Notice: If the game stops working after an update, it might be a savegame incompatibility. Remove your savegame folder and try again before posting about it.
Registration has an extra hurdle now: There have been advertisement bots, so I added a security keyword to registration. Deal with it.
  0 users browsing Suggestion Box. | 2 bots  
Main » Suggestion Box » High resolution background graphics?
Poll
So what'll it be?
Keep it low-res
 2
Go with high-res
 0
2 users have voted so far
Pages: 1
Posted on 05-05-13, 02:26 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

Posts: 262/344
Since: 06-08-12

Last post: 1670 days
Last view: 1210 days
Right now, there are a few background images in the game, stored as 100x60 PNG files. They used to be 80x50 but then I increased the screen size to make room for a permanent sidebar and such. Each two-pixel pair is turned into a Unicode half-block (U+2580 '▀'):

Please ignore the bad Japanese -- this was the only screenshot I had within reach at the time.

Now, what I can do, and have in a testing copy, is use 800x480 PNG files instead. Nothing about the game would change, and any low-res background art would still render as halfblocks:

Image was built from a rough Sai drawing, in turn traced from Poser, that I later scaled down to use in the top image, and an alternative logo I had lying around. One obvious con you can see is that text can no longer be rendered transparantly. Where the top image has the halfblocks disappear where there's text (which is pretty subtle) the bottom is much more obvious. Ofcourse, empty spaces could be provided. For the character creation screen, they should be. Other than that, one could remove the half-baked Dwarf Fortress reference and put the subtitle and maybe the "Press Enter" text in the image itself. Which is not a problem at all.

So that's a bit of a choice to make.

I don't just program Noxico...
Pages: 1
Main » Suggestion Box » High resolution background graphics?