Please rethink cropping the art for version 2.0! (FALSE ALARM)

[solaris32]

@Blackthorne

EDIT: This is a false alarm, read Blackthorne's clarification in the next post.

Why cut off 1/6th of the top/bottom art for the special edition/version 2.0? It would make far more sense to simply add some side borders. You get your new desired ratio and get to keep ALL of the wonderful art that was worked on so hard. Better yet make it optional. No one here would value the loss of art over a more desired aspect ratio. It's the same as censoring and I (and many others) hate censorship!

If your goal is to make the ratio mobile friendly, fine, have the ccropping be ONLY on mobile. And when you release the special edition/version 2.0 on pc please for the love of everything holy keep ALL the original art! It's not too late to prevent this mistake! I know that I would never rebuy such a product, and nor would many other people. Feel free to make and advertise such a poll if you don't believe me! "Would you buy QfI Special Edition if it meant you lost 1/6th of the art on the top and bottom compared to the original?" If you plan to give it away for free to owners of the original game replace "buy" with "play and enjoy". And be sure to give a screenshot example like what I did below to concretely illustrate your intentions. EDIT: Actually I added my own poll, didn't realize you could at first. But a poll sent to the Kickstarter backers would get a lot more attention.

This is what is being proposed. No matter how you do it, if you take a little more off the top or a little more off the bottom, you will be crippling your creation. Don't do it, please!


From the Kickstarter update 3-9-17:

"Shawn and I have been working on what we're calling the "Special Edition" of Quest for Infamy. It started off as a simple v2.0, but we decided to go in and add some features and ideas we've had - we'll have a more comprehensive list of additions and changes in the future, but some of them include moving the games aspect ratio from 320x240 to 320x200, to get a more rectangle aspect ratio, instead of a square one. This includes us having to resize and re-do some of the GUIs, and write code to decide what portions of art are visible in the viewing window of the game - it adds a nice dimension to the game, and it looks nicer on today's 16:9 monitors. We're also adding an alternate control scheme that should allow us to port the game more easily to mobile platforms, but it'll also be able to be used in the desktop/PC versions. As well as these changes, we hope to be able to create a stable Mac build that can run on its most recent OS. As far as gameplay, we're adding a few minor things, a couple surprises, and a few general tweaks we hope make the experience better. In the past few months, I've been playing QFI as a gamer for the first time in a long time, and I really have to marvel at the size of the world we created and the variety of quests, tasks and story threads we created for the game. Playing the game as a different class each time, I discover more little things we put in each class - and I also had to laugh at many little surprises and features/easter eggs we've put in that people still haven't found yet."

[Blackthorne]

It's not actually just a simple cropping - all the original information will still be there, but we've written code that will display what needs to be shown, and on some screens, it will scroll up or down 40 pixels so all the information is still there.  Just what's viewable at one time is limited by 40 pixels on some screens.  It's actually an interesting system.


Bt

[Klytos]

A bit of history here for those who care about such things. Our games have always been 320x200, from back in the freeware remake days to Order of the Thorne and Roehm to Ruin. When we started on QFI we very nearly went with a LucasArts style "always on the screen" interface which was why we added 40 more pixels to the height, that way we didn't have to make 320x160 graphics which is very limited. (The combat GUI is a remnant of that LA concept). When we went with the more traditional Sierra pulldown menu we'd already done a large portion of the town and Volksville Woods backgrounds at 240 height so ... we left it. It's actually been hurt us commercially to have it at the weird square resolution it is, I'm not talking millions of sales but we have had consistent feedback that the letterboxing on some monitors was a game breaking issue for some people.

So the side borders is actually what we're trying to do away with, currently the game displays in side borders on tablets which is something we're trying to port to in the near future. Coming back to a more standard 16:9 ratio fixes that as it upsizes properly. The system Steve described above decides where the screen begins it's display. 0,0 or 40,0 or somewhere inbetween, and the game will scroll up and / or down depending on whether we've locked it or not.

~ Shawn

BTW, I think you're drawing a pretty long line to connect changing a change in aspect ratio to censorship!

EDIT: It can't be made optional, to answer that question directly. It's a setting within the game engine that can't be changed at runtime.

[solaris32]

It's not actually just a simple cropping - all the original information will still be there, but we've written code that will display what needs to be shown, and on some screens, it will scroll up or down 40 pixels so all the information is still there.  Just what's viewable at one time is limited by 40 pixels on some screens.  It's actually an interesting system.


Bt

I'm glad all the art will still be there, and it sounds like a very good alternative for making it possible to put on mobile. I was just scared we were going to lose part of the game .

BTW, I think you're drawing a pretty long line to connect changing a change in aspect ratio to censorship!

I thought we were losing 1/6th of the vertical art of every screen, and it kinda made me upset, so I used a strong word like censorship. Now I understand and it's all good .

[Blackthorne]

Nah, it's not a matter of snipping and losing art forever, like matte letterboxing an open frame movie.  We have a bit more flexibility in the game world!


Bt

[Nowhere Girl]

By th way, it's not really 320x200, it's 640x400 - your screens DO have some "single-pixel" elements, that is, things not drawn in doubled resolution.
I personally prefer when games in retro resolution don't have such elements. In old games when someone was closer to the back of the screen, zhe was shown as smaller without using single-pixel lines - at the cost of details, of course. I think it looks better, "cleaner", if a game is either pure 640x400 (retro examples: "Die Höhlenwelt-Saga" or most Humongous Entertainment games) or pure double-320x200 without single pixels. Plus, there's the issue of screenshot cropping... it's annoying, but I kinda like it. If my collection of screenshots from a game doesn't have any single pixels anywhere, I can resize them from double to single resolution and save a bit of disk space. (It grew out of converting Scumm VM screenshots - D-Fend Reloaded automatically resizes double-320x200 to single, Scumm VM doesn't, plus bitmaps are horribly huge and Scumm VM saves screenshots as BMP - so in case of games I play through Scumm VM, after I finish it and select screenshots, the next thing I do is convert them to PNG and resize them. And it's amazing to see how much "weight" these screenshots lose after BMP-to-PNG conversion plus resizing - for example, in case of "Zak McKracken" they went from 900 KB to approx. 25 KB.)
Unless I'm mistaken, "Heroine's Quest" and Wadjet Eye games also do have single-pixel lines, the "King's Quest", "Space Quest" and "Quest for Glory 2" remakes, "Kathy Rain" and "Stair Quest" don't.

[Blackthorne]

The artwork is directly imported into the engine at 320x200 (or originally 320x240) - when it's scaled up, it uses a nearest neighbor filter to keep the pixel width the same.


Bt

[Nowhere Girl]

Too bad I don't even know what "nearest-neighbor filter" really is - I just know I encounter this phrase and that I need it to display games in doubled resolution.

[Blackthorne]

Yeah, nearest neighbor is just a system for scaling that ensures 1:1 pixel enlargement ration, instead of the blurry effect you get with so-called "HQ" filters.  We like our pixels perfect and chunky.


Bt

[MusicallyInspired]

Here's what nearest neