Silentcook wrote: Sun Apr 10, 2022 12:45 pm
I performed minimal testing on one such attempt. Here are the immediately obvious problems jumping out, and I'm pretty sure thorough testing would find some more.
In case of KS I don't think that there will be a lack of volunteers who might help with testing. KS was one of the most popular VNs for a looong time.
Silentcook wrote: Sun Apr 10, 2022 12:45 pm
-Videos: require pillarboxing.
Not if the game is designed to run in a 3200x2400 or 1600x1200 window (the videos are in 800x600, I just doublechecked). BTW the videos can also be up-scaled frame by frame and this can be done automatically. Also if the game runs in full-screen mode the player can add pillar-boxing automatically by changing some stuff in the GPU driver options. (If you have a GPU from nvidia try the options "No scaling" / "Integer scaling" in "Adjust desktop size and position" section. Intel and AMD have some equivalent options as well.)
Silentcook wrote: Sun Apr 10, 2022 12:45 pm
-Transitions and non-video animations: "Wall of drugs" doesn't display correctly, blackout during heart attack not optimal.
-Textbox/NVL mode/Rin's "wall of text": definitely broken. Everything requires overhauling to keep text size appropriate to new screen resolution.
-Blinking arrow in text box: sometimes appears in the middle of the screen instead.
This might indeed need fixing everywhere where the game makes the assumption that it runs in 800x600. I suspect that finding many of these kind of problems can be made easiER by searching the game's contents (not the engine) for hard-wired pixel-coordinates.
Regarding the text rendering:
At least the newest versions of RenPy handle the rendering of text at bigger resolutions (bigger than the resolution a game was primarily designed for) pretty well. I noticed that while playing some other RenPy-based games. The text and the textbox are up-scaled by the same amount and the text still perfectly fits into the text box and still looks sharp because it is rendered at the correct resolution. Not sure if there are still problems with text that it outside the small textbox on the bottom of the screen. KS seems to make this exception more often than other VNs.
Silentcook wrote: Sun Apr 10, 2022 12:45 pm
-Close ups in general: neither upscaling nor HD are very kind to close ups. Small lines and tiny imperfections that were invisible at native resolution become visible, and this actually worsens picture quality. To be fair, this didn't use the tool you're giving rave reviews to.
Oh yes, I know exactly what you are talking about. But the original KS also has this problem. If all the pictures are up-scaled by 4 this problem will of course still be there but there is no reason to expect that it will be WORSE than in the original KS. The distortions caused by individual pixels will actually become smaller relative to the picture size at higher resolutions. Also I have a suspicion that those distortions might become less of a problem if the games is rendered with OpenGL instead of software rendering. Software rendering is likely to use some cheap algorithms to go easy in the CPU. If you look at a game that up-scales its sprites in OpenGL (like for instance "Don't Starve") the up-scaled sprites look soft and not as distorted as Rin on the rooftop up-scaled and rotated by 45 degrees. OpenGL acceleration is already included into RenPy, even into that old version of RenPy that was used for the last official release of KS for Macintosh. You just need to switch it on in Windows as well.
Silentcook wrote: Sun Apr 10, 2022 12:45 pm
"Easily" is, apparently, a cheap word to throw around when it's someone else who has to put in the work to do the job. Nevertheless, something to chew on.
"Easily" is of course not a totally unambiguous word. I totally agree that in this case "easy" doesn't mean as easy as just running a script and calling it a day. If the game hard-wires some numbers while making the assumption that the resolution 800x600 is never going to change then it is obvious that SOME stuff here and there IS going to break.
But let's be honest about one thing:
The actual MAIN challenge of remaking a game made for 800x600 into 4K is the need to redraw all those "countless" pictures. While remaking the whole game is by far not as easy as snapping fingers, the help of AI up-scaling DOES make this task significantly eas
IER. So I do not think that in this context using the word "easily" was completely unjustified.
All those problems that are caused by the hard-wiring to 800x600 are incidentals
in comparison to the need to redraw everything (at least IMHO). Unless I am totally misunderstanding the problem all you have to do to fix most of the incidentals is to take a calculator and change "a few" hardwired numbers.
I still remember that 1st April joke from many years ago where 4LS has stated their intention of making an HD remake of KS. The point is that with the current advancements of AI up-scaling this joke starts to sound less and less unrealistic nowadays. And that is what I wanted to point out with this whole topic.