*sad update* ESRGAN AI Upscaling (ScummVM fork and tools pulled from github by author)

[Raziel]

@tomimt

A crazy art project just sprang to my mind.

The Secret of Monkey Island fan edition where all the backgrounds and sprites in every screen/scene are done by different artists reflecting their own profession and art style.

While one screen might be pure 8-bit, the next screen could be psychedelic over-the-top neon coloured backgrounds and spaced-out characters, while the following screen could be Cel-shading, then flat, then anime etc...

Uuuuhh

[tomimt]

That could turn out to be something truly special. Perhaps even avant-garde.

[BeleG]

This is such a primising development, well done! I can’t wait to see what can be done with this.

Here's a video I made with his build playing Space Quest 4 with my ESRGAN background upscales:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVdali9PzKQ

This can also be done for SCI0 EGA games! VGA-ifying EGA games can be much easier now!

EDIT: Here's KQ4 with a few VGA backgrounds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR5dQdrlaOM

MusicallyInspired, I don’t know which training sets you’re using but your upscales strike the perfect balance for a remake of VGA games like these. They just look like the original drawings would have before they were scanned in and scaled down to 320x240.

[tomimt]

just out of interest, here's a couple of ESRGAN upscales I did of The Secret of Monkey Island. Guybrush especially turned out pretty nice.

Edit, for those who don't want to click Twitter links, here's my Blogger blog post with the Monkey Island upscales: https://bit.ly/3aHDgiD

https://twitter.com/tomimt/status/1358184129075019779

https://twitter.com/tomimt/status/1358185180406628354

https://twitter.com/tomimt/status/1358184789891776517

https://twitter.com/tomimt/status/1358192926573092866

[Blakes7]

Here's a video I made with his build playing Space Quest 4 with my ESRGAN background upscales:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVdali9PzKQ

This can also be done for SCI0 EGA games! VGA-ifying EGA games can be much easier now!

EDIT: Here's KQ4 with a few VGA backgrounds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR5dQdrlaOM

I noticed you did some King's Quest II SCI graphics some time ago. Hopefully you get a chance to complete this if AGI engine is added.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf09eXkZiNo

[MusicallyInspired]

KQ2SCI is more than just an AGI facelift. I do want to finish it someday, but I won't use ScummVMx for that.

[tomimt]

I've been playing a lot with ESRGAN lately and decided to give a go with Larry's acid trip cinematic from LSL7. The end result is pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l8ZYBa ... =TheTomimt

This isn't Sierra related, but as the result was pretty damned good, I'll post this upscale of Broken Sword 1 intro as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sKu6S2 ... =TheTomimt

[tomimt]

Here are some results I got upscaling LSL7 Love For Sail (link goes to my Blogger blog, it's pretty image-heavy, so be warned)
https://bit.ly/2SOdNyZ

Out of all the upscale tests I've done, I'd say LSL7 could work the best as an ESRGAN upscaled version. The graphics scale up nicely thanks to the style.

[invwar]

For Broken Sword, I would recommend to use the Director's Cut videos as source. The videos are completely recoded from the original source and thus have way less artifacts, which should especially benefit at the explosion and the balloons.

[tomimt]

For Broken Sword, I would recommend to use the Director's Cut videos as source. The videos are completely recoded from the original source and thus have way less artifacts, which should especially benefit at the explosion and the balloons.

I actually used the DC video for the upscale.

[eriktorbjorn]

For Broken Sword, I would recommend to use the Director's Cut videos as source. The videos are completely recoded from the original source and thus have way less artifacts, which should especially benefit at the explosion and the balloons.

I didn't realize that, but I'm glad to see they got rid of this encoding error in Broken Sword 2:

bs2-comparison.png (87.95 KiB) Viewed 20635 times

(At least I think it's an encoding error. I guess it could be a decoder error.)

[Longcat]

I may be misremembering, but I believe they only retouched the original videos (applied some filters) and chopped them up (they are shorter) to get rid of some of the artefacts. They even replaced some shots with still frames by Dave Gibbons, like in the introscene seen here. Reason being, they did not have access to the source animation cells anymore.

So, the DC are probably actually inferior to the originals, for use with ESRGAN (and as animated cutscenes). But as I said, I may remember it wrong.

[invwar]

For Broken Sword, I would recommend to use the Director's Cut videos as source. The videos are completely recoded from the original source and thus have way less artifacts, which should especially benefit at the explosion and the balloons.

I actually used the DC video for the upscale.

Ahh, OK. So its likely Youtube created all the artifacts.

[tomimt]

Ahh, OK. So its likely Youtube created all the artifacts.

It is possible. I have some uncompressed frames on my blog: https://bit.ly/3enlLY6
beware, the blog entry is image-heavy, so it might take a bit to load.

[ZTylerDurden]

Been lurking this thread for a while checking for updates. Is this being discussed or tracked anywhere else?

The upscaled samples of Curse of Monkey Island look incredible. I've tried different ESRGAN models+games for ~2 years and not all of them work as well as they do with this game.

Is there no way to mod this game?

According to one of the devs, he earlier posted that it's "futile":

To all "non-programmers" here. ESRGAN will not come to ScummVM. The reason is simple: it is not real time, and is unable to produce 60 frames per second on modern computers. There are attempts to work around that by lowering the quality of the output, and algorithms like RTSRGAN produce 15 images per second on a single 2.3GHz CPU.

Thus, no, this topic is futile.


Eugene