iPhone4 blurry sprites « cocos2d for iPhone

cocos2d for iPhone » Programming » cocos2d support (graphics engine)

iPhone4 blurry sprites

(17 posts) (5 voices)

Started 1 year ago by itlgames
Latest reply from itlgames

Tags:

itlgames
Moderator

First, apologies if this has been already covered, but I have been searching in cocos2d, google, ... and found no response (maybe there is not response!)

When I first heard about the iPhone4 retina display, I was expecting normal resolution sprites to look at the very bad, exactly as in previous devices, so we could have the retina display to improve things, but is not, it is actually making things worst, which is not nice on terms of backwards compatibility (people tend to not care about backwards compatibility when I think it's very important...)

In my case I did spend time polishing my pixel art sprites, and they did look perfectly on pre iPhone4, I managed to change the antialias and stuff to look perfect, no blurry, no lines between tiles,... But now when I try the game on an iPhone4, it looks blurry. Which in a way I don't understand, if they are now using like 4 pixels where we had one pixel before, I don't understand why it looks blurry.

I don't think there is much we can do in terms of code right? Apart from creating a new set of graphics.

Anyway, just sharing my frustration and wanted to know some other comments on this.

Posted 1 year ago #
jptsetung
Member

Yes I think there is nothin you can do about it but provide HD graphics to your game.

Posted 1 year ago #
Duckwit
Member

So we will have to have High-res graphics or else it will look blurry on iPhone 4/4th gen iPod Touch? That doesn't sound so great. :/

Posted 1 year ago #
itlgames
Moderator

@Duckwit maybe it depends on the type of graphics. On my case as I use pixel art it's too noticeable. Maybe with some smooth graphics is not that bad.

It's just a pain in the nuts as I don't have the resources right now to re-do all the graphics for my game, I rather spend the time/money on a new game (as I'm doing).

Posted 1 year ago #
Duckwit
Member

That sounds like a real bummer.... Do you need to like 'vectify' your graphics?

Posted 1 year ago #
itlgames
Moderator

I just had to draw at the pixel most of the graphics really, really hard work, well, not me, my brother how did the graphics! We had few scanned graphics filtered to look like pixelated, but they didn't look as good as the ones done manually. So imagine the amount of work to re-do like, 200 or 300 graphics again... :S

Posted 1 year ago #
Duckwit
Member

200 , 300!? Was that like all the frames of animation? Woh..... I'n not using pixel stuff. Phew. I am using Adobe Flash to do graphics so it won't be hard to scale them into HD. :)

Posted 1 year ago #
itlgames
Moderator

Well, I'm using tiled isometric sprites, so yeah, I have like 200 different sprites, plus some of them with animations, to be exact at the moment I have 353 different graphics on my game, plus all the user interface... :S

Posted 1 year ago #
Duckwit
Member

Are you still re-doing them or are they done already? Must be a nasty chore. :(

Posted 1 year ago #
itlgames
Moderator

My brother would kill me if I come back to him and ask to re-do the whole set! So for the time being, I will have to live with it. I am using my efforts to do couple of new games, which annoyingly, most graphics were already done before the retina display thing, so well, dunno what to do really...

Posted 1 year ago #
Duckwit
Member

Maybe paying your brother? :/. I know that sounds like a. bad idea but....

Posted 1 year ago #
smasher
Member

Are you placing sprites on a half-pixel? It's easy to do by accident- especially if you have a sprite that's 11x11 pixels and you place its center at 100,100. The frame would be from (94.5,95.5) to (105.5,105.5) and the whole sprite would be drawn blurry.

Either make sure your sprites have even-numbered dimensions or make sure you are placing the corners, not the center.

Posted 1 year ago #
itlgames
Moderator

@Duckwit yeah, problem is we both have not much time, so I better prefer him to spend time on a new game really, after all, the game wasn't a success on the App Store.

Thanks @smasher, yeah, I did all sort of things to make the sprites to look perfect pixel on pre iPhone 4 devices, it happens only on the new iPhone 4.

Posted 1 year ago #
frogblast
Member

You can find a discussion of how to resolve this here:
https://devforums.apple.com/message/250025#250025

Be sure to only do the workaround on a Retina Display device: it can severely hurt performance on older devices.

Posted 1 year ago #
itlgames
Moderator

Yeah! that looks like a workaround to the problem! thanks @frogblast, you made my day... and my brother's day...

I agree for new games we should take advantage of the retina display, but it's a kick in the nuts to not have full support for previous apps. I think this kCAFilterNearest should be set by default on the iPhone 4.

Posted 1 year ago #
itlgames
Moderator

@frogblast, do you know how to integrate this in cocos2d? Been trying with no luck.

Posted 1 year ago #
itlgames
Moderator

ok, I think it's:

[[Director sharedDirector] openGLView].layer.magnificationFilter = kCAFilterNearest;
[[Director sharedDirector] openGLView].layer.contentsRect = CGRectMake(0.0001, 0.0001, 1, 1);

I haven't tested yet properly on a real iPhone 4, will do soon, but os far on the iPhone 3G seems not to affect.

Posted 1 year ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.