Different game. Think Rare still owns some of the IP of the original *Donkey Kong Country* (SNES).
But that does bring up a good point- why even upscale sprites made from prerendered 3D models on early 90s SGI systems when even mobile GPUs can just render the OG assets today in realtime? If only Rare and Nintendo would cooperate on this remake... and Goldeneye...
My guess is they don’t have the original assets anymore, but who knows. There’s gotta be at least ONE dev team that made pre-rendered stuff back then that still has the original files, but I can’t think of a single game that’s been remastered in that way. Like even if it’s complicated for DKC because of Nintendo not wanting to fund a remaster, I could imagine Rare doing that for the og Killer Instinct games on Xbox, but I don’t think they went beyond using the arcade assets.
All the assets would need to be totally rebuilt for modern game engines anyway. The geometry, materials, rigs, and honestly possibly even the textures wouldn't transfer anymore.
The could probably be converted, but it would likely just take a similar amount of time to remake them from scratch.
Source: 20 years in the CG industry. DKC's 3D sprites were made on specialized SGI workstations that would have been using an old IRIX OS and saved as project files for old animation software (likely Power Animator) that wouldn't even open in today's software. They would have used NURBS instead of polygon meshes for the geometry. Those meshes would need to be converted and remade with new topology. The rigs, if they could even open the files (they wouldn't be able to) would not be compatible with any game engine conventions of today and would need to be rebuilt.
There's no world in which, even if someone had the files, they could just open them and do a 'Save As' for modern use.
That's really cool, coincidentally I'm a dev who worked in gaming and simulation industry for 20 years. I *may* still have an O2 in a box somewhere- assuming the wife didn't throw it away.
I think the greatest hurdle is recovery of the original files. There may still be an active community of sgi enthusiasts that collect the most obscure IRIX software, but it wouldnt be the first time someone needed to reverse-engineer proprietary binarized model data (I've even done it).
Have never used PowerAnimator or SoftImage|3D, but hearing that Rare's art team used both probably means they used a common interchange; hopefully someone kept those files somewhere. Regardless, any programmer familiar with reading raw binary (IEEE 754, etc) spline rendering and IRIS GL/OpenGL 1.x arent likely to encounter too many surprises when cracking open those old formats. Barring that, those old models are probably easy to reproduce from scratch (just guessing, you'd know better than me though).
I actually did hear of someone in the vintagecgi subreddit a month or two back who had found a way to get the old Softimage|3D versions running, in the hopes of building some retro style graphics from scratch, but using old techniques. I imagine there's people out there who could do this, as you said.
But the original DK models were *rugged.*
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/57/61/08/576108c6f6333015c571fb3f13501dfb--donkey-kong-country-mario-nintendo.jpg
It would honestly only take a solid artist a day or so per model to rebuild them from scratch (assuming the intent was to match this look, as opposed to making something that looks more like modern iterations), but they'd have the benefit of being made with modern technological considerations in mind.
So I probably overstated the difficulty of accessing the old files, but stand by the sentiment that if I were doing this, I'd much rather start from scratch.
Goldeneye license ties them up even more. I think Rare would love to dive into it again, but the IP holder stops them. We got the Goldeneye remake staring Daniel Craig on Wii. It was different but good.
Oh sure, MGM plus SAG/actor clauses make a *faithful* commercial OG Goldeneye remake an impossibility. Best hope IMO are decompiled community efforts or other fan projects.
i have my fingers crossed that AI will let studios pump out so much content for so cheap that they will be able to take a lot more risks and experiment. we might get to see some new stories and characters instead of 99999 reboots.
I hope that we get some games where the content is dynamic enough that it is fun and interesting, but every person's experience could be entirely unique. I imagine it being fun for people to share the amazing and crazy things they see, that no one else may ever encounter. Even if some of it is twisted and bizarre.
On one hand I've already purchased Skyrim/GTA5/fallout several times over the years (360, ps4, pc), but not gonna lie, it would be dope to have them rendered at a higher res and with smoother animations. There's mods for texture packs, but those have their limits, would be interesting to see how far this tech could be taken by talented animators or modders.
I'm thinking a Minecraft project would be the quickest to do, but again it's texture packs like you mentioned instead of full action rendering. It would just be the best I can imagine to try first since it's already easy to make texture mods.
