

Pixel Art Scaling Algorithms - gregschlom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art_scaling_algorithms

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presidentender
This is an interesting application of human thought, certainly, and
aesthetically necessary for a lot of old games run on new emulators.

However, I often find art composed of unnecessarily-large pixels appealing:
see, for instance, the favicon of bravemule.com, or the sprites from Spelunky.

~~~
jcromartie
Totally. The pixels were carefully composed that way on purpose. Don't mess
with them.

I've always been a "pixel art" purist. It even bugs me when games try to use
pixel art but get it subtly wrong. For instance, a game might use sprites that
are scaled up at different scales at the same time and/or rotated in high
resolution. This just ruins it for me.

~~~
jbrennan
Agreed. I think 'The Incident' [1] for iOS does it just perfectly. And it's a
really fun game.

[1]: <http://bigbucketsoftware.com/theincident/>

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jcromartie
Yes! They got it right! Amazing. Thanks for this, I can use it as an example
next time I am discussing with game developers that don't understand what I am
talking about.

~~~
dogonwheels
I thought the same until I looked closely at the rotated objects as they
landed. Not -quite- right.

Still. Lovely game and very charming and thoughtful artwork.

~~~
joshu
The artwork is nice, but the game is very hard to play (at least on an
iPad...)

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gregschlom
I'm somewhat shocked to discover that other scaling algorithms exist. I always
assumed that there were only nearest neighbor + a set of scaling algorithms
that would introduce blur to images other than photography.

A good example of _not_ thinking outside the box.

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ladon86
I've always liked these - the hq3x algorithm is stunning (scroll down on the
linked page to see a good result).

~~~
pornel
I've tried[1] to use it to weasel-out from creating improved graphics for
iPhone 4 display, but unfortunately it doesn't work well for graphics with
anti-aliasing.

[1] <https://github.com/pornel/rgba-hq2x>

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rndmcnlly0
Has anyone considered generalizing these to voxels -- adding details to
minecraft style spaces?

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thristian
Here's HQ2x done as an OpenGL shader:

[http://gitorious.org/bsnes/bsnes/blobs/master/pixelshaders/G...](http://gitorious.org/bsnes/bsnes/blobs/master/pixelshaders/GLSL/HQ2x.shader)

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droz
Does anyone know of any work being done to convert photographs/images/etc into
pixel art?

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vanni
Pixel Art Scaling Algorithms Comparison on a Sonic screenshot:
[http://plus.mobianlegends.com/emulators/Gens-
gs-r7-win32-pkg...](http://plus.mobianlegends.com/emulators/Gens-
gs-r7-win32-pkg1/doc/manual/plugin-render.html)

~~~
vanni
hq4x vs Scale4x (i.e. EPX/Scale2x applied 2 times)

normal: [http://plus.mobianlegends.com/emulators/Gens-
gs-r7-win32-pkg...](http://plus.mobianlegends.com/emulators/Gens-
gs-r7-win32-pkg1/doc/manual/images/render/render-normal.png)

hq4x: [http://plus.mobianlegends.com/emulators/Gens-
gs-r7-win32-pkg...](http://plus.mobianlegends.com/emulators/Gens-
gs-r7-win32-pkg1/doc/manual/images/render/render-hq4x.png)

Scale4x: [http://plus.mobianlegends.com/emulators/Gens-
gs-r7-win32-pkg...](http://plus.mobianlegends.com/emulators/Gens-
gs-r7-win32-pkg1/doc/manual/images/render/render-scale4x.png)

Scale4x seems better to me on this pic.

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pontifier
When I was in high school I tried to write a star control clone and I had a
devil of a time with rotating the ships.

The first method I used would write the rotated pixel array back to the array
I hand coded with the rgb values for the ship. Error quickly crept in, and
while you were rotating, the ship would gradually shrink to a single pixel.
After that, I used 2 arrays and it looked ok and nobody complained, but I was
never truly satisfied with the result. I'm glad to know I wasn't the only one
bothered by poor quality pixel rotations.

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iwwr
CSI taking the detailed photo of a killer off a reflection in a doorknob from
grainy surveillance footage. What algorithm is that?

~~~
gregschlom
It's called Hollywood fiction, and there is a proprietary implementation in
Movie OS (the one that beeps at every keystroke)

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Seth_Kriticos
Ok, the infinite zoom is bullocks, but the keyboard thing might not be.

Mine does not beep though, but it makes click-a-di-clack with every keystroke,
like in many movies (and keyboards back in the 80's).

It also has tactile feedback and n-rollover and was expensive as hell, but
then again, I'm the kind of nut-case who learned Dvorak keyboard layout
because I'm so damn lazy.

Granted, they don't do the later part in movies.

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fookyong
Anyone know a way to use any of these on OS X? e.g. in Photoshop?

I googled but only found the .exe for hq3x

