WC4 Remake Experiments With Advanced Upscaling (March 15, 2020)

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
Here's a potentially promising teaser of what might be possible for the WC4 Fan Remake. Pedro's recently done some experimentation with AI-assisted video enhancement, and the results are surprisingly positive. He reports that the ability to upscale still images is fantastic, so this will help sharpen up the game flow sets at least. There's a lot of work yet to be done to refine the video elements, but this promising technology will likely improve by the time the remake is ready to go. What's already possible seems to border on something from Star Trek, so we can't wait to see how it develops!






For stills it's excellent, we can definitely use this tech to up res the room images. For motion a lot of artifacts creep in.
Still by the time WCIV is good to go I bet this technology will be good enough.

If they can fix eyes in motion it would be useable; currently it's recognising shapes rather than features. For a face that's a problem
It could happilly be used on CG scenes.

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Original update published on March 15, 2020
 
Granted it's only two samples but it looks better to me than the C&C Remaster... although I suppose C&C is working with much older, lower-resolution videos as the starting point. It's scary how much detail is reproduced in the wrinkles of the lads' faces.
 
That was a really quick experiment with a free trial, but yes, I was impressed. It is already really quite good at dealing with compression artifacts and low color depth for static images.
What isn't shown here is how poorly it does with faces in motion; any single frame is fine but in motion facial features such as eyes seem to distort; still this is absolutely solvable, infact since there's more data available when you have additional frames it should actually be served even better by this tech.
 
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Yeah, that is pretty impressive.

I know it is out-of-scope for the WC4 Remake, but what does the tech do for WC3's playstation videos (best quality we have)?
 
I'm hopeing very much the WC4 Remake will be a success. I can't really imagine how video material should become better than the original material is. The images look very good, though.
 
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Yeah, that is pretty impressive.

I know it is out-of-scope for the WC4 Remake, but what does the tech do for WC3's playstation videos (best quality we have)?

The WC4 remake includes support for WC3 file formats so that code wise supporting WC3 will be almost zero work. I fully expect if I get my arse in gear and finish WC4 then WC3 should be hot on its heels (and I'd definitely want to include the missing videos).
The TNC news shot is from WC3, not 4; so that should tell you what to expect.
 
Could the same technique be used to restore the Speradon introduction sequence to the DVD-version?
Or any of Prophecy's cutscenes not available in DVD-quality?
 
Will you reformat it in Wide Screen 16:10 or 16:9? I don't mind black borders on the sides but I never liked black borders on the sides and top with a fake wide screen look.

If someone hasn't already ripping the movies from the WCIII 3DO, that would give the best videos for a WCIII conversion. IIRC there was some question about the 3DO audio not being as good as the audio on PS or the PC.
 
Will you reformat it in Wide Screen 16:10 or 16:9? I don't mind black borders on the sides but I never liked black borders on the sides and top with a fake wide screen look.

If someone hasn't already ripping the movies from the WCIII 3DO, that would give the best videos for a WCIII conversion. IIRC there was some question about the 3DO audio not being as good as the audio on PS or the PC.

HCl made progress on 3DO video ripping but as I recall he never finished it.
Whatever the aspect ratio is I’d maintain that, no point losing good data and people have a variety of screens. Still cropping it on the fly wouldn’t be hard.
 
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