The sizzling new strategy to create high-resolution texture pack to fancy up previous games is ‘deep learning’, feeding the unique textures into a pc so algorithms can draw more-detailed variations of what they think about the photographs seem like. It has… different outcomes. I’m a hoary purist who nonetheless performs Quake pixellated with out texture filtering so I’m not mad eager on these hallucinated manglings, however I do just like the method as an act of creation quite than replication. Which leads me to coo over Everest Pipkin’s Mushy, a brand new free tileset for isometric games generated by machine studying with the intention of making a glitched-out look that’s simply not proper.
“Build spires of once-were-chairs, wander through a faded landscape of assumed logical choices, and sail the mushy seas of half-remembered pixel art conventions,” Pipkin says. I’m up for that.
Pipkin fed a load of tile photos (largely ones licensed freely underneath Creative Commons, plus “some classic game rips”) into the software program DCGAN-tensorflow, which used them as inspiration for glitchy photos of its personal. Its recreations are nudged in the direction of being haunted and a bit of hellish, echoes of what they had been alleged to be. It’s a robust look.
You can obtain the Mushy asset pack free from Itch.io and use it for all types of issues underneath a Creative Commons Attribution license. Pipkin has prompt that folks not making games may take pleasure in simply fidgeting with making little worlds within the freeware Tiled Map Editor.
You might bear in mind Pipkin from their work on such procedurally-generated wonders because the Mother Generator bot on Twitter and the greenhouses of The Worm Room in the Triennale Game Collection.
What about these deeply-learned ‘HD’ texture packs I discussed? Well! After ‘deep dreaming’ AI impartial community cybertech digipaint methods got here to prominence in 2015 with these horrific photos dripping with eyeballs and dogs, canny people figured they may use it to re-imagine low-resolution video games textures with extra element in larger decision. Fans have tinkered with a terrific many games, attempting to wipe away blocky previous pixels in a greater manner than the ugly “upscale then sharpen” strategy of most texture pack mods.
Here, take a look at the fancier neuralised backgrounds of the Final Fantasy VII Remako HD Field Mod:
And the dreamed monsters of Doom NeuralUpscale 2x by “hidfan”:
They’re, like, wonderful. They add extra element and look clearer and don’t have that terrible oversharp look, however I believe I nonetheless want the originals. The games don’t seem like themselves with these dreamed textures. The algorithms don’t perceive what one thing is meant to be, they solely attempt to make it look extra like itself. They introduce a wierd model, which clearly I’m into when it’s intentional however places me off in any other case.
I believe a part of my situation is that low-res textures are options for the creativeness, a smattering of pixels to convey the concept of what a floor is meant to be. They exaggerate, they faux, they trick. Lacking our fancy fashionable lighting and shadowing tech that may simulate many properties of actual supplies, they wanted to evoke it. They’re summary and unreal in a satisfying manner that feels actual. By attempting so as to add element to those options, higher-resolution remakes and hallucinations really feel much less actual to me.
No, push these neural nets into cyberhell with the likes of Deep Dream Doom:
