What are the downsides of using sprites scaled by factors such as 0.1?

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:bust_in_silhouette: Asked By raadhuis

I’ve got the base of a game system pretty well setup with sprites with sizes that range between 8x8 and 64x64 pixels.

The logic and systems are all built around these values. For example, my resolution is set to 640x360, while the test width/height are set to 1280x720.

Recently I started experimenting with different styles and tried importing the new sprites to the game. They are larger by an amount of 8, so for example a sprite that was previously 32x32 is now 256x256.

I modified the scale of the sprite to 0.125 in both axis, and the sprite looks fine. I did have to reimport it with a 2D preset instead of 2D pixel but aside from that it looks fine. I added a couple more sprites to test as well.

Animations are playing fine, logic works perfectly, and I see no difference while running the profiler.

Is this a very wrong approach? Is there something I’m missing that I’m not seeing while doing this?

In an ideal world I guess the correct thing to do would be to rescale the whole game to fit the new sprites, but I’m wondering how big of a deal it is since this seems a lot less time consuming.

:bust_in_silhouette: Reply From: Zylann

If you have no problem with the extra effort, I dont see what would be wrong with that approach. The only thing that comes to mind right now is physics because typically scaling needs consideration there, but as long as scale is uniform I think it should remain working.

I think if you stick with that artstyle, I’d suggest you eventually flatten out these scales so the effort goes away, or whatever unknown-yet issue that would root from that.

:bust_in_silhouette: Reply From: Calinou

Downscaled sprites can look aliased, but this can be fixed by enabling Mipmaps on the textures in the Import dock. However, enabling mipmaps will increase memory usage, which is not a concern for pixel art textures, but it can be for higher-resolution textures.