Modding ideas

Grass like most non-important objects are defined with a variable lodfi and display cost values so they start disappearing as you zoom out. Still as you found, the performance hit with so many objects being placed in the frustrum will be pronounced. The reason I suspect that the original DS1 maps had such sparse ground cover. It also influenced map design, I wonder how many players who played DS1 back in the day will remember how bad performance was in Castle Ehb and Hiroth Castle?

DS2 has an enhanced and presumably optimized engine over DS1 but I wonder how much of the optimization is to do with the engine versus the natural advancement of cpu and video cards? More so the CPU as DS2 depends on it more than the video card.

That's why I experimented with the larger grass models as there'll be comparatively fewer of them required to be placed in a map to get a grassy look compared to the smaller grass models. Then if they start disappearing when zoomed out the look could actually be worst? If I get time I might experiment with a region like Elddim and see how it looks and performs in-game.

It's very tough modding alone. That's the reason I've abandoned so many maps. I don't know if you're good at shaders, but parallax mapping could give a nice look for grass. It uses the GPU, so it would save on the CPU. I think a graphic overall should be done with shaders. I can't imagine redoing all the textures.

Edit: I don't know if this would be helpful, but it looks good with stone.

http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/SteepParallax/

pretty good explanation here:
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/graphics-programming-and-theory/a-closer-look-at-parallax-occlusion-mapping-r3262

Here is a video of what I was thinking could be done by parallaxing the grass:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OVNG9a5bnk

Holy crap, I LOVE the Skill Table overhaul there. Sort of reminds me of the original Fable, even though the colors wouldn't correspond enough for that.
Please make that a thing.

I did a test over a week with just 6 of the 137 texture folders used for the Terrain textures. Firstly the engine will handle quite large textures (2048x2048). Secondly the size increase is ridiculous (4Mb compared to 86kb) and lastly the increased size is mostly wasted unless somebody was willing to redraw every texture to take advantage of the increased canvas size. In another words the differences between a stock texture of 256x256 compared to one resized to 2048x2048 is negligible. These six folders contained 652 textures and the size of the resultant tank was 1Gb in size! To make a HD version of DS2 would require about 22Gb of space just for the textures for the ground. I can't imagine how much more space would be required for all the other objects in the game.

Replacing textures in a game like DukeNukem 3D or Doom, etc. is feasible as they would only have a few hundred or so textures to replace. DS2 has about 8000 textures for the Terrain alone.

So parallax mapping, etc, would be the only way of improving the textures in the game. Sadly the links provided give a good explanation of how they work but not how to implement them. Shaders are used in the game for water effects but not much else apparently.

Yeah, they didn't take much advantage of shaders at all. My only concern is with the rendering engine if parallax is pursued. Unfortunately we don't have access to it.

I said it before and I'll say it again, I think if we were to do an HD remaster, it wouldn't have to be a 'Remaster' but rather an 'Update'. Because I, personally, notice a lot of variation in the quality of textures, particularly in armors.

Any armor with Ornaments, for example. The small ornaments look HD, which makes sense because they're smaller, whereas the rest of the armor looks rather pixely. And it's noticeable. Especially since most of us probably have a mod altering the camera, allowing us to zoom in super close and take in those beautiful pixels.

Mythril armor is a particularly low-res armor.
The body of Leather armor is, too, low-res.

Studded leather armor, in my opinion, has the best quality of all the armors in normal DS2. The body pieces, anyway. Maybe this is just because of how well the colors go together, or maybe someone put a lot more care into this armor for.. whatever reason. I guess it would make sense- considering the only other thing you could probably match Studded Leather armor with is Plate armor, which is also of decent quality. This is because they're more unique than other armors, I suppose. Normal Leather looks rather Generic, whereas Studded Leather is rather colorful.

Lorethal's armor. This is something that bugs me a lot, considering I am making a character who I'm roleplaying with, he's an elf that resurrects Lorethal's guild of warrior elves to fight Valdis. Ever notice how the boots, gauntlets and helmet look exceptionally HD and Gold, whereas the armor has a very visible change in color? It's still bright, sure, but the gold parts of the armor become Dull. While the red are just pixely.

I think most of us now play DS2 on a generally higher resolution than it was necessarily made for, which is of course because computers have come a long way since then.

As for the massive size of an HD "Overhaul", look at Skyrim. Getting enough textures together to overhaul the whole game is, collectively, a LARGE download. But people do not mind because 1: Computers have enough space for it, 2: The visuals are worth it, and 3: Re-made textures generally don't add as much framerate issues as lighting and shaders, etc. (Although, Granted, that depends on the size of the HD textures, but still.)
So, long story short? Update the graphics where they need it. Provide the download in different modules, if possible.

As proposed by Dulac the "parallax mapping" technique is surely the way to make grass nice and efficient.

So now that I have found how to use shaders in DS2 the next thing to use is the make this nice looking shader. Dungeon siege 2 uses HLSL shaders of directx9 (I think), and this is really good. We can make really beautiful shaders with it.

But firstly let's talk about how DS2 handle this.

[t:tsd,n:b_t_fh00_fieldpatch-01]
{
	technique = GrassSurface;

	layer1texture1 = b_t_fh00_fieldpatch-01;
  i texturedetail = 2;

	layer2texture1 = b_em_grass01;
  i texturedetail = 2;
  
}

This is a gas file link to a texture and the technique is a .fx file where the shader is written. In DS2 you can have 4 layers, so what could be done if we manage to make the shader is to have every texture with grass having the technique as shader and the layer with the grass used.

There are multiple technique to render grass nicely with shaders.
The first one is really powerful but a bit too much for the game.
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch07.html
This is an nvidia site with a lot of shaders, it's really great but I don't really know if we can use it because it's using really current techniques, but if it works it could make such a nice render. There are much more than grass on this site, it's talking about water, fire and much more.

Here is another one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyQ6c17TYeU
It's just a video but it seems to be closer to what we are looking for. If I'm right there are 4 layers : the terrain, the top grass, down grass and the grass shadow.

I'll make more researches than that and I'm working on a shader at the moment in order to have a fist view. And with shaders I am thinking about modifying some graphics values of the game to make a updated render, like having a bit more contrast and so on. A bit like ENB in Bethesda's games. I don't really know if it's possible but it could be really interesting as well as having a updated look of the terrains.