Scaling sprite vs Room Design

[Theme]

Hi. I was working with AGS
I made a simple room using 1 point perspective. But them i found out that the character looked too small when near the bottom of the room.
So I used scaling on the walkable area, but I didn't like the smooth sprite, it looks out of place, I tried using DirectDraw5 but the scaling doesn't look good either.

I just wondering how you people draw a room that doesn't need to be used scaling on the character and not be a total side view with small walkable area.

o/

[Mr Flibble]

A lot of it depends on the perspective you draw your characters from, but what I've been doing to avoid this problem is make the very foreground of rooms inaccessible, keeping the player in a fairly large walking area, but with the illusion that if they walked towards the screen, they'd scale up.

Obviously, they can't walk far enough to scale up.

If you look at the old Lucasarts games which had the SCUMM interface on the screen all the time, they're accidentally doing the same thing.

[Ryan Timothy B]

One way is to fake perspective so it looks 'realistic' enough, but this can be quite difficult for people who don't have a full grasp on perspective.

Another solution is to not show the ceiling. Showing the ceiling will give you that great jump in depth from foreground to background.

Another solution (which i use) is to draw with a two point perspective. You have to work with a very large canvas and have the two vanishing points very far off to the left and right side of the canvas.
Take a look at this Monkey Island screenshot with Otus in prison: http://koti.welho.com/khavulin/pics/monkey1.PNG
There is obviously still a jump from the back corner to the left side of the image, but not enough to actually notice it while playing.

The other solution which can be combined with all of these, is to prevent the character from walking close to the background walls.  If Guybrush could walk right up tight to that very back corner, you'd notice a small distance above his head to the ceiling.  Then it would make it more noticeable when he goes to the sides of the image.

Those are just my two cents on the matter since I refuse to use scaling cause it looks very odd.

[Theme]

scaling is very odd indeed, at least in lowres, I dunno in highres. Thanksfor the tips. for drawing should be ok.
But for pre rendered 3D images I guess it would need the camera to be put on a ortographic view.
o/

[RickJ]

I have always found that scaling down looks much better than scaling up.   At the beginning of the design process I identify a typical small room and set a pixel scale at the front most walkable area.  This point could for example be 40px/foot.   I then draw my characters to that scale.   If I want a character that is six foot tall then he is drawn at a height of 240px.  You can choose any scaling that you think works best for your game.

I think most people don't take so much trouble and just wing it.

[Jared]

I'm on a project at the moment that uses broadly the method RickJ describes - the full scale view of the main character takes up over half the screen and is only used in a handful of scenes, but scales down quite neatly thanks to clear colours and neat outlining. We do have another set of sprites to use for roughly one/third scale and lower because at that point things do get a bit pixellated.

I have to say it's pretty effective.