KotOR Switch Texture Restoration 1.0.3

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The Switch port of KotOR included some upscaled textures for much of the game. While some of these look fine, I found some of the armor and character portraits pretty bad to look at. I'm not sure why, but these were not advertised or mentioned, and there is no way to turn them off in game.

I want you to picture this, the Kotor player heads are 256x256 in resolution whereas Armors and body textures are 512x512 in resolution.

On the XBOX version most, if not all, of the textures are reduced to 256x256 resolution. This means things like Armor textures look bad on the XBOX whilst the heads don't look that much different.

I theorize that the Kotor Switch port is a port of the XBOX version due to the near identical GUI, however, I also suspect that Apsyr "modernized" Kotor on the Switch by replacing the XBOX modules with the PC modules to remove the NPC cloned appearances of the XBOX and by upscaling the XBOX textures from the low-res 256x256 to the PC 512x512 resolution.

This creates a weird result where the 256x256 textures on the PC such as player heads look stunning whereas the usual PC 512x512 textures look awful on the Switch as it was made using AI.

15 minutes ago, N-DReW25 said:

I want you to picture this, the Kotor player heads are 256x256 in resolution whereas Armors and body textures are 512x512 in resolution.

 

On the XBOX version most, if not all, of the textures are reduced to 256x256 resolution. This means things like Armor textures look bad on the XBOX whilst the heads don't look that much different.

 

I theorize that the Kotor Switch port is a port of the XBOX version due to the near identical GUI, however, I also suspect that Apsyr "modernized" Kotor on the Switch by replacing the XBOX modules with the PC modules to remove the NPC cloned appearances of the XBOX and by upscaling the XBOX textures from the low-res 256x256 to the PC 512x512 resolution.

 

This creates a weird result where the 256x256 textures on the PC such as player heads look stunning whereas the usual PC 512x512 textures look awful on the Switch as it was made using AI.

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I theorize that the Kotor Switch port is a port of the XBOX version due to the near identical GUI,

Having poked through the game's files a fair bit, my personal opinion is that this is the mobile port of the game, with the Xbox UI, for some reason, ham-fisted into it. Here's why I think that:

folder in override titled "xbox_gui"

Weird decomp of the dialog.tlk file, with a path that implies it comes from the IOS codebase.

The folder structure in general is also very similar to the Android port.

I still have no idea why they used the Xbox GUI at all, seeing as the mobile port had a perfectly functional UI, but I assume it was partially due to the fixed resolution nature of the Switch, as opposed to mobile phones which have a wide range of resolutions and aspect ratios.

As you said, the textures are definitely some sort of AI upscale, that much I'm certain of.

I can confirm that the base textures are actually the PC 512x512 textures, however, they have been upscaled to a staggering 1024x1024, which is why they look so bad. See below:

Left is the original texture in \TexturePacks\ and right is in \override\Textures.

In the description, my confusion was more regarding why they included this without even advertising it, rather than confusion about why it looked so bad, which I think is what you're getting at?

Thank you for sharing, hope this is helpful info, or at least, interesting.

11 hours ago, N-DReW25 said:

I theorize that the Kotor Switch port is a port of the XBOX version due to the near identical GUI, however, I also suspect that Apsyr "modernized" Kotor on the Switch by replacing the XBOX modules with the PC modules to remove the NPC cloned appearances of the XBOX and by upscaling the XBOX textures from the low-res 256x256 to the PC 512x512 resolution.

That's a neat theory when looking at the graphics of the Switch version, but I'm doubting that they'd go through all that hoplah just for a prt.

Not to mention, I don't even know if they knew how to do such a task themselves.

I think the analysis by @jacqylfrostis accurate, this is probably the mobile version of the game.

On 6/23/2022 at 7:13 AM, Mephiles550 said:

That's a neat theory when looking at the graphics of the Switch version, but I'm doubting that they'd go through all that hoplah just for a prt.

Not to mention, I don't even know if they knew how to do such a task themselves.

I think the analysis by @jacqylfrostis accurate, this is probably the mobile version of the game.

I created my theory before Jacqylfrost jumped into the game files and now I say that he is probably right. It explains why the NPCs are based on the PC version despite having XBOX Gui.

Now instead of them using low res Xbox textures they instead used the worst AI Upscaling technology they could find because my GOD I could probably make better textures then what Apsyr did for these ports!