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Using Stable Diffusion's img2img on some old Sierra titles

by Karuma on 9/5/22, 5:24 PM with 68 comments

• by davesque on 9/5/22, 8:30 PM

  Going to have to be the naysayer here. First, I'll say the simple fact that Stable Diffusion produces anything coherent is incredible. I'm blown away by the tech. However, my honest opinion of the results showcased in this article is not positive. Many of the result images contain bizarre distortions or dreamlike artifacts that severely disrupt the flow of the image. Especially the first one. It's clear that there's something like a person with long hair standing in front of a peak shrouded in clouds. But it only takes one or two moments to see the flaws in the output. I wonder if hyper parameter tuning would help.

  Again, I think the results are impressive in their own right. But they seem impractical on account of the flaws in the details.

• by nope96 on 9/6/22, 3:16 AM

  Here's more, characters from old DOS games:

  https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x2wwxx/usi...

  and

  https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x5qrje/usi...

  I love what the AI did with the hot tub girl from Leisure Suit Larry!

• by decibe1 on 9/5/22, 8:54 PM

  This is really timely - I just started to replay some of my favorite Sierra titles "Hero's Quest".

  1 and 2 (unofficially) have VGA ports that updated the graphics. So, I may have to run some screen shots through to get an even newer backdrop.

• by yummybear on 9/5/22, 8:16 PM

  Awesome, but it’s totally missing the atmosphere in the originals imo

• by notahacker on 9/6/22, 9:55 AM

  I'd be interested to know the parameters used, especially prompt_strength

  The correspondence to the original image is not especially high: the Leisure Suit Larry image, for example, enhances the original colours of the sea in a nicely realistic way, but all the foreground detail is essentially reinvented from scratch, including some very obvious omissions. In some of them the changes to perspective and more lifelike skull/canyons etc might improve on the original image, but it also flips even pretty basic stuff like which shoulder the woman's hand is placed on (and yes, once you look at that hand closely, the fingers SD has had to add in are all wrong...)

  Ideally for this sort of use case you'd want high fidelity to the geometry of the original image but less fidelity to the palette (use more than 256 colours and naturalistic or artistic textures rather than lines and pixel dithering), but I'm not sure SD can manage that at the moment

• by z9znz on 9/5/22, 10:02 PM

  The before and after are great.

  There is an art to conveying a feeling with limited resources. That's what makes early computer game images (the good ones... because there were plenty of bad ones) so special.

  The same could be said even more strongly for words. I'm not a writer and I don't remember everything, but someone famous once said something about eliminating everything non-essential from writing to make it better. That's what makes a writer really great.

  Even so, the AI-upscaled versions of the original art are impressive.

  I said it before on this topic, and I'll repeat it. We will someday (soonish) have games where the art is generated in real time, unique for each player, based on good inputs. And it will be awesome. Every play and every experience will be relatively unique, but most or all of the plays will be excellent. That's an exciting prospect.

• by terrio on 9/5/22, 7:29 PM

  Awesome!

  I thought about this in a slightly different way: D2 remastered has a great switch back feature.

  You could easily train a network with tons and tons of D2 old vs. New and just use it to Auto upscale /reimagine of old D2.

  Image rendering a old D2 video into 4k D2 remastered style.

• by iforgotpassword on 9/5/22, 8:21 PM

  I found the intro of one of the kings quest games run through SD a few days ago, but can't seem to find it now. It wasn't that impressive since I guess there wasn't much fine tuning going on, but I liked the general idea. It had a few funny hiccups, but I'd have expected much more erratic behavior, because there is no information shared between frames (I guess). But maybe this concept can be improved upon?

• by jaimex2 on 9/6/22, 2:19 AM

  Was mucking around with Sd and one of my first thoughts was making a "Where in Stable Diffusion is Carmen Sandiego"

• by holoduke on 9/5/22, 9:43 PM

  Wonder if one day we can do realtime video conversion with this tool on a phone using the camera. We be mind blowing to see it live in action and changing your backyard in any style you like to see. Maybe even with VR. Ultra tripping experience. I guess we have to wait 5 to 10 years

• by jasfi on 9/6/22, 3:33 AM

  This is cool, but img2img likely couldn't be easily used to make images in such games, because every scene would look very different. The problem is that you can't maintain the exact look between images. It could be used for artistic ideas and raw material though.

• by vslira on 9/5/22, 7:24 PM

  Is there any service offering user-friendly access to open source DL models? Paid is fine.

• by babyshake on 9/5/22, 11:44 PM

  Can someone please do this for some Lucasarts classics?

• by selimnairb on 9/5/22, 8:52 PM

  Yeah, it’s amazing that things like Stable Diffusion can make coherent looking images. But why? Why convert iconic EGA and VGA *art* into algorithmic representations? To me, it doesn’t improve on the originals in any way. I would never play a game with the graphics replaced by these. To me, it is the constraints of older technologies that led artists to create imaginative works that transcended the materials available (big pixels with a limited palette) and helped create worlds where your own imagination could run wild. Replacing these images with photo realistic Thomas Kinkade-esque treacle is an abomination.