point vs linear when importing a PNG

as the title suggests does anyone know why when i import a PNG as a sprite 1 every approx 10 png's when point is enabled gets distorted (loses detail)?

of course when i switch to linear it becomes perfect again.

but my question is why not all PNG's behave the same way when imported with the same settings.for me at this point its random.i haven't been able to track down a pattern .

what am i missing?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lqg1kao7s97o6 ... .28.20.png

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ebdrhfqscieh1 ... .28.39.png

zoom in and see the difference.

one is not affected and the other is (web)

anyone ? any thoughts ?

I am not entirely sure but it may be related to the sprite itself, rather than an unknown (or less known) property of exporting it. I think it has to do with the edges of the object. The web object has a lot of transparent areas bordering a lot of non-transparent areas. While smoothing this, the alpha value of some of the sprites in the border areas is chaged to make them semi-transparent, which causes a noticable amount of change in the sprite. Whereas, on the other hand, if the sprite was a stone pillar, only the edges of the pillar is semi-transparentized (is there even such a word?) and the change is less noticable.

I think the same goes for other areas of the sprite as well, like if there is a half-black half-yellow square, some of the pixels in the border of colors are dark yellow after export. But the change is not as noticable to eye as the transparent-non transparent borders.

If you are not using any background objects with the net, try filling all the spaces of the net with your intended background color in an image editor, save it, put it into your project and export and check the results.

Hope that helps.

I tend to think its because of sub-pixel placement.

thank you all for your invaluable information.

my main problem right now is "conflicting technologies" if that makes any sense.

without linear sampling i have the above problem and i have to re design a lot of stuff again in a trial and error manner which is counterproductive.i also face the problem of scrolling not being so smooth with 'point on'.

on the other hand i use spriter animations that tween sub pixel and if i export with "pixel rounding on" then my tilemaps work without seems but my animations get destroyed and vice versa.

so i am at a crossroad and i could use some advice from someone more experienced than i am to show me the way to salvation :p

if i use my tilemaps the same way as ashley's tutorial (platformer for beginners) will i have seams with "sampling linear" and "pixel rounding off"?

it will be more work for me to assign animation numbers for the correct tile but if this works i dont mind.

A lot of games have minor imperfections, we as players disregard them because we expect them, and/ or we just don't care. Game play has always been the main.

So, with that being said, you don't go to war with what you want, you go with what you have. Set pixel rounding to on, and sampling to point, and make the game.

newt

thank you for your input but spriter animations are the backbone in my game so i will have to find a workaround since with pixel rounding to on they are getting destroyed.

Actually I think I tweeted lucid about adding support for that.

Perhaps if we chant his name he might show up, and say something about a todo list?

Did some testing today with and without pixel rounding, and it seems that since Spriter's linear animation is much like scrolling pieces around, the odd looking animation artifacts will be there for some animations, especially if the character is small within Spriter, or there are some very slow moving pieces, Using instant speed curves for your animations (speed curves will be supported in the upcoming plugin release), will make it animate in a more frame by frame looking way, while still saving vram, and not being affected by pixel rounding as noticeably. Until there's an actual pixel friendly art mode in Spriter to preview how it'll look before playing it in engine, I'm not seeing a better solution. I'll bring it up with Ashley, when I send him the updated plugin; he may or may not have experienced/solved something similar in the past that might help me.

newt

lucid

thank you both for your time and effort

lucid i posted on a thread a few days back when i was trying to figure out what was going on with the seams thing and spriter and i will tell you what i told ashley.

spriter is THE MOST important companion to c2 .i firmly believe that you two should team up,make it an officially supported extension and offer this as a standard feature for all future c2 releases.

i know it is quite difficult for a novice in graphics arts and animation to get the hang of it at first but on more experienced hands it literally blows away most commercial game animations out there in a fraction of the time and all these with a drag n drop feature in c2!

BUT for the time being you must plan ahead and iron out those core conflicting issues now instead of later,when it will be quite difficult to do so , since you'll be so deep inside your production circle .

EDIT

if there is a choice i would prefer that c2 would figure out a solution about us being able to keep linear sampling and pixel rounding to off while using spriter.the reason?i would hate to loose all this awesome detail while tweening real time if you had to adjust to c2 needs and not the other way around. it kind of defies the whole purpose of spriter that way.

Thank you very much, Roccinio. I brought it up to Ashley. I'll update you once I find out either way.