My wife's favorite RPGs are Icewind Dale and Arcanum. I never understood why that is, mine are Fallout and Baldur's Gate.
She often nudges me to play those games, and sometimes you just feel that it's time to replay one of those classics. I felt the call about Arcanum two weeks ago.
But before I got into it, I explained to her my position on the early 00s isometric RPGs. I have a bone to pick with their resolution situation we're in right now.
Before '95, games used pixelated graphics, so it's very simple with them - you just upscale them through Nearest Neighbor and you're good to go. Lossless Scaling allows just that.
Modern games are fine, too.
But there is a period between '97 and 2003 that saw isometric games with a realistic graphics. They can't be upscaled using nearest neighbor, they'd look jagged.
For them, we have "high resolution" mods that shoot the camera into the sky. Everything becomes minuscule, but displayed at its true resolution.
The downside of that approach is you can see too much of the area.
The camera becomes less intimate, you can see shit you have no business seeing. You also concentrate on a tiny rectangle on your monitor where you characters are. It's bad.
Some people even keep their old monitors just for those games.
Those of us who aren't lucky enough to own a CRT, we can render the game at a compromise resolution of 1366*768 or 1600*900 and play in full screen.
This technique upscales the image to 1920*1080 through linear texture filtering. This makes the image so blurry, it's like looking through a wet window. It's bad.
So how do you fix it?
I explained it to my wife, who decided to write a better upscaler. She spent 2 weeks writing a program that would grab my 1366*768 image and upscale it to 1920*1080 through bicubic interpolation.
This makes the image look crisper, sharper, the details look amazingly well.
I'm enjoying the fuck out of it, and decided to show you how I'm currently playing Arcanum.
What the mod does is this:
- Captures the image in Arcanum's window
-Upscales it to... no, scratch that, it took 100ms for a single frame on the CPU to upscale it
- Passes the image on to the GPU instead
- GPU upscales it
- Renders it gloriously at full screen on another monitor
Which means I need two monitors for this, but I have them, so I'm good. She says it could be done with one monitor, maybe, but capturing things in an inactive window in older games is very difficult.
There are libraries for capturing things in DX9-12 games, but Arcanum is based on DDraw, which is like DX7 or less. And maybe if she was Drog or if Drog's High Res mod was open source,
she could do it, but she's thankfully not Drog, and Drog is a mercantile asshole who keeps mods hostage until payment is sent to his Patreon, never sharing his code.
Anyway, that's how I'm playing Arcanum. Wanted to share with you guys.
She often nudges me to play those games, and sometimes you just feel that it's time to replay one of those classics. I felt the call about Arcanum two weeks ago.
But before I got into it, I explained to her my position on the early 00s isometric RPGs. I have a bone to pick with their resolution situation we're in right now.
Before '95, games used pixelated graphics, so it's very simple with them - you just upscale them through Nearest Neighbor and you're good to go. Lossless Scaling allows just that.
Modern games are fine, too.
But there is a period between '97 and 2003 that saw isometric games with a realistic graphics. They can't be upscaled using nearest neighbor, they'd look jagged.
For them, we have "high resolution" mods that shoot the camera into the sky. Everything becomes minuscule, but displayed at its true resolution.
The downside of that approach is you can see too much of the area.
The camera becomes less intimate, you can see shit you have no business seeing. You also concentrate on a tiny rectangle on your monitor where you characters are. It's bad.
Some people even keep their old monitors just for those games.
Those of us who aren't lucky enough to own a CRT, we can render the game at a compromise resolution of 1366*768 or 1600*900 and play in full screen.
This technique upscales the image to 1920*1080 through linear texture filtering. This makes the image so blurry, it's like looking through a wet window. It's bad.
So how do you fix it?
I explained it to my wife, who decided to write a better upscaler. She spent 2 weeks writing a program that would grab my 1366*768 image and upscale it to 1920*1080 through bicubic interpolation.
This makes the image look crisper, sharper, the details look amazingly well.
I'm enjoying the fuck out of it, and decided to show you how I'm currently playing Arcanum.
What the mod does is this:
- Captures the image in Arcanum's window
-
- Passes the image on to the GPU instead
- GPU upscales it
- Renders it gloriously at full screen on another monitor
Which means I need two monitors for this, but I have them, so I'm good. She says it could be done with one monitor, maybe, but capturing things in an inactive window in older games is very difficult.
There are libraries for capturing things in DX9-12 games, but Arcanum is based on DDraw, which is like DX7 or less. And maybe if she was Drog or if Drog's High Res mod was open source,
she could do it, but she's thankfully not Drog, and Drog is a mercantile asshole who keeps mods hostage until payment is sent to his Patreon, never sharing his code.
Anyway, that's how I'm playing Arcanum. Wanted to share with you guys.
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Thank God!
