Earlier this month, we informed about a new technique via which modders can enhance the outdated textures of older games. And a few days ago, Shiba Inu has released a HD Texture Pack for Return to Castle Wolfenstein using ESRGAN.
As we’ve already reported, Enhanced Super Resolution Generative Adverserial Networks, or ESRGAN, is an upscaling method that takes an low-res image and adds realistic details to it. By doing it over several passes with the goal of fooling its adverserial part, it will usually produce an image with more fidelity and realism than past methods.
Shiba Inu has released the HD Texture Pack to the public and you can go ahead and download it from here. In order to install this pack, you’ll simply have to place the pak1.pk3 file into Return to Castle Wolfenstein\Main dir. Unfortunately, though, this pack does not contain any TGA format textures with alpha channels.
Shiba Inu has also released a video comparison between the game’s original and HD ESRGAN textures and as you can see, there is a noticeable visual difference between them. The good news here is that while the new updated HD textures look cleaner and sharper, they retain all the atmosphere the original textures had.
Since we’ve already gotten ESRGAN textures for Morrowind, the classic Doom games and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, I’d really love to see this technique used in even more older games so here is hoping that modders will be able to release such texture packs for a variety of games.
Enjoy!
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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