It would be worth redoing the graphics if the tilesets weren't cut up like this:
https://www.spriters-resource.com/resources/sheets/52/54728.png

I hoped you would have a clean cutout of a tree so you could just paste on top a higher quality of the tree, but seems like they're chopped up. Which is going to be very hard to match. Like doing a jigsaw puzzle but the pieces aren't cut out for you. Same with some of the buildings.

But these are the snes tilesets, do the steam sprites look the same? One benefit of old games like this is that the graphics are reused over and over again. Creating all the tilesets for all the areas wouldn't be a lot of work.

I never beat this game and would like to give it another go. The graphics are just painful though, especially on the steam version. Has anyone managed to rip the graphics from the game and reimport better ones? I am a 3d modeler and quite a proficient one, I've humored the idea of recreating the sprites in 3d and render them from an ortographic perspective. Assuming there aren't millions of sprite sheets. (I don't think so)

In theory you could make the game look very very good, almost comparable to the 3d ones on the ps1 and it would be very easy since you'll just have to copy and paste rendered 3d graphics onto the sprite sheet. The characters is another story since they have to be animated but if anyone is interested and knows how to get the sprites out and if there aren't lots lots lots of sprites to create send me a message.

An odd question but does anyone know how it works, I'm trying to recreate something similar in unity but with less than satisfactory result. It seems like the camera's position is set along a prescripted path and then it rotates facing the character along that path. While still being able to move slightly off the path which leads me to believe it's scripted to be allowed to move within certain coordinates while facing the player.

Anyway anyone any info on this after having looked inside Final Fantasy X?

As you wish, I guess there will be no mod then since I don't have access to the AI stuff. All just because apparently this stuff is so incredibly difficult you've got to "hone your skills" to do it. Your fragile egos are in the way of getting things done, it's very unfortunate since it would make the game look much better. No problem, good luck with whatever anime episode you're watching.

As I said the steps you "honed yourself" are very very simple. There will be no surprises unless mr chuwy for whatever reason can't upscale all the backgrounds. And if you don't believe me you're chatting with a professional 3d artist, as in they pay me 7000$ a month for my services and I'm quite proficient at C# programming. Cutting and pasting some sprites, believe me it's very easy compared to that mr cartoon avatar.

Won't take a year either, let's get this done it will look very nice.

Some of the values are lost when the AI does it's thing, I tested to see how nice you could get it by fixing the tones in photoshop. This would be the end result for every background. Notice how the shadowy areas are darker and the highlights are lighter, best seen when looking at the hanging lamp and the pillow or shield at the top of the stairs.
https://i.imgur.com/nKUrDU1.jpg

Definitely an improvement.

You should distinguish between thinking what amounts to a photoshop filter looking crap and a person who used that filter on a mod to be crap. Fragosso is fine, his filter I think is crap. Anyway try get those backgrounds and we'll try finish this as soon and quickly as possible. I doubt it will take a year. Most background are just a couple of sprites anyway.

It's not his method though, it's a well known program used to create a cartoony effect. It's basically a photoshop filter. Some people like the cartoony look it gets you, personally I'm not a big fan of the cartoony look. The name waifu also makes me think of obese men who want to marry their cartoon characters which is also a reason why I say the waifu stuff is crap.

As for him helping us, don't think he said that other than to write a tutorial on how to extract and insert the background back into the game. Pretty sure there are tutorials on that already, anyway none of this is particulary hard to do. We just have to figure out how to do it as quickly as possible, get the backgrounds ready and send them my way chuwy.

•You should be able to extract them with Hades workshop. get an iso of the playstation game and then extract all the backgrounds into folders.
•I'll combine them into backgrounds, if there is animation in the background I'll make a background for each frame of the animation.
•You increase them by a percentage with the AI program then send them back to me.
•Since I know how much you increased them by I'll be able to increase the original pictures by the same amount and then use them as reference for cutting out each sprite from your resized pictures.
•When they're cut out I'll send them back to you the same way you sent them to me, then you insert them back into the game. The result will be a high res version of Final Fantasy 9.

Then I'll combine this with the vanilla mod I made and we'll have almost a perfect modification of the original game. Then we will have a mod that does the following:

•Improved backgrounds.
•Fix the ugly font.
•Increases sound quality.
•Disables cheats.
•Removes ugly chat icons when you approach NPCs.
•Increased encounter rate since they reduced this by a lot in the PC port.

Possible future fixes, remastered sountrack, battle UI fix and increased difficulty on the bosses.

EDIT: I noticed in your example that the highlights in the background seems to fade with the AI program. Maybe it would be possible to change the values in the backgrounds too.

You're losing detail with that waifu program, looks kinda crappy. Here is an extreme example of what enhance.io does. Much better than the waifu crap.
https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2017/10/enhancebeforeafter.jpg

I've got a program which automatically resizes a list of images by a percentage. So if I know by how much you intend to increase the background images for the AI to work on I'll know by how much I would need to resize the original images so I could use them as reference for cutting up the resized images later.

If you create a folder for each background and in every folder list all of the sprites in numerical order for each background then I could do the pasting and cutting work. When I've pasted them together I'll send them to you, you incrase them by a percentage send them back to me and I'll cut out the sprites. Then you put them back into the game and upload it as a mod.

For the examples in the first post I just grabbed a background off the internet, it might have been of low quality so maybe the AI is going to provide us with and even better result. Add me on steam Chuwy if you're interested in doing this.

EDIT: Not sure how you would do background elements that are animated, I suppose you would have to create a version of the background for each frame of whatever is being animated in the scene. That's quite painful but doable I suppose.