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Modding Community Putting HD Textures Into Resident Evil 4
jones_supa writes: The Ultimate HD Edition of Resident Evil 4 does not fully adhere to its name, as terrain textures are actually not in high definition. A couple of fans called Cris and Albert are chipping in to help fix this deficiency. The pair is working for free to create the RE4 HD Project, a mod which is cleaning up the game's chunky textures and producing some nice and sharp screenshots. At present, it looks like the project is already about half complete, and an HD texture pack for the Village section of the game is available at the project website.
So perhaps it should have been named Penultimate HD Edition?
If there are two versions of a game that are identical, except one has better graphics, then that's the one I want.
Some guys payed money for a game and now they are fixing it? Was it like a second-hand game? Something is odd about this.
Graphics matter. Anybody who doesn't think so is a luddite and should maybe consider that the whole "technology" world might not be for them.
Advances in graphics and advances in the quality of games have frequently gone hand in hand over the years. Wing Commander wasn't massively more advanced than the space-combat bits of Elite, but it felt like a whole new experience thanks to the graphics and presentation. At the other end of the timeline, if you have the horsepower to run the PC version of The Witcher 3 on full settings, you'll get probably the most immersive experiences ever made - which complements the gameplay nicely.
Admittedly, you can have a good game without good graphics; I can think of a handful of fairly recent titles that have managed it (Super Meat Boy, Thomas Was Alone), but those tend to be the exceptions. By and large, the "graphics doesn't matter" indie scene has given us a bunch of shoddy, derivative "retro-sprite-art pseudo-8-bit roguelikes" to clog up the Steam storefront. As I get older and more cynical, I increasingly find that a lazy approach towards graphics on the part of a developer usually translates into a lazy attitude towards the broader design.
In the specific case of the Resident Evil 4 remaster, I can sort-of see the point. RE4 was a seminal game that brought in a lot of wider changes to the survival horror genre. In the long run, I think you can argue that most of those changes (the greater action focus, the upgrade systems) were detrimental to the genre; but that doesn't diminish how important (and how good) RE4 was. The problem with going back to older games, however, is that graphics can turn into an immersion-breaker. Visuals which seemed fine a decade ago frequently look horrible to eyes used to modern games (and resolution upscaling can be particularly unforgiving in exposing flaws). I've lost count of the number of times I've gone back to an old game and been shocked at how much worse it looks compared to the game from my memories. So making some improvements to enable people to go back to the game without that sense of disconnect is no bad thing.
But it is, I would argue, something Capcom should have done for the re-release. Not something that should be left to the community.
Before linking to Kotaku, some of us have standards, ethical standards.
Graphics matter.
You do understand that the entire premise of the summary is horseshit based on the simple fact that there is no such thing as an "HD texture." -- but some eye-candy junkies want to make sure everything is called HD, even the textures!
Whats next, HD fonts? That might look real good in my HD text editor.
"His name was James Damore."
Of course there is such a thing as a HD texture. Don't confuse the acronym HD as something always having to do with TV resolutions, it was used way before that.
"High definition" means a particular display resolution. There's no "high definition" standard for textures. It'd be more apt to say that the game's 2005-era textures don't look good when the game is rendered in high definition.
"HD" is an unfortunate bullshit marketing term that should be taken out and beaten to death with the same shovel used to dig its shallow grave; but that doesn't change the fact that there are 'textures that look really atrocious on a contemporary high-ish resolution LCD; despite having looked OK in my memories of the game as played on by a CRT TV being fed a composite video signal'. And, because Capcom are just that lazy, Resident Evil 4 HD apparently has them.
The fact that "HD" carefully avoids meaning anything specific, while vaguely suggesting better sensory experiences worth paying more for, is obnoxious; but that doesn't change the fact that time has not been kind to some games; and some of the sins that phosphor dots and analog video used to smear into a warm glow just turn into a swarm of razor-sharp jagged pixels and offend your eyes mercilessly on newer hardware. Low resolution textures are one of those sins, probably among the worst(low-poly models don't look very realistic; but they don't grate on you), and one that doesn't get fixed as often because redoing a big chunk of art assets is a lot of trouble.
The correct term would be "high-resolution texture", and it's a relative and/or subjective term. The textures in RE4 were actually very high-resolution for the time, they're just not as high as later games developed for HDTVs. However the character models and everything else *also* aren't as detailed as those in later games.
My tasty asshole.
Yes, let's all go back to Atari 2600 graphics. I'm sure everything will be a lot better.
If I can overlook the choice of words, perhaps you could. "High resolution" would have been a good fitting term.
If we can see well, our daily life treats us with a good amount of eye candy. So, if we couldn't see the texture on a object any better than what was released on that game, we would get glasses, or stronger glasses.
