Upscaling Efforts: A Project Thread

[NuptupTDOW]

Hello again,

I wanted to make sure I'm understanding things discussed in previous threads and gain some information about this project so I am as informed as I can be when going into it. Besides my other side project, I'm also thoroughly invested in trying to improve the experience of playing CoN and RTA as they are as much as possible. Besides my efforts into modding the games and getting people to try new and interesting things, one of the most right away impactful things for revitalizing these games (besides getting online to work again) would be to do a texture upscale for the entire game.

Thanks to your solution in #27, I should be able to pull pretty much everything needed for this project from the ISO and organize them in a way to keep them orderly while upscaling all of them. After upscaling all of the textures, I can then inject the upscaled textures in-place of the existing ones and confirm that they will wrap on the model correctly. However, you mentioned over in #5 that trying to do a texture/model replacement project would run into issues due to the way the PS2 formatting was handled and the way the code utilized the tables to find the correct texture file inside the ISO. This, I believe will be the first hurdle to jump, but it's also where I am unsure what exactly the problem is. If we have the ability to extract every relevant file from the ISO, would we not also have the ability to do that exactly in reverse, and only replace/overwrite the exact texture files that we're replacing? I imagine if we can get all of the texture files to go into their correct folders under the same original name, the game should use them as intended, correct?

If not, I assume there's an explanation for why. But in addition to that, I was wondering what you meant when you mentioned the necessity of Swizzling the textures before repacking them.

I know a community member had some minor success with getting upscaled textures inside the in-game menu, but I am not entirely sure about their method yet. However, if I can get their method, and work that alongside whatever we can come up with here, I think we might be able to get some truly impressive results for these games. And, if we can do it for one, I would assume the same methods should be possible with the other Snowblind games, meaning a single upscale texture project turns into several.

Anyway, I'm sure there's plenty I can learn here, and I'm sure you're a busy person, so just hit me up whenever you get a chance!