View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0007224 | Valley 1 | Suggestion | Apr 23, 2012 10:44 pm | Apr 23, 2012 11:21 pm | |
| Reporter | Bluddy | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | won't fix | ||
| Product Version | 0.971 (RC2) | ||||
| Summary | 0007224: Scale graphics at high resolutions. | ||||
| Description | I didn't realize that AVWW will allow you to view it at any scale and at any resolution until I saw the trailer. On my computer, running either at 1024x768 or fullscreen at 1440x900, I really think AVWW looks beautiful. The textures and art seem designed roughly for these resolutions. At much higher resolutions, the toolbar becomes tiny, the characters become tiny, the textures shrink to the point that the detail is invisible and you just see their repetition, and the only thing clearly visible is the random landscape and some large structures. The game starts to resemble Worms Armageddon, with tiny characters on huge random landscapes. This isn't a good mechanism IMO. 3d games don't become tiny when you switch to higher resolutions -- they scale up, keeping the same relative sizes for characters (and some also keep the same scale for the interface). And the old 2d games supported only limited resolutions partly because of this problem. Except you have a 3d capable engine at your disposal, so you can do the texture scaling for free. From my experience with resolutions around 1440x900, I'd suggest making something around that (or somewhat higher) a constant target, and scaling as necessary on larger monitors. Yes, the textures won't be as crisp at super-high resolutions, but that's something 3d games deal with as well. Better that than having tiny characters, and small textures that clearly repeat themselves. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | New | ||||
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Scaling the graphics is very intensive on the GPU and looks terrible. There is already a function for that built into your monitor that handles this beautifully and with actually a performance gain instead of a performance cost: it's playing at a lower screen resolution. If someone wants a lower effective resolution on whatever their monitor is, they need to play on an actual lower resolution. It may look slightly blurry on an LCD monitor if that's not the native display resolution, but that would be true in any case even if we tried to scale it ourselves directly. In any case, I could never go back to playing at less than what you see in the trailer: 1920x1280. Boy is that a great resolution. You don't lose any detail and you gain tons of viewport space. The only reason you'd lose detail is if you were trying to play at that resolution while on a monitor too small to effectively display it. And in that case, the simple solution is to turn down your monitor resolution using the existing controls. Incidentally, most of the textures are 512x512 or even 1024x1024; not small by most standards for 2D games, most of which repeat at 64x64 or 128x128 at most. |
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Buy by the way, regarding trailers I do agree that using something more like the resolution you suggest would work better then. In-game it's a different story if your monitor is the right size. You see the HUD only in your peripheral vision, and that's such a glorious way to play. You don't see repeating textures because they aren't in your main field of view. But for a trailer that's really another matter, and I agree that you had good advice on that, just far too late for us to use it this go-round. I imagine this won't be the last trailer we do, though, so we'll probably go for 720p on those to avoid the very issues you mention. Now that youtube has their compression under control (unlike a year ago), that shouldn't lead to videos that are crazy muddy anymore. If you look at the earliest AVWW videos, which were 720p, that was a constant struggle. I hadn't even thought to reevaluate the resolution choice once that improved, until you mentioned it. So thanks for that. ;) |
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Mostly it was the annoying RPS comments that got me to look into the trailer issue. I don't understand why people are still picking on the graphics in this game. I'm pretty certain the graphics look objectively decent, if not great (and personally I do think they look great). So part of it may be that the trailer doesn't show off the graphics well enough because of the resolution issue, but I guess some people will always find room to complain if a title doesn't look as good as the latest AAA pixel-shaded beast. |
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I don't even read the RPS comments anymore, to be honest. But we've got people who have played the game and hated it rabidly, too, so I don't think it's a detail quality thing. I think it's mainly a matter of taste. There are some people really meh on the music, too, which I _really_ can't understand. With the RPS commenters these days, the expectation seems to be "the latest AAA benchmarking game of awesome graphics is passable, and everything else AAA is pretty terrible." And so, on that scale, I guess I have no hope ever. I find it pretty annoying as well, to be sure. Sigh. Time for me to sleep; take care. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 23, 2012 10:44 pm | Bluddy | New Issue | |
| Apr 23, 2012 10:51 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Internal Weight | => New |
| Apr 23, 2012 10:51 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0022627 | |
| Apr 23, 2012 10:51 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => closed |
| Apr 23, 2012 10:51 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Apr 23, 2012 10:51 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => won't fix |
| Apr 23, 2012 10:57 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0022628 | |
| Apr 23, 2012 11:11 pm | Bluddy | Note Added: 0022630 | |
| Apr 23, 2012 11:21 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0022631 | |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:28 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - General Idea => Suggestion - General |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - General => Suggestion |
