Scaling in Ren'Py

[DesertFox]

I've been using a mixture of LiveComposite, LiveCrop and ATL to make the most of sprites and disk space, however there are noticeable problems with aliasing when zoomed to 0.6. Doing some reading up, I've found that there's not much difference with im.FactorScale and other methods.

Is it true that scaling to 0.75 or 0.8 will make for better aliasing, or should I just use the old fashioned method and have my sprites scaled to their exact proportions beforehand? While it's useful making use of both larger head-shoulders sprites and smaller head-knees sprites, all from the same files, is it worth sacrificing alias quality? What are your experiences on this?

[PyTom]

Aliasing? That should only occur when zoomed past 50% the size of the original source. Do you have an example?

[DesertFox]

Aliasing? That should only occur when zoomed past 50% the size of the original source. Do you have an example?

It's mainly an issue in windowed mode really, and will possibly occur on smaller monitors since the game runs at a 1920x1080 resolution. So I guess an image zoomed out to 60% of its original size, then scaled in windowed mode down to 1366x768 or 1280x720 loses more of its quality in any case. Really it's about finding a compromise for players who don't want to play a visual novel in fullscreen without sacrificing quality, if possible. I thought it was worth asking about, and wondered if there was a rule-of-thumb ratio to scaling and quality loss.

[PyTom]

That would be a problem, then - if you scale down below 50% of the source material, you get artifacting. At some point, I need to figure out a way to address this issue.

[nyaatrap]

[Edit]
It looks there is a bug on ren'py resizing (I don't remember it's only a current version or an old issue).
Scaled to 0.75 scale starts aliasing, and 0.5 is too aliased as if images are broken.

[DesertFox]

I've decided to scale down all the artwork in Photoshop and simply take up some more disk space with both small and large pre-cropped versions of sprites. This was due to getting memory errors when there were more than three characters on screen. Generally since I was scaling down in-engine and using images with about 2000x3000px size, it's no wonder.