A Request for Better Resolutions on Items

[lakhnish]

This has been bothering me for a while and has only really grown into a bigger monster ever since I brought it up in the Suggestions forums. When you zoom in on just about the vast majority of items, mobs, and/or structures in the game, what you're unfortunately going to notice is that the resolutions of said items are very low.

Originally, I thought that it was a legacy issue: older stuff in the game would be of lower resolution while newer implemented stuff would be of higher resolution. Not only was I sorely mistaken, it seems to be a rather persistent recurring theme. For example, the items added in the Celestial Portal update (Celestial Orb, Moon Rock Idol, and Portal Paraphernalia) are noticeably low resolution. Thulecite Crowns and Krampus Sacks are another victim that I notice even when I'm zoomed in only a little bit, but the Thulecite Suit is oddly of high resolution.  (I'm not going to go into the Rot beta, but I can reassure you it's a theme there as well).

The cherry on the top for me is that the craftables for the DLC character Wormwood are of low resolution, but I'm going to assume it's because his assets were ported from DS since Wortox does not suffer this issue with his souls. I've reported it as a bug and it's been since marked as a Known Issue, so in good faith I'm going to assume that he will be addressed.

I've also (rather painstakingly) made a video documenting a good portion of craftable items, but not only did I miss a few, I know I've barely touched the surface (I didn't even go into the materials that are needed to craft them, just simply the crafted item itself).

Spoiler

 

I bring this up now cause if you don't know already, Star Callers and Moon Callers are getting a Twitch Loyalty Skin. I absolutely love Star Callers and Moon Callers, but what you may not know have known (but already guessed) is that while the Star Caller and Moon Caller Staves are of high resolution in your hand, when you put them on the floor, it's a different story.

My request is this: At a minimum, is it possible to address the resolutions of the default textures of items when a reskin of them comes out? I'm not an artist, so I don't know the process of how these things work. However, I thought it would be logical to at least slowly address the quality of the original texture of items when a reskin of said item is being worked on. The Twitch Skin campaigns and reskins are what I feel are at least good ways to bring into high resolution textures into the game, but it also accentuates the many low-resolution things in the game as well.

I would love if there's a way to prevent newly added items, mobs & structures from suffering the fate of being low-resolution, but if not, then that's understandable. I also realize how large a task it is just from simply attempting to document this on my own, but I'm hoping that this dream could come true. 

Spoiler

Yes, I'm aware of the HQ texture mod, except I have my own issues with it and it seems to be a losing battle if new items of low resolution are constantly being added to the game.

 

[CossonWool]

The low resolution art makes the game look aged in a bad way, imo.

[YesterdaysMindr]

IIRC both DS and DST are 32-bit, which probably has something to do with it due to the hard 4GB memory limit for 32-bit applications.

[lakhnish]

11 hours ago, engiSonic said:

IIRC both DS and DST are 32-bit, which probably has something to do with it due to the hard 4GB memory limit for 32-bit applications.

Considering that @nome reacted to your comment, that seems to be the reason.

Having said that, this bug report here brings up some rather recent development about Apple and 32-bit program support that I was not aware of.

As per an official Apple support page, Apple will no longer support 32-bit software. "All future Mac software will eventually be required to be 64-bit" and that "Apple is notifying customers when they are using an app based on 32-bit technology" is what the part of the page says.

It seems that Linux had also undergone a similar situation recently as well, where Valve has an official post about support for future versions of Ubuntu. Essentially, Valve initially said they wouldn't support Ubuntu 19.10, then they reached out to Ubuntu, and now access to 32-bit programs would be available in Ubunutu "through at least 20.04 LTS". For more details, read the official post mentioned before as well as what Ubuntu has to say as well about 20.04 LTS.

However, there has been no official response about Apple from the Steam for Apple page, or at least not one that I could find. Since I don't know how much of the user base is on which platform or the technical know how of this type of stuff, I'll leave this information for the devs to address.

[Terra_Zina]

You must have a hawks eye to spot these things. I never even noticed!

The again, I'm used to playing on low quality because my computer is doodoo.

