzur, I started tinkering around with some experimental artificial intelligence upscaling methods.

I just started with some basic tests using ESRGAN (https://github.com/xinntao/ESRGAN), and while they aren't perfect, they really ain't half bad! Take a look:

Original Daggerfall texture 2-0 on the left, and ESRGAN upscaled version on the right.
https://imgur.com/zHqCYr0

Original Daggerfall texture 3-0 on the left, and ESRGAN upscaled version on the right.
https://imgur.com/QD83bTw

I think this would be a good way to get a high quality pack of textures rolled out quickly while talented artists take their time remastering the originals (which I think most of us would prefer).

Next is a test using SFTGAN (https://github.com/xinntao/SFTGAN) which I think looks a bit better for textures:

https://imgur.com/YsyXfEe

https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1642

 

[Drax]

Oh nice, Carolus bless your soul, Luzur

 

[Drax]

Also, jesus christ that AI thing is scary, it can figure out that those lines are cracks and simulate that.

Couple a more advanced, real-time version of this with a neural-link and voila! You have the matrix.
Or, replace the neural link with holograms and you've a holodeck.

Goddamn I may actually live long enough to see those come thru.

 

[Barbalos]

Yes, that ESRGAN (and the SFTGAN the last update mentions) methods are pretty interesting stuff. I'm surprised to see the Daggerfall Unity guy trying this stuff out so fast. Very cool.

 

[Merlkir]

IMO they should use the same method as this DOOM upscale project and keep the pixelated style, just higher resolution. I think it looks better.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/99021-v-0-95-doom-neural-upscale-2x/

 

[Makabb]

Daggerfall is now confirmed to be TES VI

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

Daggerfall is now confirmed to be TES VI

Stop tryn' to jynx it.

 

[Makabb]

Daggerfall is now confirmed to be TES VI

Stop tryn' to jynx it.

Sup Drog

 

[Luzur]

I was tinkering around with ESRGAN and SFTGAN this morning and found a workflow that produces consistently decentresults.

My new method involves appying a 1 pixel guassian blur to the vanilla texture then feeding it into ESRGAN, then applying a sharpen filter to the result, then upscaling that with SFTGAN. The results look a little better to my eye:

Then I got a bit curious what the finals results might look like in-game with normal, occlusion, and emission maps applied, so I manually created some to slap on there:

I still don't consider the results stunning, but it gets acceptable results without much work. I could probably churn out some good textures in little time.

The ESRGAN seems to put out a LOT of noise on these very small textures and I've been paying around with the interpolation to see how it reacts. Right now I'm using interpolation value of alpha = 0.1 to get a smoother output before feeding its result into the SFTGAN and it seems to work okay. The first images I posted to this thread using ESRGAN was using alpha = 0.8 and you can see how it added a lot of strange details into the texture. It was interesting, but not all that great. Blurring the vanilla texture by 1 pixel seemed to help a little in preventing ESRGAN from injecting more noise.

I think what would help this out the most would be for us to train the AI on a large set of HD textures so that it is trained for this specific task (I think the included models were trained on very general pictures). Does anyone happen to have a large set of HD textures (maybe 500 or more?) that we could run the training algorithm on? It would also help if said person has a Geforce 1080TI or two...
Looks promissing! Id like to see some enemy sprites, or npcs, or tree sprites...I will try this method on some NPCs and vegitation when I get home this evening, but I suspect it won't work very well... but I hope I'm wrong!

 

[Luzur]

 

[Luzur]

 

[MilesBeyond]

I was surprised that I haven't seen anything about this on here, and a quick search reveals that I haven't missed any (although the possibility that I'm just shit at searching hasn't escaped me). There's a Unity remake of Daggerfall in process here: https://www.dfworkshop.net/ and unlike most past Daggerfall remakes that eventually vapoured, this one seems worth getting excited about.

First, it's nearly in Alpha state. What this means is that they've nearly implemented all of Daggerfall and are just about ready to move on to the bug-squashing stage. If you take a look at the roadmap (https://www.dfworkshop.net/projects/daggerfall-unity/roadmap/) you'll see that there isn't much left to go, and most of what's remaining are small things. The project is updated regularly and seems poised to actually deliver on its promises.

Second, its promises. Not only is it presenting a Daggerfall that's cleaner, runs smoother, and has some visual and QoL enhancements (all optional, of course), it also features quite a few improvements. One of my favourites is the spellcasting AI - enemy spellcasters will now be more intelligent about their spells instead of just unloading their entire mana bar in one second, which virtually guaranteed that they'd kill you if you didn't have any way to prevent it, and themselves if they did. Either way it was frustrating (remember watching Liches immediately die from their own AoE spells?).

Finally, its moddability. It has way more potential for player-made content than Daggerfall, and even in pre-Alpha there are already quite a few floating around (mostly visual enhancements, but someone's made an Archaeologists faction that's geared towards language-heavy characters).

It's still not 100% playable from beginning to end, but it's probably around 80% playable at this point. If you're a Daggerfall fanboy like me, it's a hugely exciting project.

 

[Obsequious Approbation]

Luzur keeps us up-to-date in the other thread: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/daggerfall-unity-isnt-vaporware.44006/page-44

 

[agris]

I was surprised that I haven't seen anything about this on here, and a quick search reveals that I haven't missed any (although the possibility that I'm just shit at searching hasn't escaped me).

daggerfall unity rpg codex

 

[MilesBeyond]

I was surprised that I haven't seen anything about this on here, and a quick search reveals that I haven't missed any (although the possibility that I'm just shit at searching hasn't escaped me).

daggerfall unity rpg codex

Oh man. I've been using the site's search function, like a sucker.

 

[Luzur]

Anyway, I was curious so I signed up for a 30 day trial with Topaz AI's upscaler, and the results are quite nice. Here's a bit of a dump of some textures and sprites I tested it on, it seems to do really well with flora and really bad with faces. Mostly Daggerfall, though a few are from other games.

Warning, a whole ton of images in the spoiler.

Spoiler

Looks like my little AI hint took speed on the modding

 

[Feargus Jewhart]

Looks like my little AI hint took speed on the modding

How does it feel to put a bunch of google abusing hackfraud modders doing their " 4K texture packs" out of business?

 

[Luzur]

Looks like my little AI hint took speed on the modding

How does it feel to put a bunch of google abusing hackfraud modders doing their " 4K texture packs" out of business?

Are you one of them? you sound awfully butthurt about it.

Personally though, i dont care, i just want the game out and some sweet mods

 

[Feargus Jewhart]

Are you one of them? you sound awfully butthurt about it.

Personally though, i dont care, i just want the game out and some sweet mods

No, it was a joke on the fact that 90% of texture packs are just compilations of free texture resources.