Widescreen mod

[kavehth]

after a bit of searching i found this software for resizing images

you can see the results compared with the remastered version here

i think it looks quite good. I didn't really play with the setting much so maybe it can be even better.

there is a 30 day free trial so you can try it out for yourselves.

so what do you guys think?

[ultraneonoirantihero]

so what do you guys think?

Looks good. When I make more backgrounds I will process them all, since there is a 30 day trial.

Also, I came to work and took a look at the website... and it's awful! Do you see it too?

Those new screenshots are utterly compressed, too bright and wrong colour pallete! The old ones were better. These new ones are perfect on my home monitor, but my display at work has higher brightness. The addons are PNG and the base backgrounds are JPG (same as the old ones), so it's probably due to the compression, but it's not that obvious difference on my home monitor. I'll make them PNG tonight... but I don't know what I did to new JPG backgrounds since the old JPG backgrounds were better? I'll change it as soon as I get home.

[ultraneonoirantihero]

OK, so I came back from work and took a look at the website, everything looks fine on my monitor, even with messing around with brightness/contrast.

Since I can't see what's wrong with the site images from my home, I made few Photoshop export variations and I'm putting them online so I can see the results tomorrow at my work on that crazy monitor.

If you guys can also take a look at the variations and tell me which screenshots are messed up and which are fine. There should be at least ONE version that has addons that seamlessly merge with the original backgrounds:


#1 Current site: png addons + png screengrabs from Fraps (raw png, no export)
http://www.grimwidescreen.com/index.html

#2 Very first site: png addons + jpg screenshots (print screen or scummRevisited copy, Photoshop new, paste, each exported as jpg directly from PS using 'save for web')
http://www.grimwidescreen.com/index_old_jpg_ok.html

#3 Yesterdays messed-up site: png addons + jpg screengrabs from Fraps (captured as png, batch export as jpg from Adobe Bridge via Adobe Photoshop)
http://www.grimwidescreen.com/index_old_jpg_bad.html

#4 New candidate: png addons + jpg screengrabs from Fraps (captured as png, each exported as jpg directly from PS using 'save for web')
http://www.grimwidescreen.com/index_new_jpg_maybe.html


Either Fraps or Bridge's 'batch export' messed things up, I'm hoping the 'save for web' will fix things. Let me know, I'll take a look tomorrow.

P.S. I just manually forced AntiAliasing in Residual via nVidia control panel. Is this a normal way to do this, doesn't Residual have native AA support?

P.P.S. Forced AA via nVidia control panel doesn't make Fraps screenshots better. They are still without AA... I've really spent too much time on screenshots and website instead of working on the backgrounds. Just let me know guys about those image variations I've posted above.

[ultraneonoirantihero]

I just checked out all the variations at my work: all are good except #3. I compared the images with EXIF reader and it looks like Adobe Bridge applied sRGB colour profile which displays strange on some monitors. The #4 version with each jpg background manually saved for web looks fine, I'm putting that version tonight. Well Johnny, after 3 iterations they'll finally look seamless Stupid Adobe Bridge.

Sorry for derailing this thread.

Yes Kavehth, I'll try that Resize9 software when I make enough backgrounds for first puzzle to be 100% widescreen completable, which is like 8 more backgrounds. But I think I can achieve the same result with Smart Sharpen in PS too... that Resize9 is just for people who want sharper images and don't wanna pay $1,399 for PS.

[kavehth]

Yes Kavehth, I'll try that Resize9 software when I make enough backgrounds for first puzzle to be 100% widescreen completable, which is like 8 more backgrounds. But I think I can achieve the same result with Smart Sharpen in PS too... that Resize9 is just for people who want sharper images and don't wanna pay $1,399 for PS.

I tried smart sharpen but could not get results as good as Resize9, i think it does other things beside sharpening the image.


@boltje: I tried your side-textures branch but when i put the side images in the game directory the game crashes when it tries to read the png images.

when the code reaches this line i get this error:

First-chance exception at 0x0152A7BE in residualvm.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000008.
Unhandled exception at 0x0152A7BE in residualvm.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000008.

what do you think causes the error? do i have to do anything else to get it to work?

[Botje]

@boltje: I tried your side-textures branch but when i put the side images in the game directory the game crashes when it tries to read the png images.

when the code reaches this line i get this error:

First-chance exception at 0x0152A7BE in residualvm.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000008.
Unhandled exception at 0x0152A7BE in residualvm.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000008.

what do you think causes the error? do i have to do anything else to get it to work?

That sounds like it's failing to load the png file for some reason. you could add a `if (!d.getSurface()) return nullptr;` statement before line 1402. That will just ignore side textures it cannot load.

