Update as of 12/09/2022
Hi Everyone,
Thanks to everyone who keeps reaching out and asking how things are going. I'm making progress, it's just life is in the way and so I haven't had a chance to put in the five minutes to make progress on this. So here is a few updates to let everyone know how things are moving forward.
1. I've actually already upscaled quite a lot of the files. I've done the Space Marines, Eldar and Chaos (two of which I've arleady uploaded), but haven't finished them 100% so to say. I haven't upscaled the taskbar for the Space Marines yet which is what I wanted to do before uploading but everyone seemed keen so I figured I can deal with that later on. The models on the Space Marines look great regardless, so Enjoy!
2. Little errors are holding me back at the moment. Upscaling the defilers for Chaos just come out with a lot of noise - I don't think the upscaler knows what to do with so many spikes and so the masking it does for the alpha channel comes out fuzzy which is what causes the weird appearance on some of the models that have been upscaled so far (this is what I intend to fix by hand in the future). So I'll give the Chaos a bit more love then upload them in the future. In the meantime I've uploaded the Eldar upscale which looks awesome. I'm really happy with how it came out - you can even see the runes in clear detail on the bonesingers. The Eldar have had their taskbar upscaled too, so they all look pretty sharp.
The other big thing thats been in the back of my mind is the RAM limitations of the game. I've had occasional crashes and this has been something that I thought might come up in the future as the game being so old is not meant to be running with 2048x2048 textures. But I'm also working on this on a laptop with intel evo graphics so your milage may vary.
My third issue is that I've had some people tell me they get de-sync errors on multiplayer. I assumed textures were all loaded locally as I've had local textures differ for online play previously but I get the feeling that file size is important for this and so I'm considering making a standalone mod with everything enclosed so that it doesn't mess with people's multiplayer experience.
My fourth issue is that this is only Skirmish textures. As campaign mode uses .RTX files instead of the .wtp files that I've been upscaling, I'll have to upscale everything again separately if they're to be displayed during Campaign mode.
I guess the lots of little issues built up into a "ahhh, I'll do this later" sorta mood so to solve this I accepted some help:
3. I've also had some help with upscaling some of the other races. Since I've made my code available I had user 'HNVR' over at DOW-XL-Soulstorm upscale the Orks and Dark Eldar for me. Once I've checked them out thoroughly and done their taskbars I'll upload them too. Pretty soon the whole gang will be complete and you'll be able to play any race at upscaled resolution in Skirmish.
Also also, Final point. I decided to see how the code would work upscaling other mod's textures, for example here is a Genestealer from the Tyranid mod
Unfortunately, I don't think the original image had much data to extrapolate. So other than giving the genestealer thicc thighs and sharpening up the lines on the head and teeth - it doesn't really add any more clear detail. But I do encourage anyone with an interest to give it a try. The code files are available here.
