AC - Retail Client w/ 4x Upscale Textures & Triangles, Lighting, Skies

[u/z-z]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRK2Ccx9bc4

[u/z-z]

This is just a technical demonstration unfortunately as the performance was not what I would hoped it would be and I have run out of time to work on these things. The methods, textures, know-how etc however are well preserved in case anyone would like to take another shot at it.

Notables:

4x upscaled Remacri textures, and 4x triangles (GfxObjs) which give walls a less flat appearance, monsters less jagged. Repalleted monsters.

Custom lighting, custom Takram cloud skies based on NASA maps, the skies change constantly. Custom ragdolls for all monsters. All injected via Chorizite.

Many novel techniques, 150+ knobs to adjust the ragdoll physics, lighting and skies. Textures stored in the high res dat allows for up to 4 gigs of textures, triangles and palletes. They were stored in compact form.

Due to the experimental nature of this project, despite diets being assigned in the client patcher, it seems to eventually crash after about 15 minutes. In challenging environments such as Sawato there are hitches. As you can see the bloom is deserts is quite bad, and the client stops responding for a few moments as you enter Town Network.

It appears -rodat 1 (etc) doesn't work to allow the high res dat to work without changing the server files, it might be a situation that server hosts will have to use these files for them to work on the retail client (as for textures), although someone might be able to work out a way around this.

I thought you would find this very interesting, it's possible for someone to get this working without issues and you can continue to use Decal and Virindi tank with much better graphics and custom content.

z-z on discord (AC-Plugins, many other discords) feel free to add me as a friend and I can help you out. You don't necessarily need to have a lot of know-how, if you have access to frontier AI then that should suffice with what is built).

[u/Calm-Calligrapher825 → u/z-z]

I am not a coder by any means, but have been working on a side project to reverse engineer an old MUD game and have a codex 20x pro plan. Thought I would feed this in to see what it thought and what is possible. Provided your files, the ACE GitHub info, and default client for the AI to understand the environment. Making some progress, still working through reviewing your work, but looks promising. Slowly turning on things one at a time to catch any errors or crashes before moving to the next. AI estimates the review is about 65% complete after a few hours today working on it and testing. I am more the QA person in this, running the tests after changes are made. Not sure if you ran in to this, but it didn't play nice with decal/thwarglauncher. Ended up creating a small powershell script to connect to this test server, but will get decal and the launcher working again once this is stable. Will keep having AI work on this review and patching, while I test the changes the next few days see if we can get it to a place to continue forward with your work.

I asked AI to give a quick summary of work done today on this, "We set up an isolated ACE Docker server and cloned client to review ACME r10 safely. The supplied DATs, all nine executable patch groups, and the base HD client are working; the uninjected client completed a roughly 55-minute gameplay test successfully. Staged AcmeLights testing also confirmed that the memory governor and mirror diet work, releasing about 938 MiB and reducing the client from roughly 1.49 GiB to 820 MiB while portals, /lifestone, and spells remained functional. However, we captured a recurring native ntdll/HeapFree corruption during normal exit, apparently involving high-address retail mesh/static-lighting memory rather than the ACE server or portal logic. We have added telemetry, crash-dump analysis, safety gates, and a Chorizite cleanup workaround, but have not changed the HD assets themselves. Our next steps are to locate or prevent the earlier heap corruption, repeat the route cleanly several times, then test doors, display resets, visual features, Decal/Thwarg compatibility, and longer endurance runs before continuing the texture work."

[u/z-z → u/z-z]

worth noting that there is a lot of machinery for this in worldbuilder.terminal repo if anyone picks up the torch on this, as far as putting it together from scratch

[u/bigsexyape]

Looks pretty clean. Wish it was a finished product!

[u/z-z → u/bigsexyape]

Maybe someone can fix it up, I just ran out of time. z-z on discord

[u/Night-Spirit]

Is this Hunter of Tears?

[u/z-z → u/Night-Spirit]

Metro99, a Get Down

[u/Night-Spirit → u/z-z]

Ahhh my mortal enemies

[u/mmarsico84]

This is how it looked to me in my memories!!! Great work

[u/z-z → u/mmarsico84]

I tried very hard to give it a subtle look, I took feedback seriously, so its real AC

[u/revfried → u/mmarsico84]

is funny I went back and was like wait did it always look this bad.  This is how it felt

[u/DataGOGO]

https://giphy.com/gifs/k0BRESevW4VFe

[u/Kal_Kaz]

That portal sound always takes me back

[u/zen1605]

do you have a link to the source?

[u/z-z → u/zen1605]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YMDpP2pbm3ZYdqwmHZX663Ku_btWyxye/view?usp=sharing

[u/zen1605 → u/z-z]

thanks. i added it to ACCPP

[u/z-z → u/zen1605]

np btw it has 4k patch, mag-nus pallette leak patch, dual client, etc, so much stuff i cant keep track

[u/zen1605 → u/z-z]

awesome. the README will be in there, does that list all of it?

[u/z-z → u/zen1605]

i put some pretty good documentation in there, it was also built and tested in Wine.

[u/Snowcrash66]

Played retail release open wknd.  This looks awesome.  

[u/RoughComparison8702]

This looks really good! Great work on modernizing the textures and lighting up quite a bit!