It's projects like this that make good game better.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Generally speaking, I'd say you can consider an "HD texture" to be any in-game texture where you can't see the individual pixels sized significantly greater than the native resolution of your screen. That is, if it looks blocky on-screen, it's not HD.
There's no way to say exactly what resolution this entails, because it all depends on how far away the camera can get during typical gameplay, combined with how far the artist stretched a single texture across a given set of geometry. Naturally, the bar as been raised quite a bit with 4K monitors and resolutions, but I think most people would still consider never seeing a scaled texture at 1080p to be a pretty good visual experience.
Sure, there's no official definition for "HD textures" in a game, but you tend to know it when you see it.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Hello from my world, where more than one thing can matter. Hope all is well with you.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Because, you know, there's more to games than just the graphics.
systemd?
You get that an image with more pixels tends to look better than one with less though, right? Do you need your eyes checked?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
HD textures. How very inspired. You know, if all you care about is graphics, get the fuck out of gaming. Seriously. Go into the visual arts instead. Because, you know, there's more to games than just the graphics. Oh right. You don't know. Because you're GAMERS.
What on odd attitude. Do you sometimes wonder why the PS4 is the most successful games console in the current generation? Is it because it's the cheapest of the competition? Has the most innovative input mechanics? Perhaps customers choose Sony because of how well they have managed to protect their private information?
PS, it also has the best graphics, but that's not an important consideration
It's a hobby for two guys that happens to improve part of the game. It's really clever - they've actually tracked down the original source images that were digitised to create some of the original textures.
Found the console peasant, guys.
Well, when we generally have to pick between shitty graphics and good gameplay or shitty gameplay and good graphics, someone making a good game have good graphics for once helps quite a bit.
HD textures. How very inspired. You know, if all you care about is graphics, get the fuck out of gaming. Seriously. Go into the visual arts instead. Because, you know, there's more to games than just the graphics. Oh right. You don't know. Because you're GAMERS.
I have been reading that since the nineties. It always was fairly ridiculous but I increasingly agree for a couple reasons :
- What's the gameplay difference between a game from 2000 and one from 2015? Very little. You run around gunning down people, talking to people, picking up stuff etc. Tech got you bigger terrain etc. but I will say that peaked in year 2004 (arbitrarily)
- No need to upgrade a PC. Back in the days when you upgraded for gaming you gained new non-gaming features, such as the ability to watch movies. Or enough RAM for high duty multitasking (on single core, single thread)
Nowadays most PC can do video conference, video editing (even if only in SD), 3D modeling, high res picture editing etc. but aren't powerful enough to run games.
- Where are the low budget published games? By low budget I actually mean something closer to one or a few million dollars than 100 million, and by published I mean sold in stores in a small cardboard box. I get that there are myriads of indie games but you have to buy and download them on the internet, and I'd be ok with that if they followed the old shareware model (so you can try them!). Well, even shareware often had a publisher like Apogee.
Who wants to buy a book that didn't go through a publisher? All books have a publisher (or editor), almost.
I grew up with 320x200 games and 640x480 games that had high production value, despite the low tech (2D, 3D, palettized colors, uncompressed 11KHz sound data..)
You have indie games that don't even try to look serious, they look like a 1980s game with cheesy HD graphics, you pay three dollars/euros to buy one on Steam, run it once then never again ; the money is entirely wasted, you can't even give the game away. It has negative value as it's wasting space in Steam's list (and HDD space if you don't delete it).
Or you can get the latest Call of Dooty shitfest and so on. But I don't want to spend $700 on upgrading the PC for that, don't want to play a $100 million rail shooter (made for a console controller and 60 field of view) and I don't even want to play the latest autistic Action RPG either. Oh, there's the many sandbox games too : drive in a city, get bored, shoot bystanders, kill the cops, get killed by the cops. Respawn and repeat.
You're cherry picking from that post. ..." does not mean, graphics don't matter. It's those games that have "stunning graphis" and "mindblowing visuals" etc that fail everywhere else and still get highly rated, but nobody remembers a year later.
"... if all you care about is graphics
You don't offer any solid comparisons, so I'll do it for you.
X-Com.
The '95 version was 640x480 resolution with a handful of colors. On the other hand it offered a very complex world and combat system. Even the variety of weapons and ships was pretty large.
In contrast, we have the 2012 version, which looks good on HD displays, has literally millions of colors, yet the combat system is severely crippled. The combat mechanics are not just simplified but idioticized and the game itself is greatly reduced in size and complexity.
"Graphics matter."? Yeah, they're damned critical when that's all you've got.
Cheers, AC. You're finally learnin how things work around these parts.
Actually, there is quite a lot of difference on the gameplay on games of 2000 and 2015.
