You don't work with mobile, do you?
Proposed upscaling technique - render vectors to pixels, convert to vectors, upscale and re-raster *spawn
- Thread starter msaki
- Start date
Sure i did. All games i ever released were mobile games.You don't work with mobile, do you?
I made pixel art at multiple resolutions to support different screen sizes on early cell phones. Much less work than messing with vectors or auto sprite scaling for meh results. : )
Not sure what you mean by output resolution is always known then, unless you mean at the rendering end. Modern game dev is designing for competely arbitrary screen sizes and resolutions. This is an area where 2D art upscaling is quite significant unless you use ever chunkier pixels. Designing art + rendering that scales from a 4" 720p (portrait, 1280p) screen through a 2560p 10" tablet to a 50" 4k screen is a bloody annoyance! Honestly, nothing I hate more than creating UIs to work for all devices and aspect ratios from 21:9 to 9:21, instead of actually making a fun game! And here, the scaled bitmaps of 9-patches etc mean different looking results everywhere. This is where a true vector UI system cold be invaluable. I need to look into this:
www.noesisengine.com
C++ Game UI Framework
NoesisGUI is a lightweight cross-platform C++ game user interface library based on XAML and optimized for GPUs
Independent from your point of producing the proper content for some resolution target, our engine knows at which resolution it renders, so we know it in advance. We can decide to render at this native resolution, or use some upscaling at a precise factor of 1.7 if we want. So technically we never have the problem of 'I better generate vector data, because i don't know if my stuff ends up on a thumbnail or a poster'. That's all i've meant.
I agree for content creation it can be a pain, but the OPs idea was about realtime rendering not production issues.
Yeah, but i also hate the idea that we nowadays need something like css/html capable GUI systems in games. So much complexity, just for that : (
I'd rather use a simple and compromised artstyle just to avoid this, and the games i want have no GUI anyway. All those abstract RPG mechanics - ugh, that's pen and paper crap. Proper video games implement their mechanics within their worlds simulation. And if this can't represent the idea of a certain mechanic well, it's just no good video game mechanic at all, imo. (well, i mean just action video games, ignoring most other genres)
For GUI and fonts, vectors surely are useful. And any OS supports vector fonts i think. Quality varies, though. E.g., Mac OS had zero issues with upscaling GUI for 4K screens, while on Windows i still avoid to use this, because fonts become blurry.
Idk how far games currently go here. And i don't want to know.
Unlike the OP, i don't have the impression that vector formats are somewhat underused but have hidden advantages. It's used where it's useful, like in fonts, Art tools, maybe Flash games. But making them a general tool to create arbitrary images? No thanks.
The only exception i see is 3D models from parametric surfaces. Any real world mechanical products are designed this way, and using it in games would save storage and RAM, and enable smooth curves when zooming in.
I think this fails on artists being resistant to model in such a technical way. I guess, if you have experience, you can do this very quickly. But personally i also have failed to learn it. We might need better tools first, eventually.