selective smoothing of sprites? And grayscale smoothing? (SOLVED)

[EnterTheStory (aka tolworthy)]

If smoothing is turned on, is it possible to flag most sprites to not be smoothed? I can't find any references to this in the manual.

On a related note, is it likely that smoothing will ever be applied to 16 bit or 8 bit games? My game has grayscale sprites in front of 16 bit backgrounds, so there's no reason why they shouldn't smooth in principle. It seems a shame to slow the game down to 32 bit color just to allow something that could be made to work in a lower color depth.

[SSH]

Depends what you mean by smoothing. From your question, I guess you mean alpha channels for which 32-bit is required. While you can import sprites at different colour depths, if the game is set to 32-bit, it will not speed things up for the game to have to convert them for display.

[EnterTheStory (aka tolworthy)]

Depends what you mean by smoothing.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding things. I realise that alpha channels need 32 bit, so I assumed that smoothing scaled sprites did as well. If smoothing works at lower color depths then that's very good news.

But can I have ten characters scaled on screen, and only one is smoothed? I'm assuming that this would improve the speed of rendering?

[Radiant]

Only scaled sprites are smoothed.

Smooth scaling also works in 16-bit.

Don't worry too much about performance in advance. You can always optimize later.

[EnterTheStory (aka tolworthy)]

Don't worry too much about performance in advance. You can always optimize later.

That depends on whether I can selectively smooth sprites or not. I don't want to spend months creating sprites in one way, then find that I have to go back to the start and recreate them in a different way - smaller, bigger, more or less blurred, more or less variable images for faking appearances, in groups or alone, designed for scaling or not, etc. I've been burned like that before - I'm already on my fourth set of sprites, and two of those changes were due to unforeseen performance issues. If there is a vital choice to be made I always do it the wrong way.

[scotch]

The speed increase would be small anyway, and non existant in Direct3D mode. If you're very worried about unforeseen complications make a test room with a worst case number of characters and scaled objects. It shouldn't take long. That's the only way to know what is slow. Chances are nothing will be unless you're doing something very unusual.

[EnterTheStory (aka tolworthy)]

If you're very worried about unforeseen complications make a test room with a worst case number of characters and scaled objects. It shouldn't take long.

Good advice. I tried that, and as far as I can tell things will be fine. Though to be certain I'll need to create a very complicated mock up involving large static fixed size objects, numerous small moving smoothed objects, loops, code to make sprites walk towards the visible part of the scene, different views to be loaded for each character, etc... but I'm increasingly confident it will work. AGS is looking very impressive indeed.

Chances are nothing will be unless you're doing something very unusual.

"Very-Unusual" is my middle name. (It's hyphenated. Caused all kinds of confusion in kindergarten...)