The future marches on, and so does Grim Fandango. Old Lost Soul Alliance webmaster, Bone Man (aka Dean), sent us word of a remaster of the remaster called Grim Fandango Remaster HD. It’s exactly what you'd imagine: An AI-scaled version of Grim Fandango Remaster OG. Think higher resolution and 32-bit color, wisely set in the old 4:3 ratio. Downside: It only works with the Steam version of the game.
The result is undoubtedly impressive, and you should run, not walk, over to the project’s website for more information.
Source: Reddit Announcement
DFKestrelPi
Cool! By the way, I hope you didn't mind me being a little critical of the results. I think the tech here is pretty cool! The trade-off just doesn't QUITE work for me. It's one of those things where once you start to notice the flaws they become hard to un-see. I'd love to see what you're able to to come up with with some manual retouching.
haha don't worry about it, I always feel bad jumping in as the creator of something because it changes the conversation but I wanted to note that it's not Steam-only anymore and couldn't help giving some thoughts.
As someone who has spent hours toggling between the renderers, I almost exclusively see the flaws. [Sidenote: Making the renderer toggle instant instead of smooth actually makes the flaws even more noticeable but it's so much more fun!] Given enough time I would have done a pass where I went through each image with fine-tooth comb but I set myself a deadline and (surprise surprise) already exceeded that deadline before I'd gotten the process to a good place so I had to settle for "happy enough". I actually share the skepticism with AI upscaling and intially I'd only planned on making the mod loader because programming is my wheelhouse and I didn't think I could produce good results. But then I discovered LDSR and started seeing some interesting output in the pipeline I put together.
It has pretty inherent flaws so it was understandably going to be a step too far for some. But it's all about choice, now there's a new way to experience the game for those that it clicks with. And seeing everyone's reactions has been great, worth the time it took.
HexagonCodes
Hi! Just wanted to swing by and say I released an update that adds support for GOG, and hopefully all Windows versions of the remaster, and the Steam Deck (had to fix a small issue in the underlying game under Proton for this one).
On the topic of upscaling I see it like this: The original software renderer remains the most cohesive way to view the game and is still a good and viable experience if the low resolution is not an issue.
The remaster is also great and brings the fidelity up but at the cost of some of that cohesiveness and original vision. The new lighting system doesn't always match the tone of the original and sometimes makes the character stick out oddly (e.g. in the first underwater scene while circling). Then of course there's the mismatch between the backgrounds and the new high-fidelity models. All-in-all, a good trade and this was how I played the game in recent years.
So now with this "HD" mod there's a third option for people with its own upsides and downsides. The sharpness of the models and backgrounds now match and the game looks modern enough on high resolution screens. The costs are some loss of fine detail, some color drift, and other general AI weirdness that I tried to minimize. I do want to do start doing some manual labor on restoring the lost details though.
Hopefully it'll rope a few people into playing or replaying this game I love so much :) Thanks for posting about it!
Cool! By the way, I hope you didn't mind me being a little critical of the results. I think the tech here is pretty cool! The trade-off just doesn't QUITE work for me. It's one of those things where once you start to notice the flaws they become hard to un-see. I'd love to see what you're able to to come up with with some manual retouching.
On the topic of upscaling I see it like this: The original software renderer remains the most cohesive way to view the game and is still a good and viable experience if the low resolution is not an issue.
The remaster is also great and brings the fidelity up but at the cost of some of that cohesiveness and original vision. The new lighting system doesn't always match the tone of the original and sometimes makes the character stick out oddly (e.g. in the first underwater scene while circling). Then of course there's the mismatch between the backgrounds and the new high-fidelity models. All-in-all, a good trade and this was how I played the game in recent years.
So now with this "HD" mod there's a third option for people with its own upsides and downsides. The sharpness of the models and backgrounds now match and the game looks modern enough on high resolution screens. The costs are some loss of fine detail, some color drift, and other general AI weirdness that I tried to minimize. I do want to do start doing some manual labor on restoring the lost details though.
Hopefully it'll rope a few people into playing or replaying this game I love so much :) Thanks for posting about it!
Yeah I think for me it is going into the same mental bin as smoothing filters for SNES/SCUMM games, etc. In some cases it can produce a pleasing yet inauthentic visual, with obvious flaws (like weirdly smoothed pixels) but the overall impact is nice and my brain glosses over the rest.
For example if playing Grim on my TV, I’m unlikely to be pixel peeping for the finer details, and just taking in the sharper image from a distance.
Whether or not this actually holds up in practice I will find out soon, as I’m due a replay this year. I wonder if the PC version of Remastered avoids the background animation timing issues in the PS4 version.
Thrik
Whether Double Fine may actually revisit this art I don’t know, but I’d love them to. Can we take the addition of ‘DF’ to your name to mean you’re employed by them now, KestrelPi? Maybe you can do some snooping around. ;D
On a contract basis, and not full time, but the main reason for this name change is that my password wasn't working and I couldn't be bothered to figure it out before posting this :D
I think you're right that it depends what you care about, but for me it's difficult to get past the weird details. If the goal of this technology is to be able to add information to a picture, basically extrapolate and reproduce a scene at a higher resolution, then it feels a bit pointless to me when very often the detail it is adding doesn't pass a close inspection. At least with the low-res version my imagination can fill in some of the details, so even if sub-optimal, it's not fundamentally defective. I don't disagree this technology could help upscale these backgrounds, but I'm not that impressed by the raw results.
I think we’re still dealing with a different breed of AI compared to those producing original artwork from prompts. Someone like Jan likely knows better than me but I imagine this is the more ‘generic’ upscaling tech which might be trained on a lot of things but likely not specifically comparable video game art.
Conveivably you could build/train an AI that is not only trained on more useful examples but also that can take specific prompts such as ‘add more texture to the carpet’, ‘those are meant to be tiny skulls’, etc.
I’d still rather a human do the upscaling and touch it all up, and I appreciate a general aversion to AI getting involved with art, but upscaling and restoration is an area where I think I fully support it.
Whether Double Fine may actually revisit this art I don’t know, but I’d love them to. Can we take the addition of ‘DF’ to your name to mean you’re employed by them now, KestrelPi? Maybe you can do some snooping around. ;D
Check out the weirdness on the stuff in the background in the distance on the roofing up high behind the Calavera Cafe, or the gate at the base of the blue casket elevator, or the pattern on the carpet of Manny's office (and the general smoothness of that texture vs the implied detail of the original). Check out all the detail that gets eliminated on Hector Lemans' door. This is all over this project, and there's no way that any self respecting artist at DF would have signed off on these upscales without having to do some pretty heavy retouching work on all the scenes - and that would have been way more true several years ago when this tech was newer.
It's cool, but going from this to actual shippable backgrounds in an official release would have been way more work than it initially might appear on a casual glance.
TimeGentleman
This looks great. I was always surprised Double Fine didn't do something like this, honestly. I think AI upscalers were at a relatively good quality level even back then, and then they just would have needed to do touch-ups (like replacing the loss of detail in the top right of Manny's office above the lockers or adding some texture to its carpet, to take one of this mod's backgrounds as an example). When I played Remastered, I had to put the character models down to original resolution as the juxtaposition with the HD models just made the backgrounds look bad.
Well, DF had the big task of converting the game to modern platforms. They couldn't even get the background animations to run smoothly without jumping (eg. the water in Rubacava), so it must have been a tricky job, and expecting everything to be AI upscaled as well would have probably opened a huge can of worms that they wouldn't have been able to to deal with at the time. It's a shame, but Remastered is still a massive improvement in nearly every respect... the improved music and controls alone!
But yeah, if I had all the time and money in the world...