Tech question about pixel orientation.

[Vanlande]

This game has a great art style and I just love the pixel art. I've noticed that, despite weapons and particles rotating all the time, their pixel orientation stays the same. A lot of games simply rotate the textures (can't remember any right now) but to me that makes it look bad.
I guess the question is, pixels being aligned constantly is a feature of game maker (or whatever engine is being used) or does the game use some kind of shader? Maybe some complex technique?

[I]SilverHawk[I]

[Daniel West]

I don't use game maker, but I know it should be really easy to accomplish. It's all about the upsampling algorithm. Basically, you render at pixel resolution then upscale. Usually the GPU wants to use some sort of linear sampling so that images/games don't look jaggy/pixellated when scaled up. In this case, you'd just force the GPU to use point sampling which scales up the pixels exactly. This would automatically take care of sprite rotation, scaling, etc.

(Again, I don't know how Vlamber does it, that's just my assumption).

[Sentinel Greg]

Originally posted by sqiddster:

I don't use game maker, but I know it should be really easy to accomplish. It's all about the upsampling algorithm. Basically, you render at pixel resolution then upscale. Usually the GPU wants to use some sort of linear sampling so that images/games don't look jaggy/pixellated when scaled up. In this case, you'd just force the GPU to use point sampling which scales up the pixels exactly. This would automatically take care of sprite rotation, scaling, etc.

(Again, I don't know how Vlamber does it, that's just my assumption).

Interesting. I wonder if that's why my pixels get little tails on their right edges.
Does anyone else get that?

[Daniel West]

Yeah, I do get a few misplaced pixels on the edge of the big pixels sometimes. Pretty sure it's just related to how particular GPU's do point sampling.

[Vanlande]

Hey, thanks for the answer. It kinda makes a lot of sense, but I would never have thought of doing it that way. Goes to show I know very little about graphics programming.

[Vanlande]

Any chance we can get input from one of the developers please?

[jwaap]

Yep, that's correct. the entire game is rendered at 320x240, then scaled up to whatever your computer likes!