AI upscaling video Mod. New Visionaire user.

  • #1, by dread-pirate-robertsTuesday, 23. August 2022, 10:17 A year ago
    I am upscaling cutscene videos to a higher res for a simple game mod. I took the video files which were in VV(xxx) format and upscaled them and converted to Webm VP8 as a doc I was reading suggested. Now the I need to convert them back into this VVxxx format. Then I will figure out whatever problem pops up next. I contacted the games designer and he told me that it was Visionaire V5 beta branch that was used. 
    Would anyone be willing to help me or point me to a resource. I am finding hard to find relevant beginner resources. Maybe I should just make a game and brute force it.

    Newbie

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  • #2, by afrlmeTuesday, 23. August 2022, 12:28 A year ago
    I'm confused, what game are  you talking about?

    Why are they/you using the Visionaire Studio 5.x beta branch? That thing is years old. The current version is 5.1.9.2 which was released the other week.

    What do you mean by a simple game mod?

    In regards to recommended video formats, the recommended ones are:
    mkv with vp8 or  vp9 video codec & ogg audio codec.
    mp4 with x264 video codec & ogg audio codec.

    However mkv is recommended because you can embed multiple audio & subtitle language tracks into them.

    In regards to tutorials & documentation, there is plenty floating about on the internet on this forum,  on  the wiki, on the luadocs page (reference), on our discord server (https://discord.gg/g5zFejW), & there's plenty of tutorial videos floating about on youtube.

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  • #3, by dread-pirate-robertsTuesday, 23. August 2022, 19:15 A year ago
    I'm confused, what game are  you talking about?

    Why are they/you using the Visionaire Studio 5.x beta branch? That thing is years old. The current version is 5.1.9.2 which was released the other week.

    What do you mean by a simple game mod?

    In regards to recommended video formats, the recommended ones are:
    mkv with vp8 or  vp9 video codec & ogg audio codec.
    mp4 with x264 video codec & ogg audio codec.

    However mkv is recommended because you can embed multiple audio & subtitle language tracks into them.

    In regards to tutorials & documentation, there is plenty floating about on the internet on this forum,  on  the wiki, on the luadocs page (reference), on our discord server (https://discord.gg/g5zFejW), & there's plenty of tutorial videos floating about on youtube.

    I am talking about Stasis a game that came out in 2015 which is why they used the beta branch as when development started that is what they had.

    I am upscaling the 1280 x 720p 25fps videos from the game Stasis to 2560 x 1440p 25 fps.
    I am modding the original files.

    I am using MKV/VP8 and in actions I can now see the video. 

    I want to change the video files back into the vv(xxx) format so that they work again in game. 

    I have searched all of these suggested places and videos and everything and none of it is particularly useful, you have to search forums for info and piece it together yourself. It is all over the place but in no particular order or structure.

    Newbie

    3 Posts

  • #4, by afrlmeWednesday, 24. August 2022, 01:34 A year ago
    We don't have a tool for converting the videos only. That has to be done via the Visionaire Studio editor when you export the game. Have you tried renaming the videos & changing the extensions via windows explorer itself? Another user recently claimed that they could export the videos out as the original extension file name by changing it in the export options as they wanted to allow players to replace the videos if they wanted to - I don't know if it works as I've not tried doing that myself.

    Anyway, I'm curious how your video is going to work as the game resolution is based on the default game resolution specified in the main game properties & the game then gets scaled up or down (keeping proportions) to fit the screen resolution.

    I think STASIS default game resolution was 1280x720, but I could be wrong as my memory is not so good.

    Also do you have access to the  STASIS ved & resource files? Did Chris give you them or are you just trying to slap some upscaled videos in for the fun of it? Do you  own Visionaire Studio? You need a licensed version (any license) to be able to compile & export games from it - evaluation version has a 10 scene limit & no export options.

    I've never actually heard of anyone modding a Visionaire Studio made game before because there's not much call to mod 2D point & click adventure games. Actually that's not true, the only modifications I've heard about were someone or some people (pirates I think) taking it upon themselves to translate some recently released adult content game into other languages instead of waiting for the devs to translate it themselves.

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  • #5, by dread-pirate-robertsThursday, 25. August 2022, 12:05 A year ago

    So the issue is solved for the videos I found a tool on Github that allows Video2x to output any format type, if left blank once upscaled it outputs the correct format and plays and scales it fine even at 4k no downsampling required. This does make transitions into some scenes jarringly blurry after the video plays. But maybe the same method would work with the image files as well. Animations are saved as single frame PNGs in Visionaire correct?


    No I was not given the source files to work with, I am simply mucking around with a new engine and will be buying a license to start my own game soon.

    I am doing it for the fun of it and downsampling would be the method used lots of artifacting and blurriness cleared up then down sampled to 16:9 720 24 fps. Lot of black in the videos and compression really did a number on it. The game stretches the video content to fit the desktop resolution so when I have done this in other engines the result was much better than original. 

    Stasis was heavily discounted on GOG probably to drum up sales for its sequel releasing soon. I picked it up liked it and started asking questions if it was possible to fix it up. Tweeted Chris about what engine it was built on and that I wanted to try and upscale the game he replied and here I am asking questions among other places.

    Newbie

    3 Posts

  • #6, by afrlmeThursday, 25. August 2022, 17:48 A year ago
    Ok, well it's good that you asked permission. It's just modding is not something we ever hear of in regards to Visionaire Studio as it's a 2D point & click adventure game engine & there's very little in the way of what could be modded.

    Upscaling or downscaling games in Visionaire Studio requires a bit of work because you would also need to redo all the object interaction polygons, interaction positions, & way systems (borders + paths + scaling points) again if you were to change the default game resolution. In other words you can't just replace the png/webp image files.

    I would also like to point out that most people according to steam stats (at least 60% of steam users) are still using screens with a resolution of 1920x1080 & the amount of people using 2k, 3k, & 4k resolution screens is less than 10% in total.

    & on that note, high resolution 2D games can be very heavy when it comes to system resource usage, 1080p is already bad enough for games that are animation heavy. 2K & 4K is just asking for trouble with animation heavy games & you are severely limiting the amount of people that can play your game & which platforms you can export for.

    Visionaire Studio has a built in export option for exporting a game at a different resolution other than the default game resolution specified in the main project settings section of the editor, but we always recommend against using it because it's very hit & miss in regards to it correctly adjusting positions & interaction polygons, etc.

    The recommended resolution if you want to target android/ios devices would be 1280x720 or lower, & 1920x1080 for full hd games if you only want to target desktop &/or consoles. Also the webp image format is recommended regardless of resolution as they are much smaller in file size than png & thus save on storage space for total game size & the smaller file sizes means faster loading times for images & animations.

    In regards to STASIS it was given away for free recently on GOG.

    P.S: I know I ranted on a bit & I wrote about things you didn't ask about, but I figured I should at least provide you with relevant information to take into consideration if/when you decide to work on a game yourself. & on that note my biggest tip is, don't base the default game resolution on whatever your monitor resolution is. 16:9 = most common aspect ratio. 1920x1080 = current most common monitor resolution. 480x270 is a good 16:9 aspect ratio resolution for old school low resolution pixel art games. 1920x1080 is good for full hd traditional third person & click adventure games & visual novels/myst-likes, but you can probably get away with higher resolution for myst-likes & visual novels on account of them not often having many animations & being mostly static. 1280x720 is good for handheld devices. webp over png for reduced total game storage size & faster loading times.

    P.P.S: feel free to join our discord server @ https://discord.gg/g5zFejW

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