Dragon Age BIK Improvement Konversion (DABIK)

Dragon Age BIK Improvement Konversion (DABIK)

This mod aims to fix all of the low resolution, prerendered, video-based cutscenes and loading screens all across Dragon Age Origins.

What does this mod do?

DABIK is a project inspired by A Lot of Videos (ALOV) by Audemus and Mellin, that upscales all of the prerendered cutscenes in the Dragon Age Origins game, including expansions and DLCs, that cannot be fixed or upgraded with texture/content mods, to 4K.

Dragon Age games have 2 types of visuals displayed in them:

• []Real-time rendered visuals, which consist of things like 3D models, textures, menus etc.

  []Cutscenes that are just video files - scenes similar to point 1 but rendered out before and then just played out.

In the case of the first, there are mods for improving them, from texture overhaul like Theta HD, to story overhaul mods like Improved Atmosphere or Of Ferelden mods. But since these prerendered cutscenes are just videos files - no texture, model, or other graphics mods can help them.

The only way to make them better is to fully substitute them for newer and better prerendered videos. Ones that have higher resolution and higher bitrate, so more details are shown to the player. This was achieved using Topaz Labs Video Enhance AI to upscale each video frame by frame.

What does this all mean?

Original prerendered cutscenes were stored in the typical videogame format of Bink video (BIK), proprietary of Rad Game Tools. The format is so popular in the industry that it keeps featuring on all console systems, as well as PC, since 1999. Bink 2, has been around for a few years now, but unfortunately, Dragon Age Origins still was built using the old format, so this mod uses it still. The original videos were rendered at 720p, which was the HD standard format of the previous console generations (Xbox 360 and PS3). Suffice to say, that 720p is far from HD nowadays.

Creating this mod I aimed to create both a 1080p and 4K upscale of the mod, just as ALOV does. Unfortunately, BIK has reproduction issues on 1080p. I contacted the ALOV team and they told me of their issues as well. Since I could not handle to get a working version at 1080p, instead a 1440p version has been added, along with the 4K upscale.

This does not mean that you need a 1440p/4K display for the mod to work. Any screen size will benefit from the DABIK upscale since Topaz's tools, thanks to the power of neural networks and AI, not only upscales videos, but removes noise, pixel artifacts and recover lost image quality due to data compression. There is of course still some pixelating in some frames, but in most cases it is due to the low quality shaders the game shipped with, which wer