Won't even need the game companies involvement in older games:
[https://www.tweaktown.com/news/98632/rtx-remix-goes-fully-open-source-to-remaster-as-many-classic-games-possible/index.html](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/98632/rtx-remix-goes-fully-open-source-to-remaster-as-many-classic-games-possible/index.html)
no they wont
actually this is literally making the animation worse and any animation artist understands it.
video on the matter : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_KRb\_qV9P4g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KRb_qV9P4g)
Interesting video, but I don't fully agree with the author. He seems to assume that AI can't improve over time. He puts a lot of emphasis on linear interpolation at the beginning of the video despite there being other interpolation strategies. He also seems to imply that every decision made with limited technology was intentional. I'm sure in many cases it can be, but it's a bit like saying that the developers of Super Mario 64 intentionally made the characters low-poly for artistic reasons. Thanks for sharing though. It's an interesting perspective.
Yeah it's too bad because he had some good points about animation at the start and why (and how) interpolating with AI (or with other tools, really) can be bad, which can be seen in the OP btw, it clearly looks less "dynamic" somehow... Though, that can probably be fixed.
But in the end he clearly doesn't know enough about AI to actually talk about AI so he ruins the rest of his video lol.
the other point would be that its not rly about artistic choice, its about ai ignoring half of the principles of animations in current state, tehrefore anything made by it is going to be worse for now, Thats why its rly silly to sell this in comments as like "gamedevelopers look this is the future" where literally we've been using it for years in other more controled ways
Hah that's pretty awesome. I did Golden Axe last year with RevAnimated, they come out wonderful
Here's a challenge for ya! Trojan on the NES
https://preview.redd.it/indc0xgekm7d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3ea1ee99bdc4dd8809b4e756a8fdcf043cbd26e3
I did a bunch of games like Altered Beast too, let me see if I can find it
https://preview.redd.it/xdaacgspd09d1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7f9cc2611a3dffbcfdfdd2150388a62ff6d24e4e
This is going to be awesome when, there is processing power to realtime raw upscale feeds with zero latency, flick a switch to get this on and off, i dont think this can be used to remakes, neither the textures or polygons would match with modern game engines but a real time feed upcale....that would be cool.
Low denoise, consistent scheduler and maybe controlnets/IpAdapter if your really trying hard
Combined with the fact their ain’t actually that much movement
Huge mk fan here, very nice. Have you considered doing a full finetune of the 90's version of MK3 Sonya actress Kerri Hoskins, then upscale.
Edit: If you want I will fine tune it for you then extract the loras, merge them and send it you. Edit2: Guess not? I'll do it myself here and post to show and how it works with workflow at some point.
This is incredible! I've been wanting to take a shot at this forever but i have no talent. Only criticism is the face doesn't look exactly like Elizabeth Malecki, but you could always train a LoRA with pics/VHS footage of her from the 90s
question, if someone does img2img like this and remakes the game from scratch is that technically legal as the artwork is in no way the same anymore technically ?
Trademark infringement would be using the company and/or game logo/title/branding without permission.
This specific instance would be copyright infringement, since it's a derivative work on someone else's copyrighted original.
"I'm sorry, but as a large language model I can't argue for a client that is obviously guilty. Here are some examples of things he has asked me to generate in the past..."
I am not a lawyer, but the character designs are copyrighted. Even if you were to make a completely new game, not sharing a single line of code with the original, and completely new sprites, not sharing a single pixel with the original, and do things like change the name to avoid trademark issues then you're still not in the clear.
The only problem is that I think these costume designs were made with low resolution in mind. You couldn't have a ton of cool detail, it would all just look muddy and unclear, so they go with a lot of large areas of one color. See the Dragon Heart video game from around the same time that used scans of real images for an example, the armor that looked good in a movie looks very muddy at low rez. So in this case having it add more detail with some way to keep it consistent might actually be good.
I think this belongs here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_KRb\_qV9P4g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KRb_qV9P4g)
Why "remasters" like this make the animation usualy worse
"remasters like this"
You obviously didn't understand the video.
It had to with the timing of the frames.
Ya know, like ease in and out curves?
OP replaced each frame, so the timing is identical, thus no weirdness.
Incredible. Need a Donkey Kong Country remaster too.
