Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.