Enhanced Textures for I-War 2

Replaces the textures of all ships, weapons, stations, people...
The new textures looks like the orginal, but with higher resolution, sharpness and details.

Important Notes:
Disable compressed textures in the options menu to avoid long loading times.
To prevent that the game switches to low detailed textures, you can edit the flux.ini like this:
[FcDetailSwitchNode]
global_detail_scale = 3
cull_detail = 0
box_detail = 0

Unzip the Enh_Textures folder in the mods folder of I-War 2.

Orginal resolution 256x256 200% zoom vs. enhanced 512x512 texture:


Download:
www.mediafire.com/file/4iu1z7ygq4wqj84/E...ed_Textures.zip/file

Advanced Patcom "Pyro" paint job, for the texture pack:
www.mediafire.com/file/1yy7u3i0gbf7bgq/A...Patcom_Pyro.zip/file

Thanks man! I wish this had been possible 10 years before.

Now I just need a hack to enforce LOD0 at all times.

You can enforce LOD0 in the flux.ini:

[FcDetailSwitchNode]
global_detail_scale = 3
cull_detail = 0
box_detail = 0

Well done mate!

I won't be forcing lod0 though, as I often run mods that place really huge numbers of ships and EoC's single CPU thread gets overwhelmed fast, haha

I experimented a lot with the textures, until I got the best result:

I converted all the .ftu textures with ftextools-0.2 and a batch file to .png files.
I scaled the images up with waifu2x-caffe to 2x the resolution and with Topaz A.I. Gigapixel again with 2x.
Topaz A.I. Gigapixel can't handle lowres images very well, it makes mistakes, but waifu2x-caffe not.
I used Topaz AI Gigapixel for the second upscale instead of waifu2x-caffe outright with 4x, because the image gets a little bit sharper.
Then with Topaz A.I. Clear to enhance sharpness, except for some images with lights, because they don't like sharpening.
For more details, I used the Photoshop high pass filter.

With a texture resolution up to 1024x1024, the game unfortunately crashes sometimes and won't load Lucretia's Base, witch had the most textures.
I downscaled the images 50% with Photoshop preserve details 2.0.
The difference is very low between the resolutions, possibly not recognizable ingame and not worth the size.

To convert all the .png images to .lbm textures I used the PictView command-line converter .
To browse easy through the .lbm textures, I recommend the Total Commander plugin Imagine - Image & Animation Viewer or the Imagine64.exe in the zip file.

Not recommended to play the game with, just for further modding, the textures up to 1024x1024:
www.mediafire.com/file/xoa8650wsvntg5d/Textures_4x.zip/file

The crashing would be due to EoC's severely limited ability to handle VRAM usage over 1GB. It can do it technically, but it tends to just fall on its face.