12/31/2025 Update
I've spent a good chunk of my winter break working on this and I am so close to being done but I will not reach my goal of beta testing by the new year :(
Three major things I need to finish:
Upscale shadow maps using HQConverter method
Export normal maps and make sure upscaling works properly
Figure out how to actually bundle the app and publish it, lol
I went down a rabbithole of DDS compression which ate up a lot of my time. Someone suggested I check out the BCGone model (1X) for removing compression artifacts before upscaling, and I think it makes a big difference:
The issue is that BCGone does not have an ncnn-vulkan implementation, and must use PyTorch. Sooo, I deconstructed some of ChaiNNer's codebase and started working on a python version of the upscaling pipeline.
There has also been talk of trying to figure out how to programmatically convert RLE2 textures into LRLE; LRLE are uncompressed and can be loaded directly from PNGs instead of being converted to DDS then imported.
But all that stuff is post 1.0 release. Gotta pace myself and just get the basics done.
Anyways, I'll try to keep working on this little by little and hopefully have something out end of January? If you're interested in beta testing, please reach out. I have no idea if the app will work on Linux or MacOS, or how the upscaling handles on laptops. Feedback will definitely be helpful!
Happy new year all, and happy simming :)
