I've asked a few pixel-art guys here about this, but I'll throw it to the community:
I've been making a little game for a while and it occurred to me that some of my pixels are rectangular thanks to bad scaling.
I've made two test versions of my game currently, one at 480x270 with letterbox scale integer, and one at 1920x1080 with Magicam at scale 3 (I understand Magicam scale is exactly the same as Scale Layout, and actually overrides scale layout).
I have:
- pixel rounding on
- low-quality full screen scaling
- Hi-DPI on
- point sampling
- low quality downscaling
Now, what I'm trying to do is keep the smooth subpixel scrolling I get with the 1920x1080 layout scaled version, whereas the 480x270 version that's resized is obviously jerkier.
I'm also thinking that eventually my phone app version with touch pad will be a LOT worse using the 480x270 version, as all of the touch detection will be really low resolution. Is this one of the benefits of using HD and scaling the layout, instead of designing absolutely everything (including touchpads) at 480x270 and scaling?
Is it possible to have the pixel scaling (I notice most of the rectangle distortion occurring on tiled backgrounds) retain perfect squares AND have subpixel smoothness? Is this even a desirable technique to use in modern retro pixelart games? I can't say as I've noticed many retro games seem as jerky as I get with C2 with subpixel smoothing off.
I also got a BETTER look with pixel-rounding off, but the 480x270 window using integer scaling, but it isn't as smooth (obviously) as with using High Quality scaling, but high-quality scaling doesn't keep pixels square?