An attempt at making BF2's texture quality more consistent by mixing AI Upscaling with manual texture edits and normal mapping.
Upscaling Battlefield 2's textures with AI and manual edits
Some of the textures on BF2 looked very ugly and low-res in comparison to others surrounding them. This addon aims to fix that without weighing too much or altering the art style, with most textures being upscaled by a factor of 2 (upscaled by 4X then manually downscaled back to 2X) and a few select ones by a factor of 4.
Don't expect a world of difference, the idea was to improve those textures just enough to match the game's higher quality assets, since having some extra-sharp, detailed surfaces alongside very muddy ones in the same scene is too jarring and upscaling the original textures can only go so far...
Works nicely in conjunction with TheObscure's HD Terrain Texture Pack though!
As you can see, some textures got a serious upgrade, while others received far more subtle improvements to clarity and detail, this is reflected ingame, where some textures are much better looking while others barely changed, with the end result being improved consistency on texture quality.
What was upscaled, and what wasn't
This addon upscales most textures from the following folders (other folders from Objects_client aren't touched at all, since mods usually change data inside weapons, kits, vehicles, etc):
- Common
- miscobjects
- Roads
- staticobjects
With the exception of detail textures that are overlayed on top of others and, because of that, have all of their pixels partially transparent. Those can't be AI Upscaled with good results, and i couldn't figure out a way of making them look quite right by texturing them manually, the resulting textures always looked too dark ingame compared to DICE's originals.
Installing the addon
Same as my "Retextured Trees" addon, just drop the zip's contents into "Battlefield 2/mods/*YourModOfChoice*/Objects_Client.zip" and you should be good to go.
An update for this one should happen at some point once i have time, didn't like how strong specular lighting is on some of the objects with updated normals (it makes sense on certain surfaces and tiles, but others look way too glossy)
Wow...that's great. We need more addons like this
Actually is ok. but idk why i put this, my mod always crash at 62% ?
62%? If i'm not mistaken, the game's still loading up geometries by then, textures only start getting loaded "for real" at around 67%... and this addon only reworks textures and normals, actual geometric data is untouched.
Not sure which mod you're using, but on Heat of Battle, BF:BC2 mod and the original BF2, they load just fine on all of the maps i tested (Karkand, Jalalabad, Oman, Dragon Valley, China, Great Wall), although i'm running them with all GFX settings maxed out, no idea if graphics settings influence the game to the point of crashing.
This looks really nice!
"With the exception of detail textures that are overlayed on top of others and, because of that, have all of their pixels partially transparent. Those can't be AI Upscaled with good results, and i couldn't figure out a way of making them look quite right by texturing them manually, the resulting textures always looked too dark ingame compared to DICE's originals."
Hi, if you've seen my mod you'll know that I've retextured most static objects, buildings, vegetation and so on, including detail overlays.
Here's how I do it:
In Paint.net open the original texture.
Transform the alpha to greyscale and save it as a .png file.
Remove the alpha from the original texture and save it in the format that you want to upscale with ai. I usually go for .png.
Upscale the texture.
Open your alpha greyscale .png and scale it up to the same dimensions as the upscaled texture.
Open your upscaled texture and apply the greyscale alpha .png.
Save as DXT5.
Alternately you can just create a new alpha from your upscaled texture by transforming it to greyscale then saving as a .png. You may want to adjust the brightness/contrast of the greyscale image.
If you want to give me an example of a detail texture that you're having problems with I'll take a look at it for you.
Gatto. :-)
It's crashing on 77% with no debug error
Why?
That's a potential sign that your PC's Memory is being exhausted (no Debug error).
Textures are loaded into Memory.
Any version of BF2 pre-1.5 patch will automatically shutdown if it exceeds the 2 Gig limit.
With 1.5 patch DICE removed that memory limit, but if you still exceed the total amount of RAM installed BF2 will probably crash.
Ugh. Don't remind me. I get so depressed thinking about 1.41 vs 1.5. It reminds me of a Norwegian expression: "It's like choosing between the plague or cholera"
1.41: +AI-commander and >1023 ammo -Worse hitbox and RAM limitations
1.50: +Better hitbox and more RAM -NO AI commander and >1023 ammo CTD
All in all I play on 1.41 as the AI commander brings so much to the table, but the memory issue is annoying. It kinda helps to patch the .exe with Large Address Aware, but it doesn't fix it entirely.
I wish I had the know-how to adapt the PR .dlls and .exe to 1.41. That would have made a perfect SP version of the game.