Begone, polygons: 1993’s Virtua Fighter gets smoothed out by AI

Virtual Fighter was the first fighting game to feature fully 3D polygonal graphics. We can take a look at what those original characters might look like with their angles smoothed out thanks to a thread on the social networking site.

The Stable Diffusion image synthesis model was used to synthesise the images, taking an input image as a prompt and combining it with a written description. TheAUTOMATIC1111 release comes with a nice web-based user interface.

Stable Diffusion can take some trial and error in order to get worthwhile results. The process was enjoyable for Williamson. img2img does its best if you describe the character. The hardest part was figuring out how to describe the character's clothes.

I would cherry-pick the funniest ones once I found a good prompt. "I tried this thing called negative prompting, where you tell the artificial intelligence stuff like 'please don't draw messed-up-looking hands' which does a great job in that now your characters have only six fingers instead of seven."

A month ago, we reported on anMS-DOS game fan who used a similar technique to upgrade EGA graphics. The remakes are all in good fun and the artists are still fans of the original graphics. It's possible to see how the characters look in later games.

"I'm happy to stand on the backs of giants and use millions of dollars' worth of artificial intelligence to make dumb pictures that make people laugh." I need to find something else, so I need to fire up the SegaSaturn.