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[Impmaster]

16 pixels is the traditional size of RPG characters. However, if I ever try to use a 16 pixel sprite in anything, (games, forums, anything), it will show up really small. How do you guys make pixel art large? Do you scale it up in-game, with some sort of procedure in the resource manager? Or do you save it in a specific format? Or do you just scale them up in the image? (5(4*4) = 80, so make a 80 pixel size picture, with the blocks each 5 pixels larger than normal.) 

[ink.inc]

just scale the entire window/view by an integer using the engine

[louisdeb]

Being a professional, I zoom in on it, take a screencap, and use that photo :p

[Forstride]

I personally scale the window of my games to the largest size possible for the user's monitor, while still keeping the aspect ratio.

[gggfhfdh]

Being a professional, I zoom in on it, take a screencap, and use that photo :p

what a neat and perfectly reasonable thing to do for an entire game worth of 16x16 sprites and tiles

[Xion]

just scale up the game window. The sprites and tiles and such are still 16*16, but everything is drawn at 2x or 3x or whatever.

[Quarry]

If the engine/snippet you are using allows you to scale things without blur (Nearest Neighbor being the most common name for it) the use it, because if you save your resources scaled they'll cover up 4 times more space without any form of compression

[Schoq]

Some engines are stupid with this though, and might still draw the scaled sprites "between" even pixels. Which annoys pedantic nerds like me to no end.
In that case you have to draw each frame to a low resolution image which you then scale up to cover the entire view.

[Quarry]

or cover the drawing functions to multiply the positions by a contant, but the rotation will still be bad

There's a solution to that too though, you can scale and blit FBOs in OpenGL - not sure about DX though

[Reineke]

If it's just for posting on a forum or something I scale the image 200% or 400% or whatever using the "Nearest Neighbour" filtering in Paint.NET. Bilinear or best Quality and the like makes pixel art somewhat blurry. In games where you use a 3D engine you have to make sure to use a "Point" filter in the texture and not Bilinear or Trilinear filtering. That way it'll retain its crispy pixely look (sometimes even when not perfectly scaled 2x or 4x).

[impulse9]

Scale up with no interpolation.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

if i understand your question, you know what low resolution is right? the reason 16x16 pixel blocks are large in retro games and old games isn't because they are scaled up. it's because the screen resolution is lowered (typically 320x200, but sometimes 640x480)

basically the relative size of an image on the screen depends on two factors:

- its pixel dimensions
- the screen resolution

[Impmaster]

Oh. That's useful. So the window size is full screen (or whatever they set it to), but the resolution is really low?

[Gregg Williams]

The thing is, since LCD's became pretty much the standard when it comes to monitors, resolution switching kinda blows. LCD's pretty much just have a single resolution they are meant to run at, and switching resolutions usually means the monitor than starts scaling and having distortions, etc, unlike traditional CRTS.

In the end if you want high quality PA, you pretty much just need to draw it 1:1 to the resolution you expect to run at. Usually this means making sprites and tiles that are a lot larger than 16x16 and as such also take a ton more time to do. Or yeah you can scale stuff up, a lot of times you end up doing this even if you create high resolution PA sprites, to support things like full screen mode. Theres just a large difference of scaling say a 80x80 sprite to 160x160 vs a 16x16 sprite to 160x160.

Ultimately it just depends on the aesthetic you want, big blown up pixels seem to be popular lately.