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No, maze puzzles/maps would be easier, still giving high-res players advanatages.

Is there a reason that, for smaller displays, everything can't be scaled down, so that they see the same number of tiles, just at a smaller scale?

ya

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Talaroc wrote:Is there a reason that, for smaller displays, everything can't be scaled down, so that they see the same number of tiles, just at a smaller scale?

This simply poses the same technical problems as scaling everything up for higher resolution displays. If we solve either we have probably solved both.

i doubt that the tiles and sprites would still look good when automatically rescaled.

here a screenshot scaled 1:1. thats how it would look at 800x600.


here rescaled to fill the same area at 1024x768


here for 640x480


i used bicubic interpolation. this might be too slow to use it on the fly. that means we will only have such a good quality when we precalculate the tilesets for every possible resolution. when we rescale everything at runtime the graphical quality will be even worse.

Isn't a higher resolution mostly to see more ?

At least I remember that all those top down games I played
just increased the view-size. I was always happy too see more.

And btw: Thats one of the big reasons to play a game windowed.
Scaled to 1600x1024 tmw would look strange imo...

jup

it was not about scaling the tiles it was about seeing more tiles at the same time

Since we're open source, I think we cannot prevent people from increasing the map viewsize, but I also think our default client should have the same area visible for every resolution. And since we're open soruce it's not that hard to do pre-scaled tiles for different resolutions if people want them (they could have custom repositories).

Well it wouldn't matter. If the server sends only the informations about a area that is always the same people can modifiy the client, but they only would see the map. no monsters, players, items, npcs, balblalbalbaa

if any resizing takes place, i'd say to go with even numbers for scaling. that way we could use scaling methods suitable for "snes-style"/"comic" content (hq2x, hq3x etc) so the resulting images wouldn't look too crappy (some even say snes games scaled via this method look better than the originals). bilinear/bicubic etc are okay for natural images, but crap for pixel art.

samples:
2x scaled
3x scaled - this one actually looks quite good ^_^
4x scaled

on second thought: unfortunately that'd limit the valid sizes to 800x600, 1600x1200, 2400x1800 etc, which could be a little too high for some people... unless we cut something off at the borders, giving them a disadvantage...

that method really looks good. does gimp support this algorithm?

dunno - doubt it though, since the size multiplier's fixed, so it wouldnt work too well as a plugin. but you can use the standalone versions instead.