It looks very, very close indeed to the original. But it got me thinking... I reckon I can beat that.

I tried a little experiment - instead of playing with one of these fancy upscaled textures, I tried just playing with the original unchanged texture, and what happened next blew my mind.

Instead of just being very, very close to the original, it turns out that playing with the original was exactly like playing with the original. It was bloody awesome, and I'll definitely be replacing all the original skins and textures with the original skins and textures as soon as I get a spare moment. 

It's the same but different. And more betterer. 

Here all the upscaled models in ID1

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uenuqnn0gn7ky3r/id1-models-x2.zip?dl=0

here the upscaled textures of the start map:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/g3u1f7b845h9lfz/start-textures-x2.zip?dl=0

My aim is to highlight how powerful this tool is. I personally agree with Mankrip. The upscale should be implemented at the engine level; I don't wanna spent my life converting textures every time a map is released!!

I might also try a 4x .pak. For models is tricky, because it seems that there is a maximum size possible. For textures it seems to work pretty smooth. 

I think you should try with TopazAI too

its a 30 day trial, but the results are really impressive 

Reconverting the images back to Quake's 256-color palette kills the color interpolation, retaining only the shapes. This makes those packs looks like posterized painting.

It would be more appropriate to pack the results as 24-bit color external replacement textures. 

To clarify: Color interpolation gets lost when the palette doesn't have any appropriate color for the resulting midtone. This forces the midtones to be replaced by the base colors, effectively killing the interpolation. The purple sky is a very good example of this.

As a general rule, the lower the difference between two different colors, the less palette colors are available for the midtones between them. White and black have effectively 253 potential midtones, while mixing colors such as 47 and 208 can hardly result in any other color.

A good comparison is between tech01_1 (great results!) and metal5_4 (looks cartoony). 

I'm trying to find a solution :-) 

Heres my experiment with everyone's favorite boss
https://imgur.com/a/InMOPu8 

looks pretty good, got a screenshot of in-game? 

Rest is fine. 

so was ur mum after my "appointment" with her lol 

Chthon looking nice tho. 

That version of Chthon is really cool.

It would be interesting to see the HUD, menu & console textures get this treatment. I wonder how good the text would look. 

do you have a pic of Chthon in game? 

nope, i didn't found a port that supports TGA for monsters, plus idk the files for it

btw

https://www.moddb.com/games/quake-2/addons/quake-2-upscaled-pack 

Converting them to portable network graphic from a tga should not effect the image quality, at least not too much. Also my attempts to download the paks have been fruitless it only downloads an empty folder. 

i was able to extract Icaro's zip files with 7zip. 

Iraco, thank you! looks pretty good.

looking forward to tga/32 bit version!

fullbright colors are not conserved when upscaling, so these would need an upscaled "glow map" 

 

Picked up Quake 2 again recently (been playing on and off for almost 18 years). I'm using the q2pro setup called nQuake2, similar to nQuake for Quakeworld. Using Clau's pak as well. The textures, environments are all beautiful however.

Going to check those out later, the thing I like about nQuake2 is how it preserves the multiplayer gameplay. Many other setups I've tried lose frames and don't play well in multiplayer at all (Darkplaces and a couple others I've tried for Q2 years and years ago) 

http://nquake2.com 

so how can I check any of this in game (quake)? 

in the zip file you will find the file "pak?.pak".

Copy and paste the file in the Quake/id1 directory,

In this directory you probably have already pak0.pak, pak1.pak & pak2.pak
(but you might have more .pak file --> let´s say pak(n).pak).

rename "pak?.pak" in "pak(n+1).pak", so most probably, rename it "pak3.pak".

Run the game.

Don't expect any spectacular change. The difference is very subtile! (see #18) 

can anyone reupload the monsters, or a link to an updated version if one exists? 

Sorry, I've deleted the files from my dropbox, and also from my hard disk.
It was just a test for evaluating the potentiality of the upscaling tools.
No a real success! The differences were very subtile.

Try to ask Ankh, he might still have a copy.

Cheers