Two days ago, we informed you about an AI-enhanced Texture Pack for Final Fantasy 7. And today, I’m happy to report that Final Fantasy 8 has also received a HD remaster treatment thanks to another AI-enhanced Texture Pack that has been released for it.
Created by modder ‘blippyp’, this Graphical Update mod for Final Fantasy VIII updates all of the background files for the game by using a GAN the modder trained to generate the images.
Going into more details, while the current GAN model that the modder used has only been training for about 130K iterations so far using a rather limited image store to learn from, the end results are very promising.
“What previously would of taken me months to complete, I could now accomplish in less than a day using the GAN I trained and basically doing it all at once. This mod is the results of doing that. Nothing has been done to the images so far, this is simply what my GAN produced for all the background images.”
Do note that this is a beta release, meaning that some backgrounds may not be properly remastered as the process tends to not work well with some images, and in some situations leaves a ‘checkered line’ mark on some backgrounds. The modder also expects some graphical issues/glitches with the game’s visual effects.
“I am releasing this simply in case some people would like to play with it, but mostly to get feedback on where issues are in the game so that I can more easily locate and correct those issues. So please, if you find a screen that obviously isn’t right, I would love to know about it.”
To use this mod (that you can download from here), players will need Tonberry and hashmaps. You can find both of these mods from the Qhimm Forums and you’ll have to overwrote the AngelWing textures with these new ones.
Below you can find some screenshots from the remastered backgrounds!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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A before/after would’ve been nice. I never played the original version and don’t know what it looks like.
You’re talking about a PS1 game, dude.
Oh man, the FF everybody has been waiting on a HD texture pack. How thrilling.
The only ESRGAN texture mods that i wait for final fantasy series…
My all time best ff. Mc just sooo cool less talk hit hard.
i love school theme so bad that is not long.
This is what I was waiting for, FF8 <3
Looks like a painting now. I am very sure it used 3D assets pre-rendered. originally.
It didn’t mainly use 3D assets. They were a combination of pre-rendered 3d assets and actual paintings. The same is true for FF7 and 9 as well. It’s more noticeable on FF9 though cause it used more paintings than 3d renders
Hard for me to remember. 6th screen was CGI pre-rendered.
https://i.imgur.com/VETqztp.png
I’m sure of it. in motion.
https://youtu.be/SSe6-LSj64c?t=68
It’s basically the same process though, just differently trained GANs.
Not a fan. In the ff7 AI texture redo, it seemed as though it took materials and other things into account. Metal looked like metal. Stone looked like stone. edit: and in some cases, where there was text detected, but the texture broke continuity at serif or other font points, it repaired the text, resulting in an actually more detailed image.
This seems to have just vectorized all of the color and supersampled it, resulting in a bunch of smoothed-over shapes/daubs of color. It takes away square pixels, but it makes it very muddy. I’m not sure if muddy = “HD”. I can squint at my screen and get the same effect.