Upscaling Sierra AGI games

[kremiso]

just watched this short but imo interesting video, with a reasoning about how to attempt to upgrade the gfx in the Sierra early adventures :

[ Show youtube player ]

[gimbal]

Also this interesting tech demo of Sierra AGI games but in 3D. I'd play that!

[ Show youtube player ]

[dreadnought]

Valiant effort, terrible results. But that's how it is 19 times out of 20 when people try to "fix" old gfx, with which there is nothing wrong to start with.

There's the usual call to the Holy Modern Grail of "sharpness", but his initial footage is from some wishy washy modern monitor, or maybe it's dodgy video upscaling, nevertheless you can do much better by running Dosbox in pixel perfect mode (or simply use a CRT monitor). It's also possible, judging by his final shots, that by sharpness he means getting rid of jaggies, but again, this is not how this game would look on the original CGA monitor (heavy scanlines), or via CGA or RGB (later on Amiga, ST, etc) on consumer 15kHz CRT with its natural antialiasing. Which you can easily emulate with some shaders.

Oh, well. His saving grace is that at the end he says this is a "remix", and not some sort of ultimate version, so at least there's that.

[Cherno]

The 3D demo inspired me to create some sprites for an imaginary Police Quest-Bladerunner game when I first saw it.

Now where did Gaff put the keys for the Spinner...?

[TCD]

I watched the first video a couple of weeks ago and found it interesting, but the result don't really appeal to me. If they would have tried to upscale them while keep it 'pixeled' that might work better. His conclusion is good though.

[kremiso]

Originally Posted by Cherno

The 3D demo inspired me to create some sprites for an imaginary Police Quest-Bladerunner game when I first saw it.

good ones, really good ones

Originally Posted by gimbal

Also this interesting tech demo of Sierra AGI games but in 3D. I'd play that!

me too, and personally not only an adventure
wondering a Skool Daze remake using that 3d engine ie

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Cherno

The 3D demo inspired me to create some sprites for an imaginary Police Quest-Bladerunner game when I first saw it.

That's super awesome!

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Valiant effort, terrible results. But that's how it is 19 times out of 20 when people try to "fix" old gfx, with which there is nothing wrong to start with.

I don't call it exactly "fixing" in this case. Ken Williams had a really good idea to do all the graphics in the game using line drawing and flood filling operations instead of pixel plotting and so it has triggered people to see if they can take those drawing commands and make it output in a higher resolution. It'd be pretty cool to see someone succeed at it just to solidify how clever the idea was all those decades ago. Making it look better is pretty secondary really

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by gimbal

I don't call it exactly "fixing" in this case. Ken Williams had a really good idea to do all the graphics in the game using line drawing and flood filling operations instead of pixel plotting and so it has triggered people to see if they can take those drawing commands and make it output in a higher resolution. It'd be pretty cool to see someone succeed at it just to solidify how clever the idea was all those decades ago. Making it look better is pretty secondary really

I do concur, and it's an endless source of inspiration and also personal exploration for me how far these old games and graphics can be pushed using current technology and what we know right now after 30 something years these games were originally developed. I wouldn't neither call what is presented here trying to fix something – more like opening a whole new and interesting way of looking at the graphics we've all been accustomed to throughout all these years.

Althought the results are inferior to what's seen in the original game, I could see that what this person has done might be again fed to an AI that interprets what's in the picture and does a nice renditions of these in various different styles. Again, useless, but endlessly interesting.

As for fixing things, current Sierra games interpreters already utilise a method that renders what is shown as a pixel raster (to make up for the missing colors in the EGA palette) as solid colors. This is what I'd call a good fix to get closer to what the original developers had in mind, but still being true to the original art style.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by kremiso

just watched this short but imo interesting video, with a reasoning about how to attempt to upgrade the gfx in the Sierra early adventures :

[ Show youtube player ]

You can give a chance to alternative approach: https://upscale.wiki/wiki/Model_Database

Some of models give very neat results - like this https://imgsli.com/MzgxMTc/1/2

[saimon69]

Stumbled on those resources if someone want to create an adventure with that engine:

AGI Programmers Wiki.

Barry Harmsen \ Reverse Engineering 90s Sierra AGI Games \ Sanoma TechTalks25
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[gimbal]

Awesome, I'll watch that one later. You can always spot a Dutch guy the second they open their mouth

[Valken]

That 3D version is AMAZING! I love it!

[Suthriel]

For those, who liked the 3D remake, the creator released a 3D remake of another game, Enclosure.
Here is the trailer:


[ Show youtube player ]


And you can download the game from his Website, that is also linked in the Trailers description


Or just go here: https://mausimus.itch.io/enclosure3d

[gimbal]

I love it.

[kremiso]

seems great, impatient to test it in a couple of days, thanks

[TCD]

That looks really interesting. Plus the 3D effect works very well.

[gimbal]

Exceptionally well, I would say. At the 1:17 mark they flip the game from 2D to 3D mode when outside in the snow and even though it is still all monster pixels, it looks very eye pleasing.

Q4 the tooling behind it will be made available, I'm curious to see what goes into making a game like this. Right now you could do it 2D with the Adventure Game Studio.

[ Show youtube player ]

(if you don't want to watch the entire video, watch the part at 23:40. God I love this dude).

[TCD]

Erm... okay. I just hope that Larry, Police & King's Quest etc get a 3D makeover too.

[gimbal]

Yeah but then I do hope people are wise and don't try to recreate the existing games, reuse assets to create new games and use different names for them (Cop Quest!). Because Activision still owns and sells those games.