The media quality was indeed reduced, mainly because almost every update was 150-200 MB in size, and instead of short video snippets, there were sometimes 2-minute scenes. At one point, even though the game was roughly 2x smaller, it was already close to 10 GB in size, so compression was necessary for players with slower internet connections.
I’ve been thinking about this because, from time to time, some players mention that they would like to receive an HD version. Maybe I’ll play around with some presets and try a bit of upscaling for the MP4 files, although it’s something I need to think about and see if it’s even feasible. Unfortunately, a lot of the materials in the game are clips from 2000s-era adult content, and with the added compression, the quality isn’t visually stunning. I’m not sure if any upscaling AI could bring that to a more acceptable level.
Hey there just wanted to reply to this as I've returned to try the game again recently and then checked the posts to see this.
Upscaling AI from my experience so far with older videos works very well if you use the right settings and product for it (Topaz 2.6.4 is much better than the newer versions) however you also need to re-encode them to be in an better format and compression which I've found in the last half a year or so to be AV1. Although if your doubling frame-rate AI will struggle if something is an unclear pattern such as blinds or and striped shirt with similar colors, resulting in that area looking jittery at best.
I've often gotten an upscale of an 1080p video to be the same size nearly despite it now being 1440p when going for keeping quality, otherwise can often be smaller as a result of re-encoding the raw upscale to AV1.
Problem with AV1 however is it's still relatively new and so the videos won't play on browsers that haven't been updated in a long time or video codecs updated on the system.
As a result I suggest copying what a few other games have done where they have two asset or media folders to choose from, high and low quality so people can choose if they want something with an small file size or high quality.
Just incase it's wondered about....I've found that there's not much in the way of up-scaling webp due to it being even newer than AV1 and as you can't use default image viewers on it like you can with gifs, as a result I'm on the side of using .gif over .webp still although I've found XnView to be able to process them.
PS Do you have any plans to reduce the clicks to grind or instead making it possible to repeat an set amount of actions each day? (Could be one of the `powers` you unlock early on that can be increased via destroyer skill)
