Do we need advanced pixel scaling algorithms support to make low resolutions (zooming) look better?

akaine

akaine

While many people say they don’t use zoom and support it with their reasons about strategic advantages and stuff, here are my thoughts about why zooming is a key feature and it’s imperative that devs add advances pixel scaling support.

Zooming advantages:

1. It feels like playing in the original game resolutions as it was intended. You can see characters details, clothes, heads, their moves, their gear, weapons in their hands, etc. While on high resolutions these are gone, you just see some general objects and that’s it. http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/3410/nwkp.png

2. It’s more a psychological thing but still it applies to every game where you have a protagonist or a party. The bigger your protagonist/party on your screen the closer you feel to be binded to them and to their surroundings, and the more immersive is the terrain you travel through. An example: Let’s say we are inside a small room in a dungeon, and in the next room we have some enemies. If this room occupies the 50% or more of your screen your perception of this location gives you a feeling that you are actually in this room, it adds more suspense to the situation and your tactics changes accordingly, you even want to stay in this room to feel more secure and not to go out to be killed. On the other hand if you can see the whole dungeon’s layout without even scrolling and your party are just dots on the screen this psychological attachment disappears, it becomes more about pure tactics, like RTS style: “I am here, the target is there, let’s just kill it and get over it”.

3. Most important IMHO: just look at the screenshot: http://imageshack.us/a/img856/4561/el71.png. Can you even see the objects, NPCs or anything? It’s not Supreme Commander where you need to see the enemy base location to launch a nuke and you don’t even care how many kilometers are between your base and the enemy, it’s Baldur’s Gate, people! We walk small creepy places, we talk to NPCs, we live through the character’s story.

Now, the scaling on LCD sucks, and the game does look horrible. But this is the year 2013 and this is not the first time players are struggling with this problem. There are tomes written about how it is possible to make low res image better. There are tons of advanced pixel scaling algorithms and they are very simple to implement (I am saying this as a programmer). So the bottom line is: It’s absolutely necessary to implement some.


Commercial point of view.

As a commercial software developer I know that game devs in most cases think how to make more money and not about customer’s satisfaction. Also, probably, the biggest problem of the Enhanced Edition and the main reason people (including the BG series fans) are not buying the game is that mods and patches for the original BG1/BG2 give people exactly the same quality the EE gives and even more (bugs are fixed to ridiculous level, more content, it’s already high res, etc.). The original game has been polished by the communities to perfection, while EE still has much to cover to come to this level.

So, even commercially it’s convenient to add advanced pixel scaling: while it would take little effort the benefits are bigger. One thing that modders couldn’t do is to implement this feature. So, please, include it. For some players it may become the main reason of buying this product instead of keeping playing the original.

Technical references:
Image scaling algorithms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art_scaling_algorithms#Pixel_art_scaling_algorithms
Advances pixel scaling examples: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Scaler

Arsene_Lupin

There's really only one thing that matters: how is the game meant to be played? It took me a while to find the comparison image I made months ago when I first had to answer that question:

http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/9684/bgcomparison.png

"Zoomed in" makes the game look the way it's supposed to. The zooming-out of higher-resolutions is... absurd. It literally breaks the game (and is the main reason I believe the Enhanced Editions to be necessary). Baldur's Gate is not an RTS. You are not meant to have an omniscient, god-like perspective of the world.

The only argument for zooming out is aesthetic. The sprites in particular, look hideous upscaled. This is why all of the promotional screenshots show the game at the maximum zoom level. It should go without saying, but, "it looks better," is even less of a valid excuse than, "it gives me an unjustifiable gameplay advantage."

alithegreat

Well i remember playing Baldur's Gate on my Pentium 133 MMX pc, and resolution , even then was a trouble.

I started playing BG:EE with 1.2 patch. And it seems low resolution also made me lose lots of time. I maybe just got better and DnD but, exploring maps are way easy now on higher resolution. (1920*1080)

Although i still zoom in in time to time ( not so much like vanilla) and game seems greatly flawed at that times. I guess messing with engine is tied to lots of complex stuff ( licences, software deals , lots of other party etc) . But if an improvement could be made on zoom that would be great.

O_Bruce

For me, immersion is the most important thing in BG (or at least one of the most important). Because of that, I always play with zoom-in, and I would appreciate if it could be graphicaly improved, even thought I can live without it.

Franpa

Yeah, I'd like to see better support as when I initially zoomed in I noticed everything looked ghastly kinda like the font and UI did before the current patch to BG: EE.

I mean right now when you zoom in, the graphics appear smudged because Beamdog seems to be trying to smooth/blur meticulously designed low resolution pixel graphics in an attempt to boost the definition and you just can't do that, you can make them look different (In this case worse), but you can't improve the details (Easily/cost efficiently).

The only reason some programs try to enforce this bilinear or similar upscale method is because those programs tend to be emulating a system that is designed for a display that uses rectangular pixels, outputing the graphics to a display that doesn't use rectangular pixels results in the graphics appearing wrong on an LCD if presented as is so they intentionally blur the image to mask the issue.

I'm finding the game fine zoomed all the way out at 1920x1080, but the seeming revelation of the graphics being worsened over the years instead of remaining just as good is kinda depressing. I mean it's not 1990's anymore! You have all the graphical assets from the original game! You should be able to present the graphics to us as is without loss of fidelity!

Just copy/paste the original art and show it as is and bam, job done. Tack on a nearest neighbour upscaler and you can then scale it with 0 loss of quality and without it looking constantly out of focus too. The only reason you'd filter it with something like bilinear is if you have eyesight problems and can't see how bad it has made the graphics or the resulting ghastly imagery somehow counteracts/caters your poor eyesight.


TL;DR
The best approach for upscaling games where every pixel counted when the games were being designed, is Nearest Neighbour. There simply isn't anything better. Anything else just adds stuff that shouldn't be present or taints the original structure of the graphics.

ankheg

I dont know if it was posted before, but here is a good site to get the idea. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/supplementary/multi_comparison.html

akaine

I wrote a letter to the dev team the same day the thread was created containing a similar post suggesting normal scaler (nearest neighbor) and hq2/3x. Since Black Isle or Bioware lost most of the source 3D models Beamdog/Overhaul Games had no possibility to rerender anything and was forced to use the original resources. Which was convenient since commercially the initial intention was only to add portability to the game to make it compatible with mobile platforms to be able to sell it once more, not to add content or make it better. Still, since they had to rewrite the main engine from the scratch to achieve the mentioned above now they possess the meanings to add such simple things as pixel filters to at least match the original quality of the image.

KaiDan

I always play with the camera zoomed in (and have been requesting a camera lock so it doesn't reset during cut scenes). This could help deal with some of the minor graphical glitches with the current scaling system.

argent77

I don't use the zoom feature much, so I can live with the current state of the scaler used in the games most of the time. However, there are situations when the game screen looks a little too blurry for my taste. That's why I'd like to see an improved scaling algorithm that preserves structures even when fully zoomed out.

BTW, the pixel scaling code has already been externalized into a pixel shader script (fpCatRom.GLSL) for both games (BG:EE since v1.2). So it is theoretically possible to write a mod that implements improved pixel scalers.

argent77

For anyone who is interested in a simple "Nearest Neighbor" scaler. It should work in all available Enhanced Edition games. Simply unpack the archive into the override folder of the game.

Download: fpcatrom.zip

akaine

Awesome! I'll try it right away... xD