the chafr sprite looks weird when going into distance

[Baron Leichtsinn]

i think it should scale, but the resolution should stay the overall screen resolution. cardinal sin in pixelart to have different sized pixels imo

[James Spanos]

I am quite confident there hasn't been a single pixel perfect adventure game in history. But agreed scaling doesn't look 'proper' at times.

[grimoire]

I noted this in my review as well, this was the one fault I found in the game. I'm not sure if it is a limitation of the game engine or not, but I would use nearest neighbor interpolation (or maybe that's not exactly the right term, but the downscaling equivalent of it) to scale the characters down to a smaller size as they go into the distance for a real old school effect, getting blockier and more abstract as they go. At least that is my recollection of e.g. Sierra games.

In fact I would prefer it stayed entirely at 320x180 resolution, even the fog and lighting effects and such.

[Palandus]

Originally posted by James Spanos:

I am quite confident there hasn't been a single pixel perfect adventure game in history. But agreed scaling doesn't look 'proper' at times.

Adventure, on the Atari was a pixel perfect adventure game :P

[James Spanos]

Lol, well, I got rekt!

[Em Sea Elle]

Originally posted by Baron Leichtsinn:

i think it should scale, but the resolution should stay the overall screen resolution. cardinal sin in pixelart to have different sized pixels imo

It's an artefact of Adventure Game Studio. Which this game and a the majority of other 2D adventure games use (including all Wadjet Eye games for example.)

AGS supports sprite scaling in engine, but for some reason it scales them down based on the upscaled output resolution rather than the original game resolution. I have no idea why it's like this, and every AGS game I've played has this problem.

[James Spanos]

^ this essentially.

[grimoire]

Originally posted by Em Sea Elle:

Originally posted by Baron Leichtsinn:

i think it should scale, but the resolution should stay the overall screen resolution. cardinal sin in pixelart to have different sized pixels imo

It's an artefact of Adventure Game Studio. Which this game and a the majority of other 2D adventure games use (including all Wadjet Eye games for example.)

AGS supports sprite scaling in engine, but for some reason it scales them down based on the upscaled output resolution rather than the original game resolution. I have no idea why it's like this, and every AGS game I've played has this problem.

Interesting. Apparently AGS is open source so I think the sprite problem could be very easily fixed.

You could also make all the visual effects run at 320x180 or any given "native" resolution, make the whole game 320x180, although the easiest way I can think of to do this without recoding things - just do a scaling pass before displaying each frame - might be too intensive for the design purposes of the engine. I say intensive not because it would be difficult at all for any GPU still in use today to do (or I guess any GPU ever made), but an extra step that may be unwanted to the people working on the engine. Of course, it'd be optional, whether for the game developer or the user.

[Palandus]

Most developers don't know how to change the code on rendering, so that is actually extremely complicated to do. That is why, when you get these engines built, you have a specialized person that understands the lambda math, calculus, and how to manipulate scaling and anti-aliasing to produce certain effects.

[Palandus]

It is however, far simpler to create branching text adventure / point/click paths and multiple endings. I'd know; I made a roguelike text adventure once that had multiple paths and branches.

[grimoire]

Originally posted by Bonegrinder:

Most developers don't know how to change the code on rendering, so that is actually extremely complicated to do. That is why, when you get these engines built, you have a specialized person that understands the lambda math, calculus, and how to manipulate scaling and anti-aliasing to produce certain effects.

I do understand that in this case the game developers did not write the engine and may not know how to modify it and I was not suggesting they should modify it. What I described is also very basic stuff though, so someone familiar with the languages the engine is written with could do it fairly easily (some random coder approaching the problem), or very easily if they were already familiar with the engine (one of the existing developers).

[grimoire]

I'll look at adding an option for that (both correct scaling of the sprites, and scaling of the whole screen) if it is in fact not already in the engine (I'd be surprised if something like that is not already there). It'd be up to the AGS developers if they want to put that option back in the main branch.

[grimoire]

It'd be nice to have a way to do smooth parallax scrolling too.

[James Spanos]

I'll look into smoother parallax, i believe that's done with a script here, so it makes sense to address at least that.

[grimoire]

I was mistaken that in Hob's Barrow the fog and lighting effects are not at game resolution, upon second look. I think it is like that in some games though.

I've submitted a request to the AGS devs for a feature to scale sprites to the game resolution.

[grimoire]

Issue solved: This effect is due to "Render sprites at screen resolution" being set in the advanced options. It's not supposed to be like that. I don't know if it shipped like that or if I set that when I was messing around.