"Scaling" Your Images to Fix Screen Size

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

I hope the title makes sense with what I’m trying to accomplish.

My goal is to create tile maps for a top-down RPG using 32 x 32 tiles. When I display the tiles in an 800 x 648 screen, I lose the look that I’m going for. I want everything to appear bigger.

I’m having a hard time explaining it and wrapping my head around it, but I’d like the tiles to use 32 x 32 pixels, but for them to fit into a bigger size, say 64 x 64.

If this doesn’t make sense, I’ll try to figure out a way to explain it better, but if anyone actually knows what I’m trying to do, guidance in the right direction would be great. Thanks

#2

If you’re looking for that “blocky big pixel” look, set your texture magnification filter to GL_NEAREST and you’ll be all set.

#3

I have no idea what you are talking about… very new to programming.

#4

Are you using LWGJL?

I heard you were talking about Notch’s ludum dare, are you perhaps trying to figure out what/how he’s doing that blocky scaling?

#5

I’m not using any API. He did use something that probably got the same effect I’m looking for.

#6

IIRC Notch fiddles around with the raster ( array of pixels ) and just scales the image, i.e, draws the image stretched (larger than it actually is).

[EDIT]: So basically:

int scale = 2; // twice the size
int ww = width * scale;
int hh = height * scale;

g.drawImage(x,y, ww, hh, null);
#7

Heh, that makes so much sense…

I’ll fiddle around with it. That definitely puts me in the right direction though. Thanks

#8

A workaround to this is to load the image, scale it, and store it into a object. Then you draw from it.
Scaling the image every time you draw it is way too slow

#9

That’s assuming that the thing he wants scaled is a single image that never changed. For something like the game screen you’d need to re-scale it every frame.

Scaling the image every time you draw isn’t as slow as you might think. Certainly not as slow as you make it sound :}

Of course, depends a LOT on the size of the image.

#10

Maybe, i’m a bit of a performance paranoid person ;D

And it also depends on how much you want to scale as well
I remember scaling a 24x24 tile to 480x480, 600fps dropped down to ~10

#11

I have rarely ever seen a major performance hit from scaling. My particles for example change size every frame and scale from sometimes very large or small sizes and I don’t drop fps unless there are 1k+ particles. I would still stay away from scaling things to much even though I don’t see a any drops it is good practice.