Quote:Original post by Deyja
Parrot bay? Ew. Original spiced rum please.

Anyway. Everything in the older shots is so crisp. The buildings and trees and people in these newer ones are all blurry. What's up?

I think the newer shots were zoomed in or something. I'm curious about this, as well.

edit:
Also, the shadows look weird because they don't meet at the base of the object. I'm assuming it's because you're just rotating/extruding the base image, correct? I think it would look better if you made the shadows by hand instead of generating them, especially with the trees and stools, where the shadow offset is quite noticeable.

Quote:Original post by EDI
while the camera zoom isnt yet set to optimal, a certain amount of filtering is unavoidable since the billboards exist in 3D space which can't accurately be mapped 1:1 to screen pixels.

Why can't you map them 1:1 with screen pixels? It'll certainly give an overall higher quality look to the game.

If you have a "variable" zoom, then some would say you can't have 1:1 unless the player happens to zoom to a 1:1 distance. Not true. Remember, you're in control of the game at the end of the day... don't be behold to the 3D!

If you use mipmapping on your billboard textures (and even better, generate the mipmaps directly from your 3D package instead of simply downsampling from the original), you can have the GPU do all the work for you. The key is to "snap" your zoom to distances that are 1:1 with a mipmap level. Conveniently, this doubles the visible playing area with each "zoom level" which is a satisfying standard besides the technical benefits.

But, you say, you want smooth zooming? Just do it like "smooth scrolling" in Windows: you zoom smoothly between your "snapped" zoom levels. With the motion inherent to the zoom animation the player won't notice the blurring between mipmap levels (particularly with the refresh rate of many LCDs these days). The player will feel as though the zoom is somewhat continous even though it won't be. And hey, if it's a tradeoff worth making, provide a config option in a menu somewhere (or in a text file) to allow a player to turn on "zoom snapping" or something.

If you're going to invest the effort in using sprites then you might as well make them count: align them on 1:1 pixel boundaries! Otherwise you're investing the design work in creating pixel-perfect artwork, paying the runtime cost of rendering pixel-perfect artwork, but because you're simply doing the math in a "float-y" space you're presenting the user with interpolated, non-pixel-perfect artwork. A shame!

Also, if you get this working (actually, even if you don't, but it's more effective if you do), you can employ some cool "focus/blur" tricks by shifting the mipmap bias of your sprites. When you push the bias, the GPU will start sampling down into the smaller mipmaps (even though the pixel-to-texel ratio is not changing) and will do so gradually (using bilinear filtering)... assuming your sprites are render-order-depth-sorted, you can have a single character (or object) go out of focus, or fade away (blurring and ramping the alpha). It's a really cool effect, and it works on GeForce3 hardware (probably earlier... can be done without shaders definitely!).

BTW, if you need any details on the specifics, just ask!

Damn, and here I thought all the time we were spending on the gameplay was good idea.
*Shifts over to making pixel perfect graphics instead of eliminating reoccuring messages and adding witty response*
Thanks!

I hope this is some kinda Lost based game, the monorail pics made me think there is some mechanical force behind the tropics of the islands.