Retain pixel sharpness

totebo

You know when you've hit a brick wall and you know why it's there, but you wish there was a sneaky way to avoid it? Here goes.

My pixel game uses scaleMode pixelPerfect at 320x480 to look sharp. All art is tuned to this resolution, and there is a lot of art. Now I want to zoom in to make the gameworld a little bigger. Brick wall! I have tried:

- Changing the setLogicalDimensions to slightly smaller, to increase the pixel size. The "next one down" is 180x240. This makes the pixels too big. If I set scaleMode to letterbox and try other values, the pixels are distorted.
- Increasing the setLogicalDimensions to 960x1280 and downscaling by setScale on the sprite. Distorted pixels.

I know. It's impossible. But... is it?

SinisterSoft

Maybe render textures that have no antialias in the game to a render target (that has antialias set) that is 320x480 then scale that up - but are you using sub pixels?

totebo

Interesting! Sub pixels, do you mean on decimal coordinates? Or pixels smaller than pixels? If so, yes and no.

SinisterSoft

i mean fractional coordinates but keeping the pixels the same size as each other - so things move more smoothly than if they really were that pixel size.

totebo

Yeah, I do use fractional coordinates. Let's not be too old school here!

SinisterSoft

Then drawing everything to a render target won't work.

antix

I guess flooring your coordinates before rendering to the RenderTarget is the only solution.