Include UI elements

[Eonfge]

Let me quickly preface by saying that I like this texture mod a lot. It keeps the existing art style and visual direction the same, while improving display quality. Many mods trying to do the same, often make it feel inconsistent, but your work is very good and consistent.

That out of the way, would it be possible to include the UI elements of Quake 2?

[Eonfge]

Personal test using RRDB_PSNR_x4.

I tried using Manga109Attempt but I was missing some parameters; conv_first.weight and conv_first.bias. Can you tell me what you used?

[Calinou]

I've tried several ways to upscale UI elements, but I'm not sure if a neural network approach is ideal for Quake 2's 2D art. Manga109Attempt tends to introduce noise on its own, which means I'd have to run a denoise pass that will remove some of the detail.

Maybe we should settle on a simple 4× HQX filter. It gives decent results when used in Q2PRO:

However, another concern remains: if you use a 2D scale factor different than 4×, it will look ugly due to scaling artifacts. Even if we settled on 2× HQX, it would look ugly at a 3× scale factor (which many people use in 1920×1080). We might be able to solve that concern by including separate 2D downloads (one for 2×, one for 3×, one for 4×).

[Eonfge]

In such a scenario, I would just use provide 4x HQX and leave it at that. Storage space is not much of a concern, as we're talking about only a few kilobyte per texture.

[Calinou]

@Eonfge The scaling issues aren't related to storage space. They're related to how a texture that's larger than the size it's displayed at will display on the screen.

If you display a 64×64 texture over a 48×48 area on the screen, it will most likely look ugly.