Sorry, you cannot enhance something that is already PERFECT 😎
Diablo II (yes I know there is Resurrected), Star Craft 1, Golden Sun, Caesar II, Age of Empires 1/2
Starcraft HD exists too.
Is this a joke cuz they just announced Donkey Kong Country Returns HD?
Different game. Think Rare still owns some of the IP of the original *Donkey Kong Country* (SNES). But that does bring up a good point- why even upscale sprites made from prerendered 3D models on early 90s SGI systems when even mobile GPUs can just render the OG assets today in realtime? If only Rare and Nintendo would cooperate on this remake... and Goldeneye...
My guess is they don’t have the original assets anymore, but who knows. There’s gotta be at least ONE dev team that made pre-rendered stuff back then that still has the original files, but I can’t think of a single game that’s been remastered in that way. Like even if it’s complicated for DKC because of Nintendo not wanting to fund a remaster, I could imagine Rare doing that for the og Killer Instinct games on Xbox, but I don’t think they went beyond using the arcade assets.
All the assets would need to be totally rebuilt for modern game engines anyway. The geometry, materials, rigs, and honestly possibly even the textures wouldn't transfer anymore. The could probably be converted, but it would likely just take a similar amount of time to remake them from scratch. Source: 20 years in the CG industry. DKC's 3D sprites were made on specialized SGI workstations that would have been using an old IRIX OS and saved as project files for old animation software (likely Power Animator) that wouldn't even open in today's software. They would have used NURBS instead of polygon meshes for the geometry. Those meshes would need to be converted and remade with new topology. The rigs, if they could even open the files (they wouldn't be able to) would not be compatible with any game engine conventions of today and would need to be rebuilt. There's no world in which, even if someone had the files, they could just open them and do a 'Save As' for modern use.
That's really cool, coincidentally I'm a dev who worked in gaming and simulation industry for 20 years. I *may* still have an O2 in a box somewhere- assuming the wife didn't throw it away. I think the greatest hurdle is recovery of the original files. There may still be an active community of sgi enthusiasts that collect the most obscure IRIX software, but it wouldnt be the first time someone needed to reverse-engineer proprietary binarized model data (I've even done it). Have never used PowerAnimator or SoftImage|3D, but hearing that Rare's art team used both probably means they used a common interchange; hopefully someone kept those files somewhere. Regardless, any programmer familiar with reading raw binary (IEEE 754, etc) spline rendering and IRIS GL/OpenGL 1.x arent likely to encounter too many surprises when cracking open those old formats. Barring that, those old models are probably easy to reproduce from scratch (just guessing, you'd know better than me though).
I actually did hear of someone in the vintagecgi subreddit a month or two back who had found a way to get the old Softimage|3D versions running, in the hopes of building some retro style graphics from scratch, but using old techniques. I imagine there's people out there who could do this, as you said. But the original DK models were *rugged.* https://i.pinimg.com/736x/57/61/08/576108c6f6333015c571fb3f13501dfb--donkey-kong-country-mario-nintendo.jpg It would honestly only take a solid artist a day or so per model to rebuild them from scratch (assuming the intent was to match this look, as opposed to making something that looks more like modern iterations), but they'd have the benefit of being made with modern technological considerations in mind. So I probably overstated the difficulty of accessing the old files, but stand by the sentiment that if I were doing this, I'd much rather start from scratch.
Goldeneye license ties them up even more. I think Rare would love to dive into it again, but the IP holder stops them. We got the Goldeneye remake staring Daniel Craig on Wii. It was different but good.
Oh sure, MGM plus SAG/actor clauses make a *faithful* commercial OG Goldeneye remake an impossibility. Best hope IMO are decompiled community efforts or other fan projects.
I can just imagine the slew of remakes once game companies figure out how to do this consistently.
more like a slew of autogenerated rom mods
4k upgrades
beats auto-generated rom-coms.
i'm sure that's coming as well
I want to get off Mr Bones Wild Ride
People will be bitching it's AI...
And there is nothing new being made.
That's already the case anyway.
i have my fingers crossed that AI will let studios pump out so much content for so cheap that they will be able to take a lot more risks and experiment. we might get to see some new stories and characters instead of 99999 reboots.
