Questions regarding resolutions, pixels and my sketch!

[Ernest]

Hello everyone,

After years of thinking how great it would be to create my own adventure game, I finally decided to give AGS a go. I'm doing the best I can with the given information on the website, watching the youtube tutorials of densming and reading forums right here. However, I do have some specific questions to the AGS community and some technical questions regarding the resolution and such. I hope you guys can help me out before I start this thing for real!

I have made a sketch in Photoshop which shows my style of graphics. I would like some feedback on the background (I'm terrible at drawing certain perspectives), the GUI and the overall style of the graphics. It's my first attempt, I don't have any drawing skills or experience other then a few doodles I made with Flash a long time ago.



My technical questions are:
The current resolution is 640x480. I'm not sure what to do to fix the blurry images I get when I select full screen. I get that it's being stretched out, but I'm thinking that there might be some workaround. I'm used to vectors in Flash and shapes in Photoshop. Stretching and resizing never seemed to be a problem for me, and since I'm making it pixelated I was thinking that at 200% zoom, it should have blocks of 4 pixels for each original pixel. Am I going the right direction with this or am I totally off and should I try a high resolution? It feels pointless for me to make small pixel objects and increase their size by 200-400% in Photoshop before importing them.

I would appreciate the feedback and suggestions. I can't wait to start doing some serious work!

- Ernest

[homelightgames]

To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but I'll try...  AGS is a raster system, unlike Flash, which means upscaling will usually make things blurry/pixelated.  I don't think it's that big of a deal, but it really is a subjective opinion, ie it really is a matter of taste for you.  I think there are different audiences who prefer different things.  I think most people here in the adventure world don't mind, since a lot of games are made in 320x200 and upscaled to fullscreen, whereas 'out there' people are always demanding higher and higher resolutions.  4K.  That is, of course, my own observation.  You could go to a higher resolution, but I can attest they do add a significant amount to your workload, but if that's worth it to you, that's fine.  That said, I also don't see the point of making it in 640x480 just to upscale in Photoshop, as you said.  Either work in a higher resolution, or let AGS upscale it for you.  That said, it really is a matter of personal preference.

As far as feedback on your art style, that really is personal taste.  Just look at a bunch of games in production, or finished, and you'll see a wide variety of art styles that people enjoy.  The most important thing is if your consistent.

I apologize if I misunderstood what your were asking, but either way, good luck.

visionmind

[Crimson Wizard]

Hmm, maybe the problem is either in chosen graphics filter (some do smoothing and antialiasing), or the scaling factor is not strictly integer?
Please tell which settings do you use in game setup.

[Ernest]

Thank you both for your replies. Let me show you what exactly I am struggling with at the moment:



It's the kind of blur that hurts the eyes. Crimson Wizard: You're right, it's probably not since we're dealing with resizing from one resolution to another. If you have a resolution of 320x200 and resize it to 640x480, the problem would be that because of the extra 80 pixels in height it's not resizing the game exactly to 200%. So it stretches and the pixels are looking quite "off".

As for the settings, I have it set to:
16-bit, DirectDraw 5 with a resolution of 640x480.
In the setup I didn't select any graphics filter. Although selecting one makes it look much better, the side borders are not working, making everything look fat (too much width).

[Crimson Wizard]

Ewww... yes it is bad .

Which version of AGS are you using? Regarding borders, whether they work or not depends on combination selected scaling and which resolutions your graphics card support.
I tried to explain how this works here:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=50257.msg636486012#msg636486012

[LRH]

As for the background-

As far as I can see, it looks very nice. A couple little things:



1. The way you've got the perspective, it's above the cabinet or table or whatever it is on the left in the foreground.  That means you'd be able to see the top of the table/cabinet. I drew a little outline of what it might look like.  The same goes for the couch.

2. I also drew the perspective lines based on how it's drawn right now. Although this technically could work the way you have it, you might want to consider drawing all the lines to a central focus point (1-point perspective) for the sake of consistency.

[Ernest]

Crimson Wizard: I'm using AGS Editor .NET (Build 3.2.1.111) v3.2.1, March 2011.

Since this is all quite depended on the supported resolutions of different graphic cards and monitors, I'll have to check what it will look like on a different PC. Maybe it's not too bad on other computers.

Domithan: Thank you for your suggestions, I'll work on it!

[Crimson Wizard]

Crimson Wizard: I'm using AGS Editor .NET (Build 3.2.1.111) v3.2.1, March 2011.

The 3.2.1 version is known to have problems when setting borders. It failed at some modern wide monitors with larger resolutions.
We fixed that in 3.3.0 (although there are still certain limitations because of how the program was made). In following versions we plan to remove these too.

[Ernest]

We fixed that in 3.3.0 (although there are still certain limitations because of how the program was made). In following versions we plan to remove these too.

Thank you for your support. I downloaded the newest version and it's good enough for now!