Now you don't do anything but gun down people with the rest replaced by cutscenes or QTEs, you can't get lost on the maps anymore due the invisible walls turning em into straight lines, you can heal yourself by just hiding on a spot for long enough, weapons are generally pretty much the same gun with different firing ratios and damage and generally they "auto aim" to make it easier for analog sticks and the game waste a great deal of time with cutscenes in general.
Also the terrible tutorial levels that treat the player like someone with a serious mental handicap.
So you want a game where you increase the ratio of certain patreon accounts significantly while tarnishing the image of certain people even more?
Really?
I went back and played the original X-Com again (for the first time in a decade or so) after I finished the remake. And what I found was a game whose graphics hadn't held up quite so badly as others of a similar vintage, but whose gameplay was showing serious signs of age.
On the tactical side, squads felt overly large, micromanagement was excessive by any reasonable estimation and the random number generator was allowed to become far too dominant in determining the outcome of combat. The need to play "hunt the last alien" before you could successfully complete a mission made certain missions, particularly some of the terror missions with complex cityscapes, an absolute grind.
By contrast, the remake is slicker and smarter. I felt like it was doing more than the old X-Com to make me use all of my assets in the field and was striking a more appropriate balance between luck and skill. Moreover, with the troopers being a little less vulnerable and having more defined traits to carry over between missions, I felt a sense of connection with my squad that was missing in the old game.
Now, the remake isn't perfect; I think allowing an extra 2 soldiers in the tactical squads (so 8 rather than 6) would have struck a better balance. The strategic game is undeniably less sophisticated than in the original (though also less repetitive in the late-game stages).
But on balance, I would rank the remake as being the better game, in objective terms - and in terms of both gameplay and graphics. Admittedly, the original was a far more striking game when it was first released and had a genre-defining impact that the remake didn't. But put them side by side and I'd take the remake.
The problem with going back to older games, however, is that graphics can turn into an immersion-breaker. Visuals which seemed fine a decade ago frequently look horrible to eyes used to modern games (and resolution upscaling can be particularly unforgiving in exposing flaws). I've lost count of the number of times I've gone back to an old game and been shocked at how much worse it looks compared to the game from my memories.
Some of us actually have the ability to go back and appreciate everything a game did at its time of release, how it sat among other games of its time and be amazed at what a game is doing with the system it is on (in this case, the Gamecube). Part of that is, yes, to NOT absolutely shit all over the game by running it on an HD TV or, god forbid, an emulator (who the hell does that?) and lay bare all the scaffolding of the stage.
And I'll pre-empt the mandatory comment about the size of a CRT TV here: I wonder if anyone saying that still lives with their parents in a small room with no space for anything. Also some CRT's are tiny in size with the added benefit of making games look sharper in the right way.
Anyway, this HD re-texture is a valliant effort for sure, if not for the fact that all it does is turn RE4 from an amazing gamecube game, into a retextured last-gen looking PC game. To each his own but frankly I'll continue to play it in its original form where it still looks amazing with the right setup, and if you have any sort of appreciation for the different eras of gaming at all.
I care about graphics a LOT, but I care about them in every meaning of the word. I think older videogames are as important to gamers as old cave paintings are to the history of visual art, and doing something like this remake is akin to trying to vector a cave painting because it'll look sharper that way.
I think it's OK for a videogame to look like a videogame (shock, horror!).
Are there any gamers left reading Slashdot? Because the gaming news they cover would seem to suggest that they've all left. I mean, look at this story, it's about a bunch of people creating high-res textures for some old game. Who cares? Does it make the game better? Of course not.
The top "related story" on everything even vaguely gaming related is still that bullshit, debunked story about Anita Sarkeesian claiming to have received death threats.
There are no gamers left on Slashdot, the Slashdot editors and DICE have made sure of that.
Some of those textures, specifically the gravel roads, the sack skins and the cut stone, look like they were ripped from Skyrim. Now I know and understand why there will be some convergence of style regarding art assets, but looky here: http://www.re4hd.com/wp-conten... the sandbag ontop of the pile right next to the ladder. Tell me that doesn't look just a little too familiar.
I've lost count of the number of times I've gone back to an old game and been shocked at how much worse it looks compared to the game from my memories. So making some improvements to enable people to go back to the game without that sense of disconnect is no bad thing.
I ran into this this weekend. Plugged in my 360 (which I haven't played in about 2-3 years at least) and fired up Halo 2 (which is admittedly an Xbox game) and was like "holy crap, the graphics were that bad?". Of course, I suspect this is a compounded effect between an increase in graphic quality and also display technology: watching a replay of a football game from even 10 years ago on a modern TV almost seems so blurry you can't even read the names on the back of the jersey. I wonder if we also unconsciously "upgrade" our memories of things we've watched/played years ago to something approximating a level of quality we are experiencing now, because at that time it was top of the line and as clear/realistic as we could get.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Some people buy cars and then trick them out with all sorts of aftermarket kit. Much of which is only for looks.
