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Higher Resolution in FF8
Reznor007:
On the remake, if you are going to use the original art from the game, it would be best to use 640x480 since the game is 2d for the most part, and stretching 2d to higher resolution doesn't really do much for it.
ficedula:
The original art is mostly aimed at 320x240 so it's being stretched anyway ... 2d art actually scales OK if you filter it, it's regular images like fonts that don't scale so well.
Update: OK, I had a *look* at the font code to see what I could do. While I haven't done anything major, I sorted out rescaling so on the Voodoo cards the game just scales the font down to 256x256, so it *should* run on a card with texture size of 256x256 (don't think that's anything other than Voodoo, but anyway...)
Note: It will NOT look good at ALL. There's a screenshot posted that simulates what it would look like ... font is *very* blurry, obviously, and it wouldn't help the field backgrounds much either.
For the font, there are other things that can be done - like I said before, they *may* get done at some point.
For the field backgrounds - well, I *could* implement some sort of slicing that splits it into 256x256 blocks. For field blocks that *might* be necessary on all cards; if so, then it'd work on the Voodoo too. (Unlike the font, which *should* have been loadable as-is onto any card, so I never intended to add slicing to the font renderer).
[edited] 68 2001-11-08 17:21
Goku7:
My point behind the FF8 font thing was that if it was already designed to look good at 640X480 Resolution, then you could use that as a jumping-off point for higher resolutions without needing to scale it as much.
Actually, if they did split it, THAT would explain why it wants a card with at least 8megs of texture memory to use it. It would also explain why some field screens have a terrible framerate......
Concerning Ficedula's font-scaling test: Let me see if I have this right.....
You used some scaling algorithim to squeeze the texture into 256X256. You said it doesn't look that good, and you've posted some screenshots of it.
Can you try this? My card has support for standard Anti-Aliasing edge smoothing on the primitives. I'm talking about the non-FSAA type here. Anyway, could you see if that can clear the Font up a little bit?
[edited] 239 2001-11-09 00:15
Reznor007:
I suggested 640x480 as that is usually the lowest full screen 3d accelerated mode supported. Since it is double the resolution, everything scales perfectly, and scanlines can simulate the original 320x240 look. 1280x960 would work as well, but that wouldn't help the 2d at all. 960x720 also works, but 800x600 and 1024x768 use odd multiples, and doesn't work out quite as well.
ficedula:
Goku7: No, I can't try that ... I don't have your card! I don't know exactly how the edge smoothing on the V3 works.
The way I "simulated" having a Voodoo card (as far as the font went...) was just to limit the maximum texture size to 256x256 instead of the video cards default. That way, the engine acts exactly as it would when encountering a card who's maximum really *was* 256x256, i.e. Voodoo.
So I'm pretty certain the screenshot I posted is how the font'd look on a Voodoo.
My *personal* opinion is that smoothing is not going to help at all. Smoothing is generally a very light blur effect after all, to get rid of sharp pixel edges. The font suffers from exactly the opposite problem - too damn blurry!
Um, by the words of your post, you sound like you haven't actually seen the screenshot ... yes/no?
Oh, and in order to load the FF8 font into a Voodoo card then yes it *would* have to split it. There's only two things you can do if you want to use a texture larger than 256x256 on a Voodoo:
a) Scale it down
b) Slice it into multiple sections
That's about it; not a lot else possible.
----
Reznor: Yes, I know that. However it *really doesn't matter* for the 2d images. Filtering the 2d images you don't notice a quality drop going up to 800x600 from 640x480. Now, if you *weren't* filtering the images then you're perfectly correct, choosing a resolution that scales perfectly is the best way to ensure proper display. But we are going to filter them, there's no reason not to...
The only type of image where filtering won't necessarily fix problems with scaling to a non-exact-multiple resolution (you know what I mean!) is an image with sharp, distinct shapes and edges. To wit, the font. That won't scale up too well (it doesn't).
However, since that gets distributed with the game we can always distribute multiple fonts (crappy, but hey...).
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