Fixing Graphics Limitations: Unit Purchase Screen, Unit Help, Unit View
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RESOLVED!
@thedog said in Fixing Graphics Limitations: Unit Purchase Screen, Unit Help, Unit View:
What are your screen settings?
Right click desktop
Display Settings
Have you got 100% ?
[Not a universal issue, just me being a dunce ctrl-mouse wheel in chrome. Woot!]
Right now the Unit Graphics on most screens/windows within tripleA are not displaying properly. This appears to be a universal issue, across all maps/games in TripleA
To see what I mean, open any map, and compare how the units are displaying on the Map at 100% vs how they appear in the Unit Help.
Compared to the regular units as displayed on the map itself, the units shown within the Purchase window, the Battle Calc/Battle windows, Movement Windows, and the Unit Help window are all displaying with a ton of image compression. Either these images are being rescaled or compressed, or I don't know what's going on really, but the overall visual effect is one where the units look pretty shoddy in most screens where the player will be interacting with them.
In the purchase window for example, units appear to have the Anti-Aliasing turned off and the blur becomes very pixilated.
Unlike other feature requests, for stuff that's more peripheral to the tripleA experience, this stuff is unavoidable and really in the foreground, as the player will be immediately confronted by this as soon as they make a purchase or try to move the units around.
I'm a visual person, so to me this should be like tip of the Top priorities, because it just looks so janky currently, and there doesn't appear to be anything I can do as the end user to address. It affects all games, so not like a special feature request really, this is for something that everyone and all games would benefit from fixing.
Also, while we're at it, can we get a Unit View option to upscale the Unit image graphics beyond 125%? Hehe
Up to 200% would make much more sense, so there's parity between scaling up and scaling down.
The Unit sizes are the main limitation that prevents larger scale maps with more beautiful graphics from being created. Right now the ceiling on that is 68 pixels, but this is fairly small for a modern display and even that is pushing it under the current build. Realistically the TripleA app seems designed for Unit graphics at 48px square, and anything much larger will show clipping or odd artifacts in the various game windows. From a map design standpoint this is a major impediment, and it's locking us into a scheme that just barely works for 1080p, but probably isn't going to work for anything beyond that, like 1440 or 4K. Like clearly the unit graphics in tripleA are geared towards Low Res era, like 720p and 4:3 desktop monitors, but that's probably cause it was made decades ago hehe. I think it could be much better for a modern display these days.
Right now, in my current project trying to develop of 4k map for G40, upscaling units to 150% or 200% would be the most helpful, since this is how units appear in the main map display, and that's still the most important, but I'd wish we could clean up how they look on all those other screens as well.
I'm not sure why TripleA isn't pulling the images 1:1 directly from the unit folder, but for some reason it's modifying the visual presentation there. Perhaps its the window scaling? or again, not really sure, but it's definitely off.
Here's an example. Note how pixelated the shadows/edges are for all units, compared to what you're seeing on the map itself...
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Actually I think I would frame this not as a feature request, but as a bug hehe.
It's degrading the image quality of all the graphics in our game menus, and dragging down the overall visual presentation of the application.
The issue best as I can tell is this, the UI is upscaling generally and also dynamically rescaling graphics to accommodate changes in text length for game labels, like for the those UI windows to be resized continually as text changes.
So anywhere you got text in the UI bar, if there's an image in a neighboring window, the window/graphic will be rescaled (often by small amounts, just a few pixels or a characters in terms of the text). The flags for example, will shift based by 1 px based on the number of characters in the name/label of the current player. So "German" compared to "Russia" or the like. Or how many characters are in a number label in the stats menu. Probably the descriptions in the Unit Help or battle views for those images. But basically all over. It may be less noticeable in some spots, because it's hard to see when these windows are rescaling. But one place where you can see it clearly is if you include graphics to the bottom bar for cursor over.
Below you see the identical graphic displaying in the UI, and also how it is transformed to accommodate the neighboring text label. The same stuff happens with the flags (you can test that by making adjustments via edit mode and add extra 0s to the end of the PUs). I'm not sure about the Unit Help/Battle menus, DOW screen etc, but this one you can see pretty easily with the bottom bar, since we can control when it happens just by cursor over. This is the image at scale... like what tripleA is pulling from the folder...
Compare to how the image displays (lower left) in-game...
I think what is needed is some way to lock dimensions/aspects, or tell tripleA to not rescale the UI windows that are housing graphics. But I'm still not sure.
Rescaling the graphics would probably be fine, if tripleA was using some kind of interpolation for that, but it doesn't appear to be doing so, instead the image just gets super pixelated.
The fact that the tripleA logo has this going on gives me pause and makes me think the issue may go deeper.
I mean this one, which displays when you first launch the Application... with the fuzz along the edges, especially noticeable with the "A" in the red TA there.
Basically if we could get that guy to display more like this guy...
with no weird digital artifacts or fuzz from rescaling, and just extend that principle to all UI menus which a meant to house a graphic. But I have no idea where to even start.
Anyone got an ideas for this one?
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Here is my screen grab from a 1600x900px laptop
It looks better than yours?
What percentage did you increase the screen grab images by?
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Unreal, so then the issue that is affecting just my display. And I think Beelee's as well. Must be something else?
Well that makes me very very happy at least if it's just on my end then maybe I can finally fix this!!!
Now I'm wondering if it's my native display? TripleA has no easy to access graphics settings that I could find. How are you able to look so clean?
I've been struggling with this for months hahah
No increase to my grabs. That is how the game displays for me. I believe beelee as well. Cause neither of us could read your game notes initially. I thought it was the font choice, but it was just tripleA freaking out I guess. There must be a way to resolve the issue then. I just need to figure it out.
What does the Unit Help look like for you?
My goodness I'd love to get this sorted haha
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How are you able to look so clean?
I only think good thoughts
What are your screen settings?
Right click desktop
Display Settings
Have you got 100% ?
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BINGO!!!
OK so if you had this issue
Text display 100% setting Somehow I had mine at 120% perhaps from browsing. But it was murdering TripleA. Crazy I didn't think it would nix the images.
Unbelievable! This brings me such joy hahah
OK well this can just live here now, as a quick fix for anyone who goofed like me and switched that. Unit Help is fixed, Flag screens fixed. All is well!
Aces! Thanks so much!
ps. back in business!!! Yes!!! I can't believe that's all it took. I have been staring at trash graphics for months on end lol. Units looking nice again! All the menus back to normal. It was almost certainly the mouse wheel.
)
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If you did not know, for browsing Chrome & Firefox both allow ctrl+mouse wheel to change the zoom level
