Smooth character scaling.

Hi,

i'm having issues with character scaling. When is the character scaled a lot it looks bad. I can have both small and big versions of character for different scenes, but there is nothing i could do when the character can be small and big because of the perspective in one scene. This is how it looks scaled in the game and scaled just in windows viewer, why Visionaire doesn't scale it smoothly too?

Scaling tends to generate artifacts. I however don't know the difference between runtime scaling & scaling in windows viewer.

Are you viewing your game on a screen with the same resolution as the default resolution you specified for your game? If you are viewing your game (like I do) on a laptop screen instead of a monitor with support for your default resolution then the engine will probably end up scaling your game to fit the screen automatically, then the engine will also scale your characters / animations again.

P.S: I believe things like anti-aliasing & thin outlines affect how things scale up / down. Something with a 1px outline at 100% isn't necessarily going to scale down smoothly & 100% in tact. Then there's the fact that the images are not vector.

Yes it's on my desktop, the same resolution as the game default resolution. I understand that there will always be some artifacts but what is my point is that i can scale into the same size in the windows viewer, the excact same image and it looks quite better than in the engine. So i understand it that it should be possible to achieve the same result?
The point is that it looks shitty to be honest and the only way to avoid it is to not have any perspective scenes in the game...

I'm not sure. I'm guessing the engine handles scaling differently. I believe there are loads of different filters & so on that apply to scaling? In photoshop you have all those bicubic scaling this & that options available when you use the image size tool. VS uses interpolated or nearest neighbor scaling, if I remember correctly.

I guess I'm not really the most qualified person to be answering this as I'm no artist & I've not really got much insight into the inner workings of the engine. Simon?

I think another factor was to make the raw file of your character only as big as necessary. Not sure though. I think that pictures that are too big will have these artifacts when scaling in vis.

@SimonS: Is there some chance that it could look better?

@SleeperHold: The problem with small size images is that it's not sharp when it gets bigger. So it's the opposite problem.

Daedalic asked me something similar, I think I'll implement a handling for small scaling. Probably like mipmapping.

That's a great news :-) I was afraid that maybe there is nothing to do. So hopefully there will be time for that at some point. Thanks.