Bruga’s Full HD Images
Hi everyone!
This and my previous Bruga’s Ultra HD Images ( https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3025010219 ) are exactly the same mod, except for that in this lightweight version I have reduced loading images and main menu’s background images resolution from 4k down to 1080p.
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TL;DR: You can safely use the 4k version, it won’t affect game’s performance, but in case you don’t believe me or don’t want to download a mod that big for something you find unimportant, I made this lightweight version for you.
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Though I recommend you use the Ultra HD version; because you will preceive better quality even if you do not have a 4k monitor and it shouldn’t have a noticeable effect on performance because game engine lazy loads the images (so it only affects load time during game’s core & mods files "unpacking" process at boot *[1]); I understand that some people are hesitant to download a 3.4GB mod for something so trivial as adding a lot more loading images than they need at a ridiculous high definition resolution (for the game’s age), or that they play the game in a low-end computer so they have legitimate concerns about that mod affecting game’s performance. That’s why I created this version.
Yes, it is still 800 MB because there are 230 full HD loading images + all event pics in HD + full HD main menu’s backgrounds.
The two additional changes in my previous mod are also included in this mod: all images have been cleared with noise filtering algorithms, and have been re-colored to get rid of that yellowish "ancient/sh¡th0le country filter" many videogames and Hollywood movies have. Also I have opted for downsampling 4k images (which were upscaled without losing quality) instead of using original ones even if some of them were already in 1080p, hoping we can benefit from softer/more anti-aliased edges. So I think I can say the image quality should be equal or better than the original pictures quality… Except for a few rare artifacts caused by, I think, one of the PNG compression algorithms (I guess reducing image entropy, or whatever they do, has some risks). But I think I have fixed them all, I hope I didn’t miss any, if I did please tell me.
Hope you like it!
*[1]: According to my limited knowledge that’s how game engine works: first it unpacks all game and mod packages, from lower priority ones to higher priority others so mods placed on top of your list actually replace the files of the already unpacked mod/game packages; and then the assets are being lazy loaded when needed. That’s why I keep saying my Ultra HD Images mod should not affect performance. Obviously the entire mod isn’t loaded into memory. That makes no sense, and would actually make all HD reskins simply unfeasible.
Different story is that the game has some soft limits and can’t manage really high resolution textures/images. I already have tested with 8K resolution background images and they usually make the game freezes at main menu. But I guess that’s an architecture/rendering software limitation. As I said, that’s a different story and has nothing to do with mod or asset filesize. Loading some 64MB files is trivial, but rendering 64MB textures is completely different, specially for a game that has more than 10 years old and wasn’t technologically cutting-edge when released.
