Hey everyone, I'm new to OpenGL, so to get a handle on things I'm planning on making a very small-scale isometric game. I've spent a good deal of time reading books, articles/tutorials, testing out various 2d texturing techniques, and I have a few questions. Basically, I'd like to get some opinions on the best methods for creating smooth-edged textures for tiling and sprites, etc., in a 2d isometric environment with OpenGL. I've tried creating my textures in Photoshop as PNGs with anti-aliasing and just loading them with blending enabled as RGBA, and that works fairly well. I've also tried creating high-res textures and then scaling them down with mipmap filtering, but that "blurs" the entire texture and seems to reduce overall quality, so I don't really like it. As I understand it, FSAA isn't really useful for a 2d isometric thing unless I want to trace out the edges of all my irregular-shaped artwork with OpenGL lines/points, and that seems too tedious to be viable (though correct me if I'm wrong here; I am new to OpenGL). These are the only options I've really come across. Are there other, better ways to filter textures for smoothness in OpenGL that would work with what I'm trying to do? Or should I just stick with using antialiased shapes in my editing program and loading my art with blending and an alpha channel? Thanks for your help, I hope I've made what I'm asking clear :)

Quote:Original post by cmc5788
I've also tried creating high-res textures and then scaling them down with mipmap filtering, but that "blurs" the entire texture and seems to reduce overall quality, so I don't really like it.

Mipmaping quality can be improved by using trilinear filtering (GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR), anisotropic filtering, and setting mipmap LOD depending on your needs.

Quote:As I understand it, FSAA isn't really useful for a 2d isometric thing unless I want to trace out the edges of all my irregular-shaped artwork with OpenGL lines/points, and that seems too tedious to be viable (though correct me if I'm wrong here; I am new to OpenGL).

Newer cards support transparency AA, although i never get around to try it so i can't comment on the viability.