"Resizing" a room

[lilinuyasha]

Hey there.

So I've been importing some Hi-resolution backgrounds, and more often than not, they're really, really big, and my characters are really, really small. As such, I can't see all of the room and it takes away from the feel of what i wanted to do. Using the scaling thing just makes them looks like giants while still hiding the room.

One solution I found was simply to resize the image down until it worked. My question, however, is if there's a way to simply make the entire room visible without changing the HD resolution of it? I can deal with pixelated backgrounds, but I'd rather have the HD feel. Is there a way to do this? Does my question make sense?

[Cassiebsg]

You either set your game resolution up or you backgrounds down... or both.
Decide what size you want the game/backgrounds to be, and adjust accordingly. Then you'll need to adjust your characters size to fit in the backgrounds... (you'll need characters/sprites drawn at the right resolution) Don't think it'll help much to have Roger (the default character) drawn to be on a 320x200 background, if your game/BGs are 1024x768 (he'll either just be a very big pixel blob, or he'll look like like an ant)
You can find Resolution in the General Settings options.

[Khris]

Not really.
You cannot use arbitrarily sized graphics and expect them to happen to work together smoothly; you need to start with choosing a suitable resolution, then draw (or resize) images accordingly.

The biggest resolution the official version of AGS offers is 1024x768. This is pretty highres (720p in HD terms, if you will) and perfectly suitable for hand drawn art.
As for room sizes: when you have a room that is bigger (in pixels) than the resolution of your game, the room will scroll; if you don't want that, you have to resize (and crop) the background image before importing it into AGS.
So let's say you have scanned a hand drawn background, and it is 1500x860 pixels. Resize it to 1340x768 in Photoshop or a similar program, then decide whether you want it to scroll horizontally (1340 > 1024) or crop it to a width of 1024 to avoid scrolling.

Characters also use the game's native resolution. A basic way to find a good character size is to start with an image as big as the game (1024x768), draw a standard indoor location with doors, then use 90% of the door height as characters height. Upscaling them will always look much worse than downscaling them, so you should avoid walkable areas that have a scaling factor above 100%.
When you draw additional rooms on the computer, always keep a reference character in a separate layer to make sure the room has the correct proportions.

[lilinuyasha]

Increasing resolution is a much better thing. I was stupidly unaware of how to do that. Total noob here, apparently. Thanks, guys.

[Eric]

A related, piggyback question: if you have a room where your character size is down scaled by too much (I notice the animation hangs on every other frame at about 15%), is it a better practice to switch views to a smaller version of the sprite?

[selmiak]

if pixelart: maybe, probably kills the pixelart, if other kind of animation: try it and it'll probably look better when scaling in a gfx program, if not, stay with engine scaling

edit: for pixelart you have to repixel it for the other view, so that's either a lot of work for scaling up, or some easy pixels for scaling down much, but then you have complete pixelcontrol contrary to engine scaling!

[lilinuyasha]

My only issue now is that since some rooms are different sizes, I will occasionally have a black part of the screen (WHich is no problem most of the time. I just worry that seeing blackness, all consuming, never ending on the left or right parts of the stages seems a little tacky and unprofessional.)

[Eric]

if pixelart: maybe

Mine's drawn as vector, so resizing is lossless for the most part, but that' same good point to make!

[Cassiebsg]

My only issue now is that since some rooms are different sizes, I will occasionally have a black part of the screen (WHich is no problem most of the time. I just worry that seeing blackness, all consuming, never ending on the left or right parts of the stages seems a little tacky and unprofessional.)

You could "fill" in the blanks/black parts maybe?
Cause unless those black parts are intentional and part of the game design, the player will notice them and yes, think "tacky and unprofessional".

[lilinuyasha]

I've just decided to keep the black spots in, since they're mostly even and don't really detract from the gameplay.

That being said, is there a way to center the stage?

[Khris]

Make the borders evenly sized, so that the background is a big as the room size.
You could in theory set a manual viewport, but you should do things the correct way from the start, and centering the smaller background on a room sized black rectangle is the obvious solution.