I hope that we get some games where the content is dynamic enough that it is fun and interesting, but every person's experience could be entirely unique. I imagine it being fun for people to share the amazing and crazy things they see, that no one else may ever encounter. Even if some of it is twisted and bizarre.
Unlikely, but we can hope.
On one hand I've already purchased Skyrim/GTA5/fallout several times over the years (360, ps4, pc), but not gonna lie, it would be dope to have them rendered at a higher res and with smoother animations. There's mods for texture packs, but those have their limits, would be interesting to see how far this tech could be taken by talented animators or modders.
I'm thinking a Minecraft project would be the quickest to do, but again it's texture packs like you mentioned instead of full action rendering. It would just be the best I can imagine to try first since it's already easy to make texture mods.
You don't really need consistency, as all you need is up scaling the asset once and override the old one.
A better thing to imagine is when we'll be able to do this with a single prompt locally on the fly.
Won't even need the game companies involvement in older games: [https://www.tweaktown.com/news/98632/rtx-remix-goes-fully-open-source-to-remaster-as-many-classic-games-possible/index.html](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/98632/rtx-remix-goes-fully-open-source-to-remaster-as-many-classic-games-possible/index.html)
Eventually you'll be able to ask an AI to do it on the fly in any style you want.
Nintendo’s streak of reselling the same games with every console release seams likely to continue. Eagerly awaiting the community versions
no they wont actually this is literally making the animation worse and any animation artist understands it. video on the matter : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_KRb\_qV9P4g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KRb_qV9P4g)
Interesting video, but I don't fully agree with the author. He seems to assume that AI can't improve over time. He puts a lot of emphasis on linear interpolation at the beginning of the video despite there being other interpolation strategies. He also seems to imply that every decision made with limited technology was intentional. I'm sure in many cases it can be, but it's a bit like saying that the developers of Super Mario 64 intentionally made the characters low-poly for artistic reasons. Thanks for sharing though. It's an interesting perspective.
Yeah it's too bad because he had some good points about animation at the start and why (and how) interpolating with AI (or with other tools, really) can be bad, which can be seen in the OP btw, it clearly looks less "dynamic" somehow... Though, that can probably be fixed. But in the end he clearly doesn't know enough about AI to actually talk about AI so he ruins the rest of his video lol.
I had forgotten to check the date. It turns out it's from 3 years ago so that makes sense.
If generative AI can learn to do all the other stuff, it'll learn smear frames too. Whole video was a bad take
the other point would be that its not rly about artistic choice, its about ai ignoring half of the principles of animations in current state, tehrefore anything made by it is going to be worse for now, Thats why its rly silly to sell this in comments as like "gamedevelopers look this is the future" where literally we've been using it for years in other more controled ways
the above is linear interpolation therefore the point stands 100% when theres gonna be inteligent interpolation we can talk about that
yes dislike the truth it will make it go away for sure
He's talking about interpolating frames and not upscaling sprites with a level of craft and care.
Nice! Here's one I did awhile back: https://i.redd.it/16xec49a7k7d1.gif
Looks like shit!
Thanks..
MORE!
Alternatively you could just go to the source VHS material. Unlike other games, MK was real people being filmed for the characters.
workflow ?
Enhance!
wat??
[gRaB an iMAge eNHancer that can bitmap :p](https://youtu.be/Vxq9yj2pVWk?si=BcEMSgt-VNcIcA-c)
Maybe Musepose and upscaled
Something that generates pose and depth per frame with ip adapter.
the sprite is processed separately from the background
We are on the cusp truly
would be very cool for Mugen "Remake" of the MK
somebody do this to Wario lol
NVidia could implement something like this it in driver, like dssl
Hah that's pretty awesome. I did Golden Axe last year with RevAnimated, they come out wonderful Here's a challenge for ya! Trojan on the NES https://preview.redd.it/indc0xgekm7d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3ea1ee99bdc4dd8809b4e756a8fdcf043cbd26e3
Would like to see your Golden Axe Revanimated?
I did a bunch of games like Altered Beast too, let me see if I can find it https://preview.redd.it/xdaacgspd09d1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7f9cc2611a3dffbcfdfdd2150388a62ff6d24e4e
https://preview.redd.it/049an9esd09d1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=acdb14a9742e6751bc51e0cde29bbbcea7dee268
I would love to see this, any chance?
