Improved textures recompressed from the PS2 version

[the-gaybanana-corporation]

(sorry if this doesn't comply with the usual formatting for posting issues on this page, pretty new to posting on github in general cuz i literally just made this acc)

This isn't inherently an issue with the actual mod itself but should bring this project a lil more up to par with the PS2 version (I know you guys had your final update but hear me out 🙏). In short, I've been playing around with the Silent Hill 2 Texture Explorer and realized that there were some large quality gaps between the textures found in the PC version and the PS2 version, especially with the PC's DXT3-compressed transparent textures.
So for a good few months now (not done yet), I've been working on porting these textures over, re-compressing any transparent textures with DXT5, as well as removing the white backgrounds found in non-transparent textures from the PC version which sometimes messes with the DXT compression algorithm.
I've attached some example screenshots of an old texture with a new one and a little sample mod that replaces the textures found in the starting restroom, motor home and neely's bar for anyone in or outside of the enhanced team to compare and contrast with the old sh2e textures. These should work from my testing and they don't affect their original texture archives's file sizes. I also adapted my new textures with the textures found in the final update so there shouldn't be much worry there.


sh2e.zip

[TommvinHuwaltzky]

How about AI-upscaling them while you're at it...? :-333

[the-gaybanana-corporation]

How about AI-upscaling them while you're at it...? :-333

lmao i probably could but thats outside the scope of what im tryin to accomplish plus i heard theres a bunch of difficulties when it comes to replacing this game's textures, hell the game outright crashes when i replace a texture with a different data size value no matter if its smaller or larger (those values are hardcoded), so normal size it is!

[TommvinHuwaltzky]

Well, they managed to replace the ground-texture when James is digging for the key, soooo..... :-3

[certainmorning]

Numerous requests were made to add option to inject HD textures, but it seems EE Team simply doesn't care about it. Really sad.

[the-gaybanana-corporation]

Numerous requests were made to add option to inject HD textures, but it seems EE Team simply doesn't care about it. Really sad.

for me personally I dont mind having the ingame texture size unchanged that much though i do very much appreciate the upscaled ui elements

[Polymega]

Numerous requests were made to add option to inject HD textures, but it seems EE Team simply doesn't care about it. Really sad.

It is too much of an undertaking. If it could be my fulltime job and I got paid to do it, I'd do it in a heartbeat. As it stands, AI upscalers do not meet my level of standards for environment textures, and a large part of that issue is due to how the imagery within any given texture file is arranged:

^ AI upscalers simply can't understand what's going on with all this nonsense to make something fruitful. To do this right, the textures would (nearly) all need to be remade by a human hand.

[ProtonBlast]

True. AI upscaled textures don't look great and would bloat the game's file size.

[robertesaum]

How about AI-upscaling them while you're at it...? :-333

I'm recreating by hand all the textures that I and other people on VGTP found the source images for, but we need help finding more sources and matches.

As a placeholder, I'm using some upscales done by AI (I used 3 models and filtered the best results), plus various touch-ups I did in photoshop (mainly fixing melted text, transparency problems, seam problems, etc). Some other textures I've recreated from scratch.

If you'd like to see some of the results, I'm posting a bit of this process on YouTube. I don't know if it's allowed to send links here, if not I'll delete it without any problems:

https://www.youtube.com/@robertesaum3/community (unfortunately YouTube compresses the quality of the images a lot)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g_WzFdWvFo (this video is quite old, I've already managed to recreate several other textures that weren't shown there, as well as a significant improvement in the quality of the placeholders).

[the-gaybanana-corporation]

lmao i did not intend this thread to go into a whole thing about ai upscaling

[the-gaybanana-corporation]

Numerous requests were made to add option to inject HD textures, but it seems EE Team simply doesn't care about it. Really sad.

It is too much of an undertaking. If it could be my fulltime job and I got paid to do it, I'd do it in a heartbeat. As it stands, AI upscalers do not meet my level of standards for environment textures, and a large part of that issue is due to how the imagery within any given texture file is arranged:

^ AI upscalers simply can't understand what's going on with all this nonsense to make something fruitful. To do this right, the textures would (nearly) all need to be remade by a human hand.

however i should say i think i found a useful way to use ai and its to clean up all the blockiness that comes with edited textures that were already compressed while preserving the texture's grittiness.
During my work in fixing up the enhanced edition textures myself, i realized that the edited textures for the boss room in the prison kinda highlighted the dxt compression heavily and it looked a lil ugly in the transition from the black areas to green areas.
So to fix this, i ran it thru an ai upscaling program. Now, the ai upscaler would sometimes make these images with grit a whole lot smoother and id say that does ruin these textures. So what i did was i downscaled the ai image to the original texture's resolution, layered the original texture over the ai-upscaled one in gimp and used the eraser tool on the original in some areas where necessary to clean out all the blockiness, i think it did a decent job without ruining the original texture's art direction too much. Heres an example

my new fixed version

enhanced edition version

I also went and removed the white background for some textures that had em and thats cuz they would usually interfere with the edges of the textures when compressed and its noticeable when you compare those parts of these compressed textures from the pc version to the uncompressed ones on ps2. In fact, you can see a lil bit of that in this texture i posted when looking at the little right part at the top edge and on the bottom part.
Not too good at explaining things but i think thats the result of how dxt compression works. It splits the texture into chunks of 4x4 pixels and compresses them individually, forming a compressed texture that has barely noticeable 4x4 blocks when observed closely. This is normal, but whenever there are harsh transitions in color like from say dark green to white within one of those chunks, it messes up that chunk's detail which is pretty noticeable in most cases. Removing the white background shouldnt cause any issue to my knowledge tho i tend to be careful just in case.
The example texture you posted in response to certainmorning, Polymega, doesnt seem to highlight that issue all that much because the 4x4 chunks that have the actual texture's information dont contain parts of the white background in them, making it look clean

[TommvinHuwaltzky]

True. AI-upscaled textures don't look great and would bloat the game's file-size.

Look at stuff like Moguri for FFIX; AI-upscaled textures can look fantastic when done right.
And SH2 is old and pretty slim, even with all the EE-enhancements. Nowadays file-size shouldn't be a problem.
People have to cope with CoD's 100GB-updates on the regular, so this is nothing in comparison.