Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD

The general background textures seem to have gone through some sort of smoothing AI.

@Eel

Not sure what a "smoothing AI" is. Can you point to the place where you noticed a difference?

A piece of software that takes the texture, and makes it smoother for higher resolution renders.

In this comparison video, if you pause at the moment when Link is talking with Impa, behind her you can see there's details in the stone wall that look fine on wii but look a bit lost on switch (like, the colors got smoothed and combined together), that seems like the type of error that a machine would do.

@Eel

Yeah I see the part you mean. I don't really know what "smooth" means though in this context. "Smooth" isn't a technical term in computer graphics as far as I know.

I assume you mean the deep-learning algorithms that increase the resolution by adding detail, refining edges, all that jazz. It does look like they have improved the environment textures from that video, so you're probably right. That moment at 2:08 looks the clearest. It looks like they've double the resolution of the background textures. The only reason it wasn't immediately clear is because the original versions are so damn low-res, so it doesn't jump out as being that much of an improvement unless you hold them up next to each other!

I do feel slightly more OK with paying full price for it now anyway!

I was just being literal with my usage of smooth.

@Eel

I assumed you meant the AI programs that add more detail to a texture? I wouldn't call that "smoothing" at all. It's kinda the opposite in my mind. Smooth feels like it would mean something like blur, which would be less detail.

One of the few times I feel comfortable in pre-ordering! I just hope the analog controls option works well, cos I really can't be doing with motion controls.

I’m expecting it to be a tango at first. But I’m hoping I’ll get used to it.

In the original, me readying my attacks would always give enough time for the enemy to switch stances so fighting was a pain, and some actions were literally painful, because after a while I would get bored and start trying to only move my wrist.

@Eel

Lol looks like Nintendo heard us arguing over the word "smooth". It's gonna be a smoother experience!

Smooth all around.

Like soft touch plastic.

I am hyped about this. Wanna know why? I never played it and never watched a playthrough!

The one thing I read is that this game is the first in the Zelda chronology. This is correct right?

The is the one that started it all?

Yes, it chronologically is the first game in the series, with the first Link and the first Zelda.

I like how the changes to this are literally in the opposite direction of Majora's Mask 3D. Except these ones seem to consistently be for the best.

Majora's Mask 3D: People can't figure things out here!
Skyward Sword HD: People can figure things out here!

Here's some in-game footage that seems to have leaked early from Japan:

@Zuljaras

Yeah, not that it really matters that much though. The timeline's a buncha retroactively made-up nonsense imo.

Can you take a look and tell me if the textures that are in areas like the sacred grounds and such are updated? I don’t care about the ground cause it looks the same but the wall textures look pretty significantly different. I’d greatly appreciate if you could try and come up with the same result to see if they actually did redraw them@Dezzy

@Cambam12

Don't have enough clear footage yet to know about all areas but all I can say for sure is they've definitely updated some of the environment textures. These look twice the original resolution, same as the updates to the character textures.

My assumption is that everything has just been doubled (why would they randomly pick out a mushroom texture as something important to improve?), but that it won't necessarily be that obvious in some cases. The machine-learning upscaling algorithms work really well in the 512-2048 pixel range (for a texture with an average amount of detail). Unfortunately most of the textures in the original Skyward Sword are either 256 pixels or 128 pixels, so there's probably not much the upscaling algorithms can do with some of them.

So it’s using machine algorithms to double the texture res?@Dezzy

Even if the timeline doesn't mean anything to the game, it also makes sense to me as well. It was the main reason I got into diving deep into the Zelda lore, and it's just a fun thing to think about. Sure, it's a last minute thought for Nintendo, but if it didn't mean anything at all, they would've dropped it right after Skyward Sword... however, they didn't, and still haven't as it's still up on the official Zelda website for Nintendo of Japan, and they're still updating it with each new game, despite BotW not being directly on the timeline.

@Dezzy That is true. Most Zelda game stories are like standalones but still it is cool to play the "very first" one!

Impossible to know for sure. You can't reverse-engineer those algorithms because they all behave slightly differently depending on the datasets they "learn" from.

It definitely looks like it to me though. If they'd done it by hand, you'd generally expect to see some differences in the details between the textures (like you did in Twilight Princess HD and Xenoblade:DE).
If you're looking at something like a brick wall texture and they've added something like a big crack across one of the bricks, that's almost definitely a human artist not an AI. An AI would only know to do something like that if you deliberately trained it on cracked brick textures (which you'd be unlikely to do). So if you can't see anything like that, and all of the textures look very close to identical to the originals, then they probably used an AI.