
Doing an HD Remake the Right Way - smacktoward
http://www.fortressofdoors.com/doing-an-hd-remake-the-right-way/
======
mxfh
When thinking about what is considered the "original" representation of the
sprites, one should be aware of the nature of the original medium (CRT) as
well. Most importantly: pixel aspect ratios, color space, overscan ...

Highly recommend reading Kyle Pittman's articles on CRT simulation:

[http://www.piratehearts.com/blog/2014/03/28/crt-
simulation/](http://www.piratehearts.com/blog/2014/03/28/crt-simulation/)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9364800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9364800)

[http://gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/CRT_S...](http://gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/CRT_Simulation_in_Super_Win_the_Game.php)

~~~
cwyers
The Rare Replay collection is somewhere else that a lot of work has been put
into the CRT emulation for older games.

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dyselon
The art in Skullgirls was done somewhat similar to the way the article
describes in "Recoloring". Each frame was composed of three different images
and each sprite had a palette along with it. The palette was a list of color
gradients. The first image was the black and white line work. The second image
was a solid color key layer whose value acted as an index into the palette
(i.e. which gradient should be selected). The third image was a monochrome
shading layer which acted as the position into that gradient that should be
drawn. The gradients were rendered to textures at runtime, and the shader did
all the work of actually composing the layers.

It did have some downsides, in particular that it was a bit unnatural for
artists to work with, and memory was a constant struggle on console.
Skullgirls characters could have well over 1000 frames of animation, and the
game supports 3 on 3 fights. Mike did a handful of clever tricks to optimize
memory usage, including breaking the images into smaller tiles and throwing
out all the empty ones, and compressing the images even in memory. I'm a big
fan of the final effect; I think the sprites look great, are high resolution,
and allowed artists to create an extremely varied set of palettes for the
game.

~~~
larsiusprime
Hey there! I'm the author of this article. Would love to swap some notes with
you sometime about your pipeline! Mind dropping me a line at lars {dot} doucet
{at} gmail {dot} com?

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nathanb
Great article.

When an indie developer does an HD remake, it's a labor of love. Each sprite
is scaled up meticulously and a lot of thought is put into how to make the
game look the best.

When a big company like Squeenix does an HD remake, they toss it to a third
party, who will do...well, pretty much what you see here. FFV has never been a
big moneymaker for Square (wasn't even originally released in the US, so the
nostalgia factor isn't even there for many of us who grew up with their
games), so I'm guessing "cheap and good enough" trumped "actually good".

What's funny is that those who _are_ nostalgic for these games (or who just
think they're better than most of the stuff on the market today) are willing
to work long and hard with no monetary compensation to produce actually good
versions of the game in question. I wonder if there's some way for Square to
work with these folks to produce a legal, well-done version of the game for
Steam. Probably too risky, but it's a shame.

~~~
cbhl
Tracking down rights to rerelease old games is GOG.com's secret sauce. And
once they've got the distribution rights, they'll work with people who build
emulators (like DOSBox) and wrappers.

See also: [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/09/16/how-gog-com-
save-...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/09/16/how-gog-com-save-and-
restore-classic-videogames/)

Granted, some companies do want to keep those rights to themselves.

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douche
Fantastic writeup. Another example I can think of offhand would be the VBA
remake of the original Genesis Shining Force.

Some comparisons:

Original:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pewTGCkt4qE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pewTGCkt4qE)
Remake:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uVuOd4Aiag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uVuOd4Aiag)

Not sure which one is really better - the original has a very different color
palette. The sprites are probably nicer on the remake, although I think the
character portraits in the original are superior. The remake does have a
number of gameplay improvements.

~~~
Macha
Another interesting example is FF6 Advance. The original GBA had a screen that
wasn't backlit, and would be hard to see darker colours in, particularly if
played outside or near a window etc. So many games (FF6) included, compensated
for this by using a brighter colour palette across the board than NES/SNES/etc
versions.

