High Resolution Signs

High Resolution Signs

Modern RGG games are typically beautiful.  A huge amount of expertise goes into rendering high quality textures with high quality normals.  Unfortunately, that work is then shaved back by forcing all of it to better fit a low graphical spec.  The most conspicuous victims of this paring back are the various signs scattered all throughout the cities.

There are two main reasons why it's particularly unfortunate that the signage takes the same visual hit as everything else.  First, a player is far more likely to stare at or read a sign with text and/or pictures than they are to stare at a wall or a sidewalk.  Second, text and pictures are far less ambiguous in nature than the graphics arranged to serve as walls and floors—we know what to expect when we look at text and pictures, and we can more immediately tell when the detail in such imagery is lacking.

This is what makes RGG games' frankly astonishing lack of detail in signage such a misstep.  The moment you're standing closer than about 15 feet to a sign, it begins sticking out like a sore thumb.  Sometimes you can tell from much further than that.

And that's what this mod aims to fix.

There is also a 4K UI mod which solves the 1080p aliasing of the game's UI.

Installation

Install Ryu Mod Manager (v3. 4. 1 or above) and then extract this mod's archives into \LikeADragonGaiden\runtime\media\mods, same as most of the other Like A Dragon Gaiden mods you can find here.

Ryu Mod Manager v3. 4. 1 can be found here as of 2023-11-15: https://github.com/Fronkln/RyuModManager/releases/tag/v3. 4. 1

• []I have split the archive up into three parts to make it perhaps a little easier to manage the download process for some folks.  Part 1 is smaller than the other two because it covers a good 15% of the image replacements despite being only 5% of the total download.
  • []Special care was taken for some particularly challenging cases, such as human figures.  To a certain extent, this part is still a work in progress.
    • []Upscaling isn't a magic bullet.  The chief goal of this mod was to eliminate low-res pixelation.  This is achieved.  In worst case scenarios where the original resolution was truly miserable, this pixelation gets traded out for unavoidably imperfect upscales.  But in 9 out of 10 cases, it's an incontrovertible improvement.
      • []Because of a limitation in Ryu Mod Manager, most of this mod consists of repackaged assets.  Two points of note: First, in the extremely unlikely event that another mod modifies environment textures, you will want to make sure said mod is loaded below this one.  Second, although this shortcoming made things extremely difficult on my end, ultimately it only increased the final size of the (extracted) mod by about 20%.