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"I felt Crisis Core was overlooked," says Devina, who's still actively working on the Crisis Core Upscale Project as a texture artist. Working with Qualls, modders Devina and Zakkura have upscaled something like 6,000 textures to 4x their original resolution, sometimes creating textures from scratch if the original source couldn't upscale well. He made his project open source, and two other members of the forum, which hosts a number of Final Fantasy modding projects, joined in to help. Thankfully, Qualls wasn't taking it on solo. That meant that much of the work on the Crisis Core Upscale Project had to be done by hand. Unfortunately that resulted in some very poor upscales." "They actually strip out the transparency channel all together and upscale that as a separate image before fusing them back together. "These tools don't handle transparency very well at all," he says.
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And Crisis Core has a lot of textures with transparency. But he says that both tools are built for RGB images, rather than RGBA images-the 'A' is the alpha channel used for transparency. After trying out the popular ESRGAN model, Qualls settled on Topaz AI, which is faster and better documented. Unfortunately, upscaling an entire game isn't as easy as feeding a bunch of jpgs to an AI and letting it work its magic. Even playing Crisis Core on an emulator, though, it was clear some parts of its presentation, like the text, didn't hold up on a bigger, higher-res screen. But after playing the new Final Fantasy 7 Remake, he decided he was interested in learning more about Zack's story. While many modders take on projects to enhance their favorite games, Qualls had actually never played Crisis Core, or even owned a PSP. "It was nice to have something to actually look forward to doing at home to take my mind off of questions like 'I wonder if I was exposed to the virus today?'" he says. Modding Crisis Core quickly turned into a distraction from the stress of working throughout the pandemic. Qualls works in telecom sales, and has continued going into his job as an 'essential worker' throughout the year. "I saw it as a chance to teach myself a new skill and entertain myself during the coronavirus shutdowns," says Evan Qualls, who's spent the last nine months working on the FF7 Crisis Core Upscale Project in his spare time. It was nice to have something to actually look forward to doing at home to take my mind off of questions like 'I wonder if I was exposed to the virus today?'