Ashenbub's HD Textures for PSOBB are incredible!!!!

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So first off this is exciting and much appreciated. I downloaded and donated to support. :D

As I am experimenting with these textures I can see obvious improvements close up, but I'm also noticing lots of noise or grainy effects at a distance and I'm not sure whether to attribute that to these or one of the other myriad settings in the launcher options. Part of me wonders if the blurrier textures before just dulled or made that less noticeable. Another way to describe what I'm seeing is that there seems to be some intense flickering as I move around which again is most noticeable farther away from the camera.

Without going down rabbit holes for anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, or other mysterious advancements ... can anyone recommend settings in the launcher for a high end PC? I will probably revert to my old files tomorrow when I have more time to test and compare, but I would appreciate if someone could comment on what produces the least jarring and most smooth appearance overall. After looking at EP I, the Forest is especially hard to look at when moving, particularly the grassy textures on both the ground and the elevated, non-playable area surrounding the level.

Edit: If I only use anti-aliasing (HSAA 4x + SMAA) the game looks ideal. Crisp, smooth, and none of the problems I mentioned above. Now my issue is that the item reader is tiny and changing the font size doesn't fix it, whether the hi-res HUD is enabled and at whatever scale. It's almost funny how terrible trying to troubleshoot all this has been. I must be missing something. Maybe I'll reinstall the add-on tomorrow, I give for now. (Fixed! Leaving in case someone else encounters similar issues.)
 
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I've been working on a very similar project for ages and absolutely must know how you got so much of this to work crash-free.
Every time I so much as even open a texture with mipmaps, I enter crash city and it is annoying me to tears.

I've been trying to mix the best parts of the results of four different AI upscale models, using full cut-outs, soft merging, fading and whatever else makes a single cohesive texture from it all that looks nice. I've also been doing a lot of guesswork on blurry messes where text is obviously supposed to be present and trying to restore or at least throw down something that seems sensible in its place. I've put a hell of a lot of work into "this won't happen" and then I find you succeeding in so many of the places I've failed, and this both excites and hurts me greatly.

Currently, I'm stuck on the last little bit of the Mags, and it is killing my soul - previously, about a year or so ago, I was trying to work in areas and bosses and gave up on that because almost everything came with a crash.
 
RedKing said:
I've been working on a very similar project for ages and absolutely must know how you got so much of this to work crash-free.
Every time I so much as even open a texture with mipmaps, I enter crash city and it is annoying me to tears.

I've been trying to mix the best parts of the results of four different AI upscale models, using full cut-outs, soft merging, fading and whatever else makes a single cohesive texture from it all that looks nice. I've also been doing a lot of guesswork on blurry messes where text is obviously supposed to be present and trying to restore or at least throw down something that seems sensible in its place. I've put a hell of a lot of work into "this won't happen" and then I find you succeeding in so many of the places I've failed, and this both excites and hurts me greatly.

Currently, I'm stuck on the last little bit of the Mags, and it is killing my soul - previously, about a year or so ago, I was trying to work in areas and bosses and gave up on that because almost everything came with a crash.
Click to expand...
Are you saying your textures crash on Ephinea or another server?
 
Ender said:
Are you saying your textures crash on Ephinea or another server?
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I was crashing on Ephi, I don't play any other servers.
But I think I have the problem with my mags figured out, and have moved on to doing some other texture work.
 
RedKing said:
I was crashing on Ephi, I don't play any other servers.
But I think I have the problem with my mags figured out, and have moved on to doing some other texture work.
Click to expand...
Can you share one of the files that should work but you're constantly crashing with?
 
Ender said:
Can you share one of the files that should work but you're constantly crashing with?
Click to expand...
I actually got it working - my issue was not being able to preserve the original mips with GIMP - it refuses to save anythng without the expected maximum mip level for the size, so any upscale gave it extra mips and then would immediately crash...

I eventually found a tool that could clamp the mip levels and that fixed my issue.

My issue was with Giel Gael and Agastya and has been resolved.
 
I recall trying this pack out previously and it not having mip maps, which imo makes it unusable, though I don't want to discredit the large amount of work that went into this. It seems like a great texture pack otherwise, so I'm curious if there's a technical reason behind the absence of mip maps?

Also what tool was used to extract/import textures? I very seriously toyed with the idea of upscaling at least some of the textures years ago but couldn't find a tool that could extract more than a single texture at a time. The DDS compression artifacts also made it a real challenge, so I respect the hell out of committing to this undertaking.
 
ZabaZu said:
I recall trying this pack out previously and it not having mip maps, which imo makes it unusable, though I don't want to discredit the large amount of work that went into this. It seems like a great texture pack otherwise, so I'm curious if there's a technical reason behind the absence of mip maps?

Also what tool was used to extract/import textures? I very seriously toyed with the idea of upscaling at least some of the textures years ago but couldn't find a tool that could extract more than a single texture at a time. The DDS compression artifacts also made it a real challenge, so I respect the hell out of committing to this undertaking.
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There's at least one upscaling software that can produce mipmap really easily.
CaptureChainner01.PNG

Regarding DDS artifacts, there are many models that can handle or even specialise in handling textures with BCx (DDS) compression. Chaining models with ChaiNNer is easy once one understands the workflow of the tool so you can for instance clean compression artifacts, then separate alpha channel from texture, upscale both on their own (with a different model if you like), merge alpha back into texture... etc all in a "single click".

As for tools that can import textures in the game files, sadly none have been released (publicly), people are still stuck using leaked and unfinished tools from like 2010 at best.
 
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Ashenbubs has discontinued this project and delisted it from Nexus Mods. There's no working link or support for the pack anymore, so I'm locking the thread and (belatedly) relaying his message about it here.

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