It's their time/money to spend as they see fit.
Have gnu, will travel.
Seriously, who cares?!? If it was a total re-vamp of something like RE 3, or RE code V. Then sure! But RE 4 broke the spirit of what RE was all about. It turned a zombie-survival-mystery-horror game into a "lets-shoot-the-poor-non-english-speaking-villagers" game. It was HORRIBLE!!! It is "the"game that made me stop playing RE games entirely! RE 5 in Africa? Seriously? Now it's "lets-shoot-the-poor-BLACK-villages" game...
I want the original RE feel back to the game. So modders out there, turn RE 4 and 5 into something not so suck-fest and bring back the zombies and T-virus please.
High resolution textures is not the same as high definition textures.
There is a difference between a 1080p video clip that has been converted from a DVD source and one that has been converted from a Blue-ray source.
The problem I've seen often, is that the HD graphics added as mods tend to fail a lot. If the entire game is not upgraded to HD by the same artists with the same goals, then it look weird. Ie, mods to upgrade trees then you end up with mid range rocks next to high def trees and it stands out. But to do HD for the entire game is very expensive. I know in Fallout 3 and NV that I found few good texture packs that I liked, either they added lots of clutter or you needed the full set with hours of downloading. Skyrim had a free official HD DLC that was ok I think; not as high def as some gamers would like, but much more than you'd get on the basic DVD, and it was nicely integrated.
The attitude of what graphics are needed or not may or may not be a problem. In some games the lower quality sometimes is distracting. Sometimes the original developers were worried that the target computers would not handle higher graphics and deliberately lowered them (case in point, System Shock 2 with really low polygon counts). If you're in a shooter type of game, then I don't think graphics count for much honestly, there are so many distractions that nearby textures aren't vital. For open exploration games the textures matter more, but even more important is how things look from a distance which works well even with lower definition textures, and high def textures can distract too at times.
There's a point where better graphics make the game look better, and beyond that it's just for bragging rights. Better graphics does mean slower gaming, unless you waste a lot of money souping everything up. I'd rather have a responsive game at a reasonable budget.
As for Resident Evil 4, I don't know if that's a new or old game. For older games, updating graphics by modders is a common thing to do. Common enough that no one sane would add a story about it on Slashdot, it's no big deal. Only worth mentioning it for new games for those who want to whine about how the devs are ignoring "true" gamers or stuff like that. So I really don't know why this article is even here either way.
But what's the big deal here? Every game that can be modded has people adding higher resolution textures. What's so special about Resident Evil 4? Other than the slashdot editors not being very picky about what they put into the feed of course...
Well, for PC gamers the entire media industry has mostly abandoned them. Latest consoles are all the rage now, exclusive games for one camp or the other, etc. Overall though most games don't generate any stories at all unless there's some sort of controversy or it's a long awaited game.
Have a play at Postal 2, it's built around murdering some of these people. Though you start out as trailer trash, you asshole!
HD is a very specific term referring to 720p. "Full HD" refers to 1080p.
HD (1280x720)
The HD resolution of 1280x720 pixels stems from high-definition television (HDTV), where it originally used 60 frames per second. With its 16:9 aspect ratio it is exactly 2 times the width and 1 12 times the height of 4:3 VGA, which shares its aspect ratio and 480 line count with NTSC. HD therefore has exactly 3 times as many pixels as VGA.
This resolution is sometimes referred to as 720p, although the p (which stands for progressive scan and is important for transmission formats) is irrelevant for labeling digital display resolutions.
HD link fixed
If it helps you, think of it more as an "HD (or Full HD) appropriate texture resolution", as that's in fact what it really is - properly matching texture resolutions to modern screen resolutions. But I understand your frustration when people use terminology incorrectly.
It always annoys me when people describe a game as "laggy", because if the game has any netcode / multiplayer, I have no idea if they meant laggy in the "proper" sense, meaning latency in network code, or laggy in the "slang" sense, meaning low or jittery frame rates. It's been irritating that we've never been able to get a good term for low frame rate to stick.
So, sorry if it offends your sensibilities if people use the term "HD" incorrectly, but it's really hard to fight the tide unless you can come up with a better name for it. At the moment, "HD textures" seems to be the dominant term for increasing in-game texture resolution.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
...and DMCA takedown notice in 3, 2, 1 ...
Would not surprise me... "How dare these terrorists infringe on our intellectual property and copyright by making our own shitty looking product better."