Okay, I should save some posts for later, but this is too cool not too blog about.

I’ve recently been sweating over one of my bad legacy decisions on Dredmor: namely, the fact that the game is resolution locked at 800×600. If you run in a window, the game runs at 800×600. If you run fullscreen, the game runs at 800×600 on your fullscreen monitor. Well, I decided that this was unprofessional, and started looking at what I could do to fix it… but I kept resisting, because I didn’t *really* want to break everything. Dredmor has… a lot of hard-coded positions. It’s very bad. Very, VERY bad; in fact, one of the things I really regret not doing for Dredmor is Long story short: the main menu screens still don’t work in any resolution, but the rest of the game… pretty much does. I think there are a few bugs still to be kicked out, but I’ve been playing the game very happily at 1680 x 1050 in glorious fullscreen and it’s… a much, much better experience. Clearly, the right decision. A brief word on the technical scaling elements follows below:

It turns out that the other people who have been interested, historically, in upscaling pixel art are the people who make video game emulators. There is, in fact, an entire Wikipedia article devoted to “pixel art scaling algorithms.” Cool! So I grabbed a handful of stuff and checked it out. My favourite out of the scaling algorithms mentioned on Wikipedia was Scalex; it won very handily. I’m currently only using it for the sprites — and some sprites need to *not* go through the scaling process (i.e. the mouse cursor, items when in a cursor or a screen, etc.) but I might use it for tiles. There are also still a handful of bugs and I have no idea *what* I’m going to do about some of the UI elements. Consult with David in the morning, I suppose.

Screenshots will follow once I figure out how to make the blog media uploader work. Grr, WordPress. I suppose this means I also have to put up some “hi-def” video footage… new trailer time, anyone?