Speculation: Could Underworld Exporter Add AI Texture & Sprite Upscaling?

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A few months ago — many apologies! — via Twitter, Jonathan Williams brought a rather interesting image to my attention:

AI upscaling — especially using GPUs to handle the processing, although there are (somewhat slower) methods that utilize CPUs — of 2D textures from old games has been something of a hot topic, lately. And I’ll admit that I had wondered whether any of the Ultima games could possibly benefit from it, although most of them are probably too low-resolution to really make it work. I suppose a fan project like the long-dormant Beautiful Britannia could use AI upscaling as a shortcut for converting the lowest-resolution textures in Ultima 9 into higher-resolution textures that would still be supported by the engine.

But if anything, a project like Unerworld Exporter — which essentially automates the porting of Ultima Underworld into the Unity engine — might be the best application of this technology. This is aimless speculation on my part, of course, but I wonder if as part of the export process, this sort of texture upscaling could be applied? It’s likely way more complicated than that, and it seems almost a pipe dream to think that there could be a one-click solution for suddenly having an HD remake of Ultima Underworld at my fingertips.

But aimless though it may be, it’s fun to speculate. And as the image above shows, the game would certainly look really, really great at a much higher resolution.

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6 Responses

  1. Slashing Dragon says:
    August 19, 2019 at 3:52 pm

    It seems like he used a JPG image to create the upscaled version, which is not very good idea because of the artifacts. Here’s a better take on it using Hyllian’s XBR 4x upscaler. http://slashie.net/share/upscaled.png

    Results would look much better if the individual assets were upscaled instead of the output. It’s not that complex and can be batch-automated.

  2. Cambragol says:
    August 20, 2019 at 4:33 am

    The XBR 4x upscaler image looks…weird to me. Not better, but not necessarily worse. It’s like it is missing the intent of the lower res originals.

    • Slashie says:
      August 20, 2019 at 6:31 am

      If you mean inside the 3D viewport then yeah, it would probably look nothing like that if the scaler is applied to the assets individually rather than the output (would probably look much better). There are also a couple of other high-quality upscalers that have slightly different results that could work better with the individual pixel art.

    • WtF Dragon says:
      August 20, 2019 at 7:42 am

      This is kind of an example of what I tend to think of when I think about upscaling. Basically, applying ESRGAN (or similar) to each texture during the export process (in the case of Underworld Exporter), rather than any sort of filter that would be applied live during gameplay.

      https://i.imgur.com/AWd24hX.gif