RE: [GD-General] More screen res love (tile graphics)

[Troy G. <Tr...@cs...>]

> That is the gist of it.  Running at a resolution other than the 
> native LCD resolution looks really bad -- not in a "this is kinda 
> crappy" way, but in a "this is pretty damned illegible" kind of way.  
> So just going fullscreen is actually worse than running windowed.  I 
> tried playing Homeworld the other day, and it has a cap of 1024x768.  
> When I tried to run it, I pretty much couldn't read the menus on my 
> Viewsonic VA800.

I find this odd... I am constantly on the road and on airplanes, so I'm
forced to do most of my PC gaming on my laptop (and it's faster to boot, so
it's not all bad!). The laptop runs at a native resolution of 1600x1200, but
have absolutely no legibility problems playing any games at lower
resolutions (and I play all of them except Medal of Honor at lower
resolutions -- I like the extra resolution for aiming over distances). These
include alot of 2D games (my particular favorites) including the recent
SimCity4. I sometimes find the scaled up graphics with the filtering a nice
change from the "supersharp" non-filtered graphics of a CRT.

Of course, this isn't always the case... really well done pixelart looks
great running at it's native resolution (whether it be CRT or LCD), and
interlaced signals look *awful* on LCDs! It drives me insane at GDC, E3,
ECTS, Xfest, DevCon, etc., all of these video game related tradeshows they
attach the systems to LCDs... I think they make most games look worse
(because of the large amount of filtering being done on the interlacing,
which ironically most games are already doing assuming the signal will
remained interlaced!).

I assume the best solution is to have multi-resolution artwork targeting the
major resolutions (640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, etc.). Of course,
it would be a pain to hand design this artwork. But, I believe there are two
routes to reducing the workload. First, develop the artwork in a
resolution-independent format, such as a 3D (ala Starcraft) or vector
artwork. These can then be rendered to whatever needed resolution. The
second option would be to produce the highest resolution originals and use a
better-than-bicubic down-sampling filter (which most often muddies
pixelart). I'd recommend separating out luminosity from the chroma channel,
then applying different filters to each before recombining. For chroma, a
simple bicubic should work fine, and for luminosity you'd want a detail
preserving filter. I can't recall one off the top of my head, but Game
Developer had a few articles (a few years ago, so they should be on
Gamasutra) about better-than-bicubic down-sampling for things like mipmaps
with text.

Troy
Developer Relations
Criterion Software
www.csl.com