[kavehth]

@boltje: I tried your side-textures branch but when i put the side images in the game directory the game crashes when it tries to read the png images.

when the code reaches this line i get this error:

First-chance exception at 0x0152A7BE in residualvm.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000008.
Unhandled exception at 0x0152A7BE in residualvm.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000008.

what do you think causes the error? do i have to do anything else to get it to work?

That sounds like it's failing to load the png file for some reason. you could add a `if (!d.getSurface()) return nullptr;` statement before line 1402. That will just ignore side textures it cannot load.

well i want to be able to have the side textures, do you have any idea why it is failing to load? how can i find out?

also the game is running at a 4:3 resolution, shouldn't it be running at 16:9 so it can load the textures?

[ultraneonoirantihero]

That sounds like it's failing to load the png file for some reason.

I always export png files the same way.

Did you (Botje) try running your mod with the new png files I added on the site?
http://www.grimwidescreen.com/download/ ... addons.zip

If you manage to run the mod with addons then the problem is not in the images but in the code.

P.S.
Kavehth, does it fail to load every image, or just specific ones? Remember when I asked for help with "extracting the backgrounds" (when Samoean said we shouldn't share original game files), well there is 1% chance I made a typo error while naming some of the backgrounds, but I certainly did not mistype all background names

[JohnnyWalker2001]

The links are broken, but could it be a colour profile issue in Photoshop?

Edit: Seems like you sorted it out

[ultraneonoirantihero]

The links are broken, but could it be a colour profile issue in Photoshop? Edit: Seems like you sorted it out

Yes, the sRGB profile messed things up. I removed the pages once i fixed the problem.

Been busy at work. Didn't touch those backgrounds. But I have an empty time slot this weekend, will definitely finish some (at least 3).

Any news about merging the mod-fork with residual master? Or that "fail on load" error Kavehth has?

[Botje]

@boltje: I tried your side-textures branch but when i put the side images in the game directory the game crashes when it tries to read the png images.

when the code reaches this line i get this error:

First-chance exception at 0x0152A7BE in residualvm.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000008.
Unhandled exception at 0x0152A7BE in residualvm.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000008.

what do you think causes the error? do i have to do anything else to get it to work?

Did you by chance compile it without defining the USE_PNG option or linking with libpng? The few screens I tried work fine here.

[kavehth]

Did you by chance compile it without defining the USE_PNG option or linking with libpng? The few screens I tried work fine here.

thanks, i got it working, the problem was that i didn't set USE_PNG to "true"

here is the game running at 1080 with sharpened backgrounds and in widescreen





@ultraneonoirantihero if you want i could compile residual and put up the exe, so you can test the backgrounds yourself, are you using windows?

[ultraneonoirantihero]

@ultraneonoirantihero if you want i could compile residual and put up the exe, so you can test the backgrounds yourself, are you using windows?

Yes, I use WIN XP. But I also have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

I'm noticing some position mismatch with the addons, the more south you go the bigger the mismatch. I will look into it when you build residual.

Really excited, looks amazing. Kavehth, how was does it feel playing GF in widescreen? Do you create "wide" folder inside Residual and place PNGs there?

Also, how did you embed new sharpened backgrounds, did you repackage lab files (data001.lab or whatever it's called) or some other way?

The sharpening process on those backgrounds led to higher contrast, so there is some "shadow crushing" and a bit of colour change.
http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/orig ... -Ks7Jh.png

[kavehth]

Really excited, looks amazing. Kavehth, how was does it feel playing GF in widescreen? Do you create "wide" folder inside Residual and place PNGs there?

It feels great playing in widescreen especially the scenes that are in the streets.

you can put files directly in the game folder or in a folder called "widescreen".

Also, how did you embed new sharpened backgrounds, did you repackage lab files (data001.lab or whatever it's called) or some other way?

For the hi-res backgrounds I've made a program that converts a png to a .bm file, after converting i package them inside a file called "datausr.lab" and put that in the game folder. right now the program does not compress the images, so the size of the images are a bit bigger than the ones in the game.

i made two versions of residual one that renders at 640x480:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/eualnikgubb5u ... 0.zip?dl=0

and one that renders at 1440x1080:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wft9ae5kzmv4v ... 0.zip?dl=0

you have to go into fullscreen in order to see the sides

here is the program for converting images:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/n8f6610esvmal ... M.zip?dl=0

and here is a couple of images that i sharpened and repackaged:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/njgbc9c81r4et ... r.zip?dl=0

[ultraneonoirantihero]

Every exe I try to run says: "... it's not a valid Win32 application".

Since I'm using Win XP 32-bit, maybe it's trying to use some 64-bit libraries? I Googled the problem and there is a tutorial how to export Win32 compatible applications from Visual Studio 2012+

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articl ... windows-xp

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/ ... 20645.aspx

I will now try to run these EXE files in Ubuntu using Wine.