RadianHelix

Previs of Doodads and Characters!

Added 2023-04-16 17:17:18 +0000 UTC

This is another minor milestone that's vital to progress.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d9/texture-filtering-with-mipmaps

Mip Maps and Texture Filtering are essential components anytime you have a camera that zooms in and out. We've been struggling with how best to implement mips in our system from the beginning.

The game uses marching tile sprites, just like a game from the 90s would have, but at very high resolutions, which is more reserved for textures in 3d. This causes a lot of unwanted issues with mips, such as sampling darker or lighter pixels that are near their neighboring edges:

And getting filtering wrong can cause unsightly noise around the outside edges of your textures:

This isn't a real problem for texture we processed through Unity, as Unity can give us access to tools like AssetImporter, which lets us set our filtering and texture settings just right.

Texture.LoadImage is used at Runtime, in our external Editor, which Modders will be using to add custom content to the game later on. Our designers will be using it too, while testing assets quickly before merging to the main project.

Luckily, Curtis was able to solve that this week by adding the alpha dilation filter to our runtime solution. This is a Unity feature which would violate the EULA if we were to add to to the external editor, so a custom solution had to be invented from scratch.

But the end product is that we'll have nice and smooth zooms that don't turn into pixel soup anymore, making our editor an even more critical tool for future custom content.