GTA 4 Modder Forced to Fight Engine Limits and Rockstar’s Flaws to Improve Graphics — His Solution Differs from Most Available

Some players aren’t waiting for Rockstar — they’re updating Grand Theft Auto IV’s visuals themselves.

Recently, an enthusiast known as The Wil released a large-scale modification for Grand Theft Auto IV designed to enhance the game’s graphics.

He replaced all of the city’s textures with AI-enhanced versions. During the work he discovered that level authors “didn’t pay much attention to matching texture resolution to the scale of the associated asset.”

As an example, he pointed to doors: most of them “use 512-pixel-high textures; yet some two-story buildings also have 512-pixel-high textures. The result is a blurry building with a detailed door.”

Because of that, The Wil had to “…select textures one by one by hand. It was a meticulous process of finding the optimal resolution and AI method for each replacement. Other mods available in the community simply upscale every texture equally, ignoring the size of the linked asset or whether it needs that level of detail. They even double the resolution of normal and specular maps, overloading the game without delivering real visual improvements.”

He was also constrained by the game engine: “Replacing that many textures with high-resolution models can cause glitches. Most issues can be fixed by simply observing the size limit for each package in the .img files.”

The “HQ Vanilla City Textures Revitalization” mod is distributed free of charge via Nexus Mods.

There are technical caveats: some users reported game glitches such as the map disappearing, and occasional performance drops can occur.

Source: iXBT.games