Troubleshoot: Preview vs Export Image Quality Delta

I've been testing in preview throughout development, but I wanted to try the export build just to see and the first thing I notice, is the image quality takes a dive.

This is the ship sprite in the preview:

It's sharp.

This is the ship sprite in the export (NW10.5 or 12 makes no difference), some are blurry while others are fine:

Fullscreen scaling: High Quality

Use High DPI on

Sampling: Linear

Downscaling: Both Medium/High Quality is the same

Ashley & others:

Any possible reasons for this? Is there a setting I've missed?

Edit: Okay, i think its due to the spritesheet formed when exported, it adds 1 pixel to each side (IIRC) and it screws up some of the downscaling. But its strange that it affects some sprites but not others.. some voodoo stuff is going on.

Edit2: Also noticed some shader effects bugging on NodeWebkit 12, as well as some stutters/jank.. but works fine on NW10.5 (which is a dang shame because Greenworks isn't compatible with the newer Steam SDK).

I wouldn't think it would matter, but try turning image recompression off in your export dialog just to rule that out.

I've turned it off already, no effect. I resized a few sprites affected by -1 pixel width & height and it now looks sharp on export.. but some others are not affected by default, I dont understand it.

Are the sprites significantly downscaled? What do the exported spritesheets look like?

Currently WebGL mode can create mipmaps for high-quality downscaling, but only when the source image is a power-of-two size. Spritesheeting means every image on the spritesheet can use high-quality downscaling, but some leftover images can end up not on a spritesheet, end up with a non-power-of-two size, and then have to use low-quality downscaling. So the ones which you think are blurry are actually using a higher quality downscaling, whereas the crisp ones are actually aliasing due to undersampling, which looks higher contrast, which can be mistaken for higher detail.

You could try setting downscaling quality to "high", which uses more memory but should at least be consistent.

I have some sprites downscaled by 25% (3/4 size), some at 50% (half the size of original). The reason for this is it maintains a crisper quality when the game is scaled up for a higher resolution.

That's interesting, I really prefer the look of the aliasing sprite, not just the contrast but the "high quality" ones look blurry, its definitely worse!

So if I want them to look sharp, I should use downscaling to low? I'll give it a go.

Great! Tested it on low-quality downscaling and it looks sharp, no blurry, details maintained (mix of pixel art & normal style).

https://halfgeekstudios.files.wordpress ... /fixed.jpg <- Full size, no blurry sprites

Thanks for clearing up the way downscaling works. I can see some art styles benefit from high quality downscaling though, just not in my case.