AI is Helping Old Video Games Look Like New (theverge.com) 57
Classic video games are getting a makeover. But it's not big-name game developers making the improvements: it's independent modders. From a report: The technique being used is known as "AI upscaling." In essence, you feed an algorithm a low-resolution image, and, based on training data it's seen, it spits out a version that looks the same but has more pixels in it. Upscaling, as a general technique, has been around for a long time, but the use of AI has drastically improved the speed and quality of results. "It was like witchcraft," says Daniel Trolie, a teacher and student from Norway who used AI to update the visuals of 2002 RPG classic The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. "[It] looked like I just downloaded a hi-res texture pack from [game developers] Bethesda themselves."
Trolie is a moderator at the r/GameUpscale subreddit where, along with specialist forums and chat apps like Discord, fans share tips and tricks on how to best use these AI tools. Browsing these forums, it's apparent that the modding process is a lot like restoring old furniture or works of art. It's a job for skilled craftspeople, requiring patience and knowledge. Not every game is a good fit for upscaling, and not every upscaling algorithm produces similar results. Modders have to pick the right tool for the job before putting in hundreds of hours of work to polish the final results. It's a labor of love, not a quick fix.
Trolie is a moderator at the r/GameUpscale subreddit where, along with specialist forums and chat apps like Discord, fans share tips and tricks on how to best use these AI tools. Browsing these forums, it's apparent that the modding process is a lot like restoring old furniture or works of art. It's a job for skilled craftspeople, requiring patience and knowledge. Not every game is a good fit for upscaling, and not every upscaling algorithm produces similar results. Modders have to pick the right tool for the job before putting in hundreds of hours of work to polish the final results. It's a labor of love, not a quick fix.
Yes that is how AI works (Score:2)
So AI requires humans to do the work?
Actually yes, that is kind of the dark secret of AI!
You put in 400 hours of training work, to do 10 hours of actual work.
J/K for most things... maybe not in this case though. :-)
new approach for video compression? (Score:3)
Side Effects May Include (Score:4, Funny)
Heads up, that AI Upscaling may lead to some side effects you hadn't planned on:
* AI refuses to render Frogger as it's a now extinct species.
* Sonic rings turn out to made of onions, which also explains why that world is so slippery.
* All vector graphics in Lunar Lander and Asteroids have disturbing bezier curves applied.
* Samus suit too shiny to actually behold after lens flare added.
Biggest problem?
* Anatomically correct Mario
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What does the Supreme Court have to do with AI-generated textures?
Go home, you're drunk.
Oh boy (Score:2)
Internet Rule 34 ... in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
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Actually the original game is still there and available to play, so it's more like someone found that Chinese vase and tries to make new ones that are based off its base design, but with modern techniques for shaping, coloring etc.
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Tries and fails, from what I see in the reddit thread samples.
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Perhaps they should just use a filter which emulates the look of a CRT...
Obligatory, classic video (Score:2)
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Uncrop. Zoom. Enhance. [dailymotion.com]
For anime art, check out 'waifu2x' (Score:2)
Morrowind. (Score:1)
https://www.nexusmods.com/morr... [nexusmods.com]
What's old is new (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the analog days, we used unsharp masking [wikipedia.org]. It finds any transition between light and dark, and accentuates it by making the light part lighter and the dark part darker only near the transition. It actually degrades the image quality compared to the original. But because the edge is accentuated, your brain screams to you that the image has improved and is sharper. Unsharp masking is what the "sharpness" control on your TV or camera settings does - degrades the image quality to create the illusion of sharpness. It (or one of the many variants of it) is also used on pretty much every photo or CGI image you've seen. We're so accustomed to it that a neutral unprocessed image seems blurry.
You have a little more leeway with upscaled bitmapped game graphics because it doesn't need to be a faithful enlargement. It's not like scientific or documentary photography where the image needs to be accurate to the original. For game graphics, you can literally make stuff up and it doesn't matter as long as it looks better. Whether you do this with unsharp masking, a fractal algorithm, an AI algorithm, or have a human redraw the textures is irrelevant. It doesn't matter that the new detail is made-up; as long as there is new detail it looks better. For example, it'd be pointless to run these algorithms on spy satellite images since you wouldn't know if the details brought out were likely accurate, or were just made up by the algorithm.
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> For example, it'd be pointless to run these algorithms on spy satellite images since you wouldn't know if the details brought out were likely accurate, or were just made up by the algorithm.
I somewhat disagree. In some cases, it could spot contextual clues that make the detail that's added valuable. That is, if you give an AI algorithm the task of inferring what full resolution images look like from their NTSC low-resolution variants, trained from a lot of pairs of high-res images and NTSC low-resolu
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I have.. I've played with AI upscaling of low resolution photos for quite some time. It does better than you think, but I've only evaluated it on *subjective* measures. You'd need to do a trial with humans reporting whether they could see a feature after different methods of scaling to really compare, and that's too hard ;)
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I've seen unsharp, this looks considerably better. It looks to do a fairly good job of guessing what a high res version of the same shape would look like. The main issue you'll have is that everything looks unnaturally smooth, like take a shield... if you got the overall shape/form you can make a high resolution version, but it'll have no ridges, no cracks, no nooks and crannies, no inscriptions and so on. I guess it'll smartly trying to apply textures it already knows, like this is wood, this is brick, thi
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It looks better not so much because this is a breakthrough in graphics
Clearly you haven't looked at what is going on. This is nothing like making a straight edge and applying a little unsharp. There is literally nothing in common with the "old" way of doing it.
You half understood it at the end and then completely fell off the rail again. You're absolutely correct you can "make stuff up" in computer graphics. This has nothing to do with unsharp mask which most definitely doesn't make up anything. On the other hand here we're making up EVERYTHING. Hey computer upscale this:
"Oka
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Back in the day these used an AI unsharping algorithm.
No they didn't. AI != "Anything we do on a computer" and unsharp masking sure as fuck isn't any definition of AI, not real AI, not the watered down version of "AI" being used currently.
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Look and see. [nexusmods.com]
One is a blurry mess, one has actual detail. That's why it looks better- because it's not a blurry mess. No edges have been artificially enhanced, a neural network has gone, taken a low-resolution template, and created high resolution content using it.
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Interersting to see ... (Score:2)
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