Of course, once you play that version on a emulator on a modern LCD (or even
on the backlit GBA SP), the colours end up being too bright, to the point that
there is a fanmade patch for FF6 advance to bring back the SNES colour
palette:

[http://www.fantasyanime.com/finalfantasy/ff6/images/ff6gba_c...](http://www.fantasyanime.com/finalfantasy/ff6/images/ff6gba_colorrestoration.png)

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bane
_Waifu2X is a powerful upscaling algorithm based on deep convolutional neural
networks, and specifically trained on anime._

Huh. I guess it goes to show what good solutions fan groups can come up with.
That's fairly bleeding edge, with a well chosen training set and it produces
great results. Really fascinating. I wonder how well it works on regular old
line-art or if it really is dependent on working with anime-like artwork.

~~~
mintplant
The best part about waifu2x is that it tends to work really well even on
images it wasn't intended for, at least in my experience. I use the web
version [1] all the time on all sorts of images, usually with excellent
results--even for photos.

[1] [http://waifu2x.udp.jp/](http://waifu2x.udp.jp/)

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nness
Reminds me of the HD remake of the Resident Evil remake for the GameCube (the
remake of the remake of the PlayStation original, just to be confusing).

Back when it was released on GameCube it looked absolutely amazing. When they
released the PC port, more than a decade later, they talked about re-creating
some of the iconic scenes in the game engine so that they were more dynamic.
In the end only two scenes re-created. The remaining scenes were just upscaled
from their GameCube originals. This was unfortunate since not only where they
a low resolution (something like 700x300), but some of the scenes were heavily
compressed and upscaling them produced a lot of haloing and noticeable
compression artefacts.

Why Capcom couldn't just re-render the original scenes is beyond me.

~~~
ZenPsycho
Game companies seem to be particularly bad at retaining original assets.
Developers and artists keep a lot of stuff on their locally non backed up
machines and regular staff churn, combined with deliberate software
obsolescence and bit rot pretty much spreads the ashes of original source
files to the cosmos.

~~~
nness
I would like to think that is the most likely reason behind why the assets
weren't re-rendered. The alternatives are just laziness or budget issues,
which I wouldn't put past Capcom either.

------
Animats
The new "Waifu 2X" neural net based up-scaling algorithm is impressive. That
should be applied to older anime.

Improving older anime, drawn at low-res and 5 FPS, has real potential.
Especially if you can get better source material than old VHS tapes.

~~~
scott_karana
The low framerate is a much more obvious, and much harder to solve, problem I
think...

You can't easily auto-tween a 3D rotation of a 2D character, for example.

I think the author's approach of "use upsizing algorithms as a basis for
humans to remaster" is probably the best of both worlds.

~~~
Animats
_" You can't easily auto-tween a 3D rotation of a 2D character, for example."_

Actually, you can. See the previous HN discussion of "Framefree", which
decomposes an image into separately moving layers and uses a full mesh morph
layer by layer to interpolate between frames. Some ultra-slow motion for
sports is done that way.

~~~
scott_karana
I assume you mean this?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052626)

That's pretty awesome! I stand by my point that it's not _easy_ , but I'm
amazed by how effective that is.

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cpeterso
Here is a great interview with the developers of the Gears of War HD remake
for Xbox One. They used the original, nine-year-old game engine and scripting
to keep the same feel.

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-the-
ma...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-the-making-of-
gears-of-war-ultimate-edition)

------
bitwize
Right or wrong can only be reckoned with respect to one variable: THE BOTTOM
LINE. And Square Enix can make money by turning the crank and shitting out an
old Final Fantasy game slapped with a fresh coat of paint, at much lower cost
than doing a proper, polished remake and certainly lower than releasing a new
game.

I suspect after FF7Remake Square Enix will pull out from console gaming
altogether and release more "get Cloud's sword with microtransactions" style
mobile farm fests.

Because that's where the money is.

~~~
Domenic_S
I feel like most (all?) popular art is that way. Games, movies, music.

1\. Create something amazing, pour artisan-level craftsmanship into it, gain
huge following

2\. Exploit your popularity by churning out branded garbage

3\. Profit

Even Disney's not immune. Have you seen how many direct-to-DVD/streaming
'movies' there are that cash in on their popular franchises? It sucks.

~~~
derefr
> Have you seen how many direct-to-DVD/streaming 'movies' there are that cash
> in on their popular franchises?

I have a strong feeling that a lot of those are made exclusively for toddlers,
who tend to frequently get obsessed with consuming anything-and-everything
related to a given franchise. I don't feel bad that they're not well-made;
nobody could keep pumping _good_ pieces of media out at the rate an obsessive
toddler will want to consume them.

~~~
dexterdog
My obsessive toddlers would watch the quality stuff over and over again. They
didn't need the filler.

