Doom Modder Uses Artificial Intelligence to Enhance the Textures of the Cult Classic

cageymaru

cageymaru

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A Doom modder named "hidfan" on the Doomworld forums has used artificial intelligence (A.I.) to increase the texture fidelity of the 1993 cult classic. The Doom Neural Upscale 2X mod uses a combination of Super Resolution from the NVIDIA GameWorks: Materials & Textures toolset and Topaz AI Gigapixel to upscale the textures and sprites 8x. From there he had to manually rid the textures of unwanted AI artifacts. All transparency masks had to be manually enhanced as the AI wasn't programmed to deal with binary black and white. The final step was to downscale the textures to a final 2x resolution to restore the pixel art look of the game. Hidfan has graciously uploaded his work to a Google Drive folder to share with others. The wad file and installation instructions can be found here. A Morrowind modder named DassiD also used A.I. to upscale the textures in Morrowind as we reported yesterday.

The process was to pack doom textures into different 1024x1024 pngs (7 iamges), then get the 8x upscaled versions (using 2 different techniques), then blend those results together as they both have qualitys and issues, downsize to 4096 with bicubic supersampling to blend some noise, then downsize to 2048x2048 with nearest neighbour supersampling to keep the sharpness feeling of original doom textures. Unfortunately this comes with some unwanted pixels here and there and a heavy de-noising work was needed. Also the contrast is changed, bright details are brighter, and dark one are darker too, this had to be cleaned as well by removing them and letting the original texture color appear.
 
cageymaru said:
A Doom modder named "hidfan" on the Doomworld forums has used artificial intelligence (A.I.) to increase the texture fidelity of the 1993 cult classic. The Doom Neural Upscale 2X mod uses a combination of Super Resolution from the NVIDIA GameWorks: Materials & Textures toolset and Topaz AI Gigapixel to upscale the textures and sprites 8x. From there he had to manually rid the textures of unwanted AI artifacts. All transparency masks had to be manually enhanced as the AI wasn't programmed to deal with binary black and white. The final step was to downscale the textures to a final 2x resolution to restore the pixel art look of the game. Hidfan has graciously uploaded his work to a Google Drive folder to share with others. The wad file and installation instructions can be found here. A Morrowind modder named DassiD also used A.I. to upscale the textures in Morrowind as we reported yesterday.

The process was to pack doom textures into different 1024x1024 pngs (7 iamges), then get the 8x upscaled versions (using 2 different techniques), then blend those results together as they both have qualitys and issues, downsize to 4096 with bicubic supersampling to blend some noise, then downsize to 2048x2048 with nearest neighbour supersampling to keep the sharpness feeling of original doom textures. Unfortunately this comes with some unwanted pixels here and there and a heavy de-noising work was needed. Also the contrast is changed, bright details are brighter, and dark one are darker too, this had to be cleaned as well by removing them and letting the original texture color appear.
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Finally, something AI does that I care about, making old games look amazing!
 
One day, not many moons from now, an even more advanced AI will upscale these, than another one will improve upon them, then another and so on until they (the machines) produce a full blown 3d environment.

PhaseNoise said:
And yet the actual AI in games has not progressed from FEAR, or Thief.
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I think I know what you mean. You seem to be of the opinion that camping = smarts.
 
cageymaru said:
A Doom modder named "hidfan" on the Doomworld forums has used artificial intelligence (A.I.) to increase the texture fidelity of the 1993 cult classic. The Doom Neural Upscale 2X mod uses a combination of Super Resolution from the NVIDIA GameWorks: Materials & Textures toolset and Topaz AI Gigapixel to upscale the textures and sprites 8x. From there he had to manually rid the textures of unwanted AI artifacts. All transparency masks had to be manually enhanced as the AI wasn't programmed to deal with binary black and white. The final step was to downscale the textures to a final 2x resolution to restore the pixel art look of the game. Hidfan has graciously uploaded his work to a Google Drive folder to share with others. The wad file and installation instructions can be found here. A Morrowind modder named DassiD also used A.I. to upscale the textures in Morrowind as we reported yesterday.

The process was to pack doom textures into different 1024x1024 pngs (7 iamges), then get the 8x upscaled versions (using 2 different techniques), then blend those results together as they both have qualitys and issues, downsize to 4096 with bicubic supersampling to blend some noise, then downsize to 2048x2048 with nearest neighbour supersampling to keep the sharpness feeling of original doom textures. Unfortunately this comes with some unwanted pixels here and there and a heavy de-noising work was needed. Also the contrast is changed, bright details are brighter, and dark one are darker too, this had to be cleaned as well by removing them and letting the original texture color appear.
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Is Doom a cult classic? It seems like it is just a classic. Other than that this is pretty cool.
 
There is no such thing as AI. Its just code. Until a program writes it own code and doing something different than what it was told to do its just good code. Quantum computers will introduce us to AI. AI is a marketing term where cloud meets useful code that looks so flashy that it tricks managements is AI. LOL
 
bbertram said:
There is no such thing as AI. Its just code. Until a program writes it own code and doing something different than what it was told to do its just good code. Quantum computers will introduce us to AI. AI is a marketing term where cloud meets useful code that looks so flashy that it tricks managements is AI. LOL
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I’ve always wanted to say this.

AI doesnt exist. Algorithms are not AI.

You’ll know when AI finally exists because it will completely take over litterally at the speed of electricity.
 
bbertram said:
There is no such thing as AI. Its just code. Until a program writes it own code and doing something different than what it was told to do its just good code. Quantum computers will introduce us to AI. AI is a marketing term where cloud meets useful code that looks so flashy that it tricks managements is AI. LOL
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Ugh. Next you're going to tell me the Cloud isn't really a magical cloud, but a clever abstraction for dumb-consumers and dumb-executives to believe there's something new about old datacenters.

AI, deep-this, neural-that, machine learning blah blah -- like trying to scrape dogcrap off your shoe, won't be able to avoid those buzzwords until the new ones come along (it'll be a quantum-everything circlejerk).
 
DPI said:
Ugh. Next you're going to tell me the Cloud isn't really a magical cloud, but a clever abstraction for dumb-consumers and dumb-executives to believe there's something new about old datacenters.

AI, deep-this, neural-that, machine learning blah blah -- like trying to scrape dogcrap off your shoe, won't be able to avoid those buzzwords until the new ones come along (it'll be a quantum-everything circlejerk).
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The cloud doesn't save you any money, but executives probably like that they don't have to hire people to physically maintain servers.
 
SecretStash said:
The cloud doesn't save you any money, but executives probably like that they don't have to hire people to physically maintain servers.
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Cloud *can* save you money, and hassle. Not having to maintain servers and being able to easily backup or transfer your service is le awesome. But that's not for everyone, for a variety of reasons...
 
tempertantrum said:
Cloud *can* save you money, and hassle. Not having to maintain servers and being able to easily backup or transfer your service is le awesome. But that's not for everyone, for a variety of reasons...
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They make it very hard to save. I suppose an app that scales up and down may benefit most in savings.
 
Is there video of this anywhere? I have no interest in downloading and playing it, but would like to see it...
 
SecretStash said:
They make it very hard to save. I suppose an app that scales up and down may benefit most in savings.
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A lift and shift is almost always going to cost more, you really need to design for it and take advantage of its strengths.

Like instead of running a test environment 24/7 alongside prod, spin it up when needed and destroy it when not. Your environment should be really fluid. If you're just spinning up 100 dumb VMs and calling it a day, you're going to lose.
 
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