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[Quarry]

Nowadays I notice a lot of games that use NN scaling for their graphics, however, one thing that bugs me the most is this;



It might not be obvious to some people, but if you look closely you'll see that even though the game is scaled at 2x NN, there score text is not offset at 2x but rather 1x

I think that this kills the whole idea of having pixellated graphics

NN scaling is mostly done due to a game's artstyle, but if you don't do it properly it really doesn't look nice


I want to have artists' opinions on this, and what programmers should do to prevent this from happening

[Sam]

Avoiding it on the programming level is generally simple.
Rather than drawing your sprites at their scaled up size, you draw everything at its native size to a texture (or BitmapData object, or Surface, or whatever your engine uses) and then enlarge that. That way it's simply impossible to place an object that half covers a pixel.

Mixed pixel sizes, like the large pixels of the "+6" with the smaller pixels in the rest of the image is a different crime thing.
The ideal of pixel art is that each pixel is carefully and deliberately placed for maximum effect. When you use "enlarged pixels" in one area of an image you're stating at the best way to represent something is as a series of squares, but it usually isn't.

[Quarry]

I use BufferedImage then draw it according to the scale amount and write all my pixel buffers on that image which works

But people who use XNA or flash engines or w/e mostly don't bother and have this problem

[GenericUser]

This is even more noticeable if you rotate sprites:



Sam's got it - the quickest way of avoiding it is simply drawing to a smaller texture, which you then scale up.

[thatshelby]

If you rotate, then scale, it's not as noticeable.

[paste]

This is even more noticeable if you rotate sprites:



Sam's got it - the quickest way of avoiding it is simply drawing to a smaller texture, which you then scale up.

You really shouldn't be rotating things at this resolution, though. It would look a lot better if you just redrew it at a different angle. The only time it might be good is if you were doing a quick full rotation (or multiple of pi/2).

...Unless you're advocating the use of the bottom right image, which would be completely contrary to what the first two posts are saying.

[Schoq]

It annoys me to no end when I see this in a game. It just screams laziness, carelessness and dumb first attempt at faux retro style.

But I usually don't say anything in fear of revealing that I'm the most pedantic of nerds.

[Udderdude]

I generally attempt to clip objects to pixel boundries in my Flash games, but then I also use vector animations/effects, and if you scale the game area all of the sprites are smoothed out instead of giant blocky pixels.  So I guess it kind of cancels eachother out .. >_>

[Geti]

Honestly though rotating at scaled up size yields better results imo because it doesn't rape the clusters in an image. Not necessarily laziness or retro style or w/e. There's a lot of new pixel art that doesn't look anything like old pixel art.

The example shown strikes me as obnoxious though. :/

[GenericUser]

...Unless you're advocating the use of the bottom right image, which would be completely contrary to what the first two posts are saying.

Oh no, I'm not! It's exaggerated to demonstrate the difference.

I agree though, you shouldn't really do naive rotations at low resolution.

[Farfin]

if it's good enough for treasure it's good enough for me

[1982]

You really shouldn't be rotating things at this resolution, though. It would look a lot better if you just redrew it at a different angle. The only time it might be good is if you were doing a quick full rotation (or multiple of pi/2).

...Unless you're advocating the use of the bottom right image, which would be completely contrary to what the first two posts are saying.

You can do this if you are making a SNES like game. But I agree, it looked shit even back then.

[Quarry]

Also, in every XNA game that's pixellated, this is present, especially for rotation

And in Terraria NPCs usually just don't offset by one pixel at 2x scaling, but sometimes offset at floats which causes them to be blurred

Disgusting

[Belimoth]

Disgusting

The word 'sub-pixel' causes me to have chest pain. Seriously the worst.

I use BlitzMax so to avoid these phenomena I use its SetVirtualResolution() function pretty religiously.

[Quarry]

trololol