[AdventZen]

From an artistic standpoint, reworking the quality of an item is fairly similar to creating a skin, but instead of working from scratch, you already have a very strict base on how the item looks/moves with every animation;

For some items (namely ingredients such as rope, with no other use than to create more items), it's as simple as redrawing the item, but for most hand/chest/head-slot items, there's animations to be taken in consideration, and given the frequency at which skins come out, I don't believe the resolution bump will be a fast process, at least not while RoT is in development heaven. (Thanks for the thorough dedication and frequent updates, ya'll <3)

I'd absolutely love to see a "Hi-Res Textures" option in the settings, but it might take some time for that, IMO. It is really odd, however, that new items still suffer from low-res images, so I assume the time-consuming nature of redoing assets is not the only problem.

Can someone ping an artist from Klei? I'm not very familiar with the devs and their forum-names D:

[X-lem]

My biggest struggle with the low res images is that it makes it that much harder to tell the difference between items when they are all thrown on the ground. This is especially the case when skins are used. 

[Well-met]

Absolutely agree.

As somebody with a character mod that uses 1.5 scale, it's extremely obvious.

[. . .]

I wish one day the textures won't look so low res

[Sinister_Fang]

2 hours ago, AdventZen said:

From an artistic standpoint, reworking the quality of an item is fairly similar to creating a skin, but instead of working from scratch, you already have a very strict base on how the item looks/moves with every animation;

For some items (namely ingredients such as rope, with no other use than to create more items), it's as simple as redrawing the item, but for most hand/chest/head-slot items, there's animations to be taken in consideration, and given the frequency at which skins come out, I don't believe the resolution bump will be a fast process, at least not while RoT is in development heaven. (Thanks for the thorough dedication and frequent updates, ya'll <3)

I'd absolutely love to see a "Hi-Res Textures" option in the settings, but it might take some time for that, IMO. It is really odd, however, that new items still suffer from low-res images, so I assume the time-consuming nature of redoing assets is not the only problem.

Can someone ping an artist from Klei? I'm not very familiar with the devs and their forum-names D:

If they handle their assets anything like they did with Mark of the Ninja, then they already have them in higher quality then what's in the game. I'm not sure if this is the case with DST as well, but if it is, it would be even easier (although maybe a bit tedious) to put them in.

[-Variant]

4 hours ago, AdventZen said:

For some items (namely ingredients such as rope, with no other use than to create more items), it's as simple as redrawing the item, but for most hand/chest/head-slot items, there's animations to be taken in consideration, and given the frequency at which skins come out, I don't believe the resolution bump will be a fast process, at least not while RoT is in development heaven. (Thanks for the thorough dedication and frequent updates, ya'll <3)

While this is true, there's another thing I want to mention.

A lot of the art that's low res, at least what we see in game, already has a hi res version.

Take Wheeler and Wagstaff for example, they had super, super ugly low res art when they were first added in, but an update or 2 later, they came out fresh and hi res, but they didn't have to redraw anything, they had to change around some lines of code, and bam.

I did just over-simplify the process, but all in all I wanted to say that there are indeed hi res versions out there. Maybe not for all the items, but a good few.

Now a hi res option for PC users would be splendid.

[CrimXane]

after this man mention them, i can't unsee them, please do. either make them all LQ or all HQ 

[. . .]

43 minutes ago, CrimXane said:

make them all LQ

Please no no no

[Fuffles]

Well they do have all of those graphics in HQ, they just can't use them all because the game will quote on quote "explode".
32-bit can't handle that much, sadly. But then again, Skins are in a higher quality, and at least updating equipables wouldn't hurt, if you ask me

[lakhnish]

22 hours ago, FuffledBeeQueen said:

Well they do have all of those graphics in HQ, they just can't use them all because the game will quote on quote "explode".
32-bit can't handle that much, sadly. But then again, Skins are in a higher quality, and at least updating equipables wouldn't hurt, if you ask me

It was mainly equipables that were bothering me the most, if only cause you're seeing them the most.

Having said that, is it not possible to have a both a 32-bit and 64-bit version of the game that steam would correctly chose? Or is going from 32 to 64 a big task in of itself?

I don't know the technicalities of this type of stuff - like if it's easier on one OS than another or what specifically needs to be done. If it seems like too big an ordeal to do, I don't see them doing this anytime soon (or maybe at all), since they have a lot of other projects going on at the moment, namely Return of Them, character reworks, and DLC characters.

