Army Men RTS - high resolution texture pack addon

Army Men RTS - High resolution texture pack (version 1)

--- DESCRIPTION ---

Recently I found out about a program that is specially designed to upscale images of cartoon/anime characters based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks algorithm. The program is called waifu2x. The results can not be compared to normal texture upscaling in photoshop/gimp. Since Army Men RTS is basically looking like a cartoon I decided to try the program on the textures for units, so they look better during cutscenes. I got carried away a bit and updated more and more textures and ended up with 200 textures (out of 1272 available). TommyCD1 was the one who sent me the original textures extracted from the game and explained how to mod the game, big thanks to him.

• Github.com
• Github.com - OpenCV version if you don't have a Nvidia card
• Inatsuka.com - the above OpenCV version with GUI (I used this one)

By the way... I wrote instructions how to change LOD settings and how to play the game in widescreen on higher resolutions on PCGamingWiki, so you can check that out too:

• Pcgamingwiki.com

--- INSTRUCTIONS ---

1. Extract the archive you downloaded from moddb and you will get three TEXTURES folders. Each of these contain textures for different types of objects in game, which I explain below, so you can choose which you want to use, only one of them or all of them.

2. Open the TEXTURES folders and copy the folders inside them to Army Men RTS installation folder. This means you will be copying the folders called base, world, client and missions to the game installation folder. No files will be replaced, since they are located in archives called base, world, client, missions, etc.. The game automatically loads new textures in folders that have the same name as those original archives.

TEXTURES_1
- Contains only textures for people and objects they are carrying.
- This was the original idea for this texture pack; to only update people, so they look better during cutscenes when camera is close.

TEXTURES_2
- Contains updated textures for menu backgrounds and many objects found on the maps like rocks, plastic toys, flowers, skateboards...
- Highly recommended to use this too, but you may not notice much difference except when playing on high resolutions or when you zoom in on objects.

TEXTURES_3
- Contains textures for most army buildings, tents and vehicles.
- Original textures for these objects contained a lot of "noise" and to get decent results I had to remove that noise using the algorithm. This makes these objects a bit more cartoony looking, so they are not as close to original like the textures in folders 1 and 2. Only use this if you are OK with that.

--- POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENTS ---

The program I used removes the alpha channel(transparency) in textures, so I could not update decals and other textures with alpha channel.

I have not updated the loading screens, even though the results were pretty good. The reason is the game loads so fast on my PC I can barely see the loading screens.

The algorithm didn't work well on chinook and helicopter, so I gave up on those.

I did some testing on still images of the intro video and results were pretty good. Technically it should be possible to update that video too, but the whole process could take hours, if not days.