Should Beamdog implement Catmull-Rom Bicubic/ESRGAN shading?
Allanon81
Member Posts: 343
Pretty simple question about the amazing upscale resolution scalers out there!
- Should Beamdog implement Catmull-Rom Bicubic/ESRGAN shading?19 votes
- Yes100.00%
- No0.00%
0
Comments
ESRGAN most likely would—but I wouldn’t mind downloading the upscaled assets as a separate mod package or add-on of sorts, to be honest.
indeed, not gonna vote on something if i dont know why im voting for
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Hope this helps?
what is the advantage of not implementing this feature?
If you played BG:EE / BGII:EE / IWD:EE pre-2.0, you already know what Catmull-Rom Bicubic scaling looks like. It was the scaling algorithm these games employed at release, and was unfortunately replaced with (the much cruder and blurrier) bilinear filtering we have now (with the option to use Nearest Neighbor if we prefer heavy pixellation.)
@lefreut posted screenshots for comparison recently in a different thread (though IMO the difference is a lot more evident in-game than on screenshots.)
ESRGAN is, to the best of my knowledge, an A.I.-based scaler that gets better the more you use it (and it's already pretty good.) It can be used to upscale 2D assets so they look prettier. The downside is that pictures upscaled with ESRGAN take a lot more space (and upscaling all assets in the game is a time-consuming task.)
Note that Catmull-Rom and ESRGAN do different things and can be used in conjunction.
if you think they are fine, that seems like a "no"
there's no advantage.
Think he was asking specifically about the alleged advantage of NOT implementing them.
When 2.0 released, IIRC Beamdog said they had to implement Bilinear filtering to allow for sprite highlight and sprite contour (two features I don’t recall ever being asked for, but I digress.) More recently they said Catmull-Rom was causing issues on tablets (again, I don’t recall seeing anything about this but I might simply have missed it.)
It remains baffling that when people complained about bilinear filtering being blurry, they gave us the option to use Nearest Neighbor and advertised it as the original scaler, when the original scaler was actually Catmull-Rom (and looked better than either—unsurprisingly, since it’s more advanced.)
ESRGAN could make assets too big for any platform other than desktop and could take a very long time to upscale all assets. I’d be happy to download the upscaled assets as a separate mod-like package to circumvent size concerns, but I do understand the time ones.
Early on (I'm talking BG:EE pre-release closed beta) the game employed bilinear filtering for scaling. Contracted programmer Philip Djonov ( @nop though I doubt he still browses these boards) was tasked with implementing Catmull-Rom Bicubic following a debate among testers initiated by @Zeckul (haven't seen him around in a while either.)
When 2.0 was released, the game went back to bilinear. Going by memory, it was done because bilinear would enable the sprite contour and sprite highlight features (which are pointedly unavailable when switching to Nearest Neighbor, in fact.) Some users complained about the degrade in visual quality (bilinear is visibly blurrier than Catmull-Rom) and Beamdog implemented the option to use Nearest Neighbor, selling it as the previous scaler (which was untrue; the previous scaler was the much more advanced Catmull-Rom Bicubic.)
More recently, Julius said in a different thread that Catmull-Rom was causing issues on mobile devices.
Perhaps both are true, though I honestly don't see how Catmull-Rom could be problematic on mobile devices—then again, I'm no programmer.
Having the option to use Catmull-Rom again would be a godsend.
Catmull-Rom and ESRGAN, are, of course, complementary, because ESRGAN-upscaled resources would need a rendering method in-game, and a superior method would just make them look even better.
edit: also, upscaled assets would get the closest to the most widely understood meaning of "enhanced", when talking about "enhanced" or "remastered" 2d games.