[. . .]

All I want is HQ grass, trees, and saplings because I'm always seeing them everywhere and they look ugly..

I also want all items with skins the default item to be HQ too.. Like the normal fire pit texture looks like 64x64 texture upscaled 10 times, but the skins are HQ.. the same thing with chests too. It's really dumb all skinned items are HQ but the default texture of the skinned item is 99% always LQ 

[Fuffles]

11 hours ago, lakhnish said:

1 - It was mainly equipables that were bothering me the most, if only cause you're seeing them the most.

2 - Having said that, is it not possible to have a both a 32-bit and 64-bit version of the game that steam would correctly chose? Or is going from 32 to 64 a big task in of itself?

I don't know the technicalities of this type of stuff - like if it's easier on one OS than another or what specifically needs to be done. If it seems like too big an ordeal to do, I don't see them doing this anytime soon (or maybe at all), since they have a lot of other projects going on at the moment, namely Return of Them, character reworks, and DLC characters.

1 - No kidding, right? there's a difference when the object is not HQ and an Object that is HQ, but has non HQ additives.

Ignore the Cacti, it's my personal mod testing chamber server
 

2 - Sadly The process of making a 32-bit game 64-bit is a lot of work, mainly because it needs to be rewritten to be comatible for 64 bit systems. I believe Peter or someone else on the Klei team already said why they can't go from 32-bit to 64-bit easily.

[. . .]

4 hours ago, FuffledBeeQueen said:

they can't go from 32-bit to 64-bit easily.

Hopefully one day they do it. I think I remember they said DST wasn't a possible or easy thing to do too, yet here we are.

I even wouldn't mind buying DST again as long as it doesn't look like an upscaled nightmare.

[Cunning fox]

That may sound a bit stupid, but if they release something like a Kickstarter page to collect money for going 64 bit (or maybe new skins (wink-wink)), I'd donate as much as I could.

[lakhnish]

2 hours ago, Cunning fox said:

That may sound a bit stupid, but if they release something like a Kickstarter page to collect money for going 64 bit (or maybe new skins (wink-wink)), I'd donate as much as I could.

It seems that for single-player Don't Starve, there is a 64-bit version, but only for Mac users it seems, not Windows (unless I'm wrong, but it seems to be the case from some testing).

Based on that, it seems that something similar will probably happen for DST for Mac users (or at least something that there going to look into, as per this bug report) .

RIP the dream of HQ DST.

[trinket_4]

co.op and eXiGe made a mod (available on steamworkshop) that make the Eyebrella, Bee Queen Hat and Krampus sack into HQ version.

it's great, I hope one day every item is HQ

[Canis]

I have an idea.

What if klei hired the modders behind the HQ mods on the steam workshop to keep doing what they're doing with every item. Then they can implement an option for "High-Resolution Items" which, when ticked on, would replace all normal sprites and animations with the high quality ones.

Hell, I'm pretty sure most modders would help Klei for free.

[. . .]

2 minutes ago, Canis said:

I have an idea.

What if klei hired the modders behind the HQ mods on the steam workshop to keep doing what they're doing with every item. Then they can implement an option for "High-Resolution Items" which, when ticked on, would replace all normal sprites and animations with the high quality ones.

Hell, I'm pretty sure most modders would help Klei for free.

They already have HQ vectors of basically everything in DST.

Maybe instead they can give a good modder the vector files then the modder can make a HQ mod with the textures Klei already made but aren't adding into DST because of reasons 

[Canis]

Just now, Warbucks said:

They already have HQ vectors of basically everything in DST.

Maybe instead they can give a good modder the vector files then the modder can make a HQ mod with the textures Klei already made but aren't adding into DST because of reasons 

Huh?

They have HQ sprites but they're just going unused? But like, why?

[-Variant]

1 hour ago, Canis said:

Huh?

They have HQ sprites but they're just going unused? But like, why?

Everything they draw is HQ.

But when they're put into the game, they're told to be low res to save on things like memory and whatnot. A lot of other people can properly explain why they aren't used in game, but I think Klei's working on sliding these into the game soon.