Design Non Pixelart Game Resolutions

Okay so my question is this...There are a blue million tuts on pixel art in GMS but what about non pixel games. Basically Im making a game that I cant upscale like a regular pixel art game. So how do you go about setting up the Room/Viewport/etc... Cant do it the pixel art way cause if it scales up the viewport (or whatever) the images are blurry.
 

TrunX

Member
The alternatives that come to my mind are:
  • High-res graphics that you scale down to the screen resolution.
  • Own graphics for each predefined resolution.
  • Vector Graphics
  • Show more of the room, so everyting gets smaller with higher screen resolution (suitable for RTS games)
  • Using a shader, that can scale up lower res sprites (e.g. meant for 720p) without looking blurry or pixelated.
  • 3D models isntead of 2D sprites
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Cant do it the pixel art way cause if it scales up the viewport (or whatever) the images are blurry.
You can turn that off by disabling interpolation. There's a function to do it on the fly (which even enables you to draw some things with interpolation and some without!) but if you never want to toggle this, you should find the "Interpolate colors between pixels" checkbox in the Windows game settings and uncheck it.

Changing the application surface's size to be the native game resolution (instead of defaulting to the window size) also helps reduce blur, and it also speeds up drawing - this is good on mobile devices.
 

Joe Ellis

Member
I've heard for a while with hd and hand drawn games that the ideal thing is to have all the graphics fit the largest monitor size on the market and scale down if the monitor is smaller. It will get outdated at some point, but considering monitors can be the same res as big tvs, it'll probably look fine when scaled up. There's a certain point where your eye can't see any extra detail or can't tell when too far away so I think as long as you make the graphics fit 4k res, they'll always look fine
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
HD art will run into issues sooner or later due to texture page size, though... the Skullgirls devs (who also released an RPG recently in the same 60fps traditional animation art style) had to jump through hoops to get the game to run, dynamically loading and unloading sprites to keep needed frames in VRAM. There is a SG meme about "everyone looking 8-bit" when the game fails to load images in time, they use a fallback solution of using low-res images upscaled to the right size when the real sprites aren't ready in time. Since the default GM texture page size is 1024x1024 (iirc? Or was that bumped up to 2048x2048 now? - in either case you can go up to like 8k x 8k, but higher texture page size = lower compatibility with low-end devices, so...), you can't fit more than a handful HD graphics assets on there, and page swapping could very well be a bottleneck if you need a lot of HD graphics active at the same time.
 

Niels

Member
HD art will run into issues sooner or later due to texture page size, though... the Skullgirls devs (who also released an RPG recently in the same 60fps traditional animation art style) had to jump through hoops to get the game to run, dynamically loading and unloading sprites to keep needed frames in VRAM. There is a SG meme about "everyone looking 8-bit" when the game fails to load images in time, they use a fallback solution of using low-res images upscaled to the right size when the real sprites aren't ready in time. Since the default GM texture page size is 1024x1024 (iirc? Or was that bumped up to 2048x2048 now? - in either case you can go up to like 8k x 8k, but higher texture page size = lower compatibility with low-end devices, so...), you can't fit more than a handful HD graphics assets on there, and page swapping could very well be a bottleneck if you need a lot of HD graphics active at the same time.
I stil find it strange that other engines don't have the same problem
 

Khao

Member
I'm currently working on an HD game. My previous game was also HD.

There's not a lot you need to do differently. Previous game had views and viewports set to 720p, and all assets were made with that resolution in mind. Later, we switched up the viewports to 1080p and the game looked way smoother on 1080p displays. Eventually we supported arbitrary resolutions so the game looked smooth in any monitor. Assets were still 720p, but you can still see the benefits in jumping to higher resolutions. Smoother cameras, smoother scaling, smoother rotations, smoother movement.

If your characters are not too texture heavy (for example, if you're using skeletal animations) I'd recommend storing them in a higher resolution than you usually render them, so they still look good when increasing the resolution, or when doing zoom-in effects or whatever. At the same time, there's things you might not actually need to have at high resolutions and might still look great when upscaled, like certain particles or certain objects that are not too important.

Know what to scale down and what to scale up and you'll do well.

If it helps, my current game has 1080p assets and features hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation and I've yet to run into memory issues.
 
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