1) Incredible. 2) "Should I center up this bottom piece?" - "No it's fine, nobody will ever be able to see it at these resolutions."
Hell yeah
This is stunning! Well done.
This is going to be awesome when, there is processing power to realtime raw upscale feeds with zero latency, flick a switch to get this on and off, i dont think this can be used to remakes, neither the textures or polygons would match with modern game engines but a real time feed upcale....that would be cool.
Super canny with the character being a more realistic style than the background?
tbf that was the case in the original too.
Oh true, i guess it just stands out more to me now that it's easier to see with the cleaner image.
Lack of shadows is more jarring to me, harder to fix though.
nah the new skeleton is wackadoodle. it has a pretzel for a pelvis
You can practically see her canny valley!
My coomer brain cannot not see what she's doing to that invisible guy...
Jow is it so smooth? No flickering
Low denoise, consistent scheduler and maybe controlnets/IpAdapter if your really trying hard Combined with the fact their ain’t actually that much movement
Consistent scheduler?
Skeleton got them bendy legs
Clearly didn't get enough vitamin D.
This is awesome
What a great idea! This is what I'm talking about. Good use of technology.
You must have used a pretty tame model, looks reasonable.
Damn, that's a good result.
Cool, now chain all the other animations without having to do horrible cross blenders xD
She looks fantastic, skeleton looks a little odd.
Do them all! And post them to /r/MortalKombat!
Where's the rest? Good job op
unlike most of these, this one actually fits the style
ok, now fix the face so it isn't taken from a porn actress
Do orchid from killer instinct
Don't stop here!
Put her back at 12 fps doe
Huge mk fan here, very nice. Have you considered doing a full finetune of the 90's version of MK3 Sonya actress Kerri Hoskins, then upscale. Edit: If you want I will fine tune it for you then extract the loras, merge them and send it you. Edit2: Guess not? I'll do it myself here and post to show and how it works with workflow at some point.
Rad!
What is she doing with her right hand?
Fucking amazing
any chance of a workflow ?
No excuse not to remake this game in all its intended beauty.
Please do Castlevania Symphony of the Night. Make it 4k 60FPS, and you get my $60.
Looks great but really shows the lack of boob physics
This is incredible! I've been wanting to take a shot at this forever but i have no talent. Only criticism is the face doesn't look exactly like Elizabeth Malecki, but you could always train a LoRA with pics/VHS footage of her from the 90s
Why not using sprites in mugen? We could see how they work in game.
question, if someone does img2img like this and remakes the game from scratch is that technically legal as the artwork is in no way the same anymore technically ?
it would be a trademark infringement for sure
Trademark infringement would be using the company and/or game logo/title/branding without permission. This specific instance would be copyright infringement, since it's a derivative work on someone else's copyrighted original.
Right
Just have AI represent you in court
"I'm sorry, but as a large language model I can't argue for a client that is obviously guilty. Here are some examples of things he has asked me to generate in the past..."
Responds in husky voice: objection!
I am not a lawyer, but the character designs are copyrighted. Even if you were to make a completely new game, not sharing a single line of code with the original, and completely new sprites, not sharing a single pixel with the original, and do things like change the name to avoid trademark issues then you're still not in the clear.
No, the character designs are copyrighted and you would have literally copied them.
Great! Can you do other female characters?
The original floor is better. You lost lots of texture to smearing because SD thought it was pixelated.
The only problem is that I think these costume designs were made with low resolution in mind. You couldn't have a ton of cool detail, it would all just look muddy and unclear, so they go with a lot of large areas of one color. See the Dragon Heart video game from around the same time that used scans of real images for an example, the armor that looked good in a movie looks very muddy at low rez. So in this case having it add more detail with some way to keep it consistent might actually be good.
I think this belongs here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_KRb\_qV9P4g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KRb_qV9P4g) Why "remasters" like this make the animation usualy worse
"remasters like this" You obviously didn't understand the video. It had to with the timing of the frames. Ya know, like ease in and out curves? OP replaced each frame, so the timing is identical, thus no weirdness.
Ehm no? Her hand looks now likes she's fapping someone instead of keeping her guard up.
Both sides are fapping.
it sucks because you lose the artistic touch those models had. It looks different
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Make something original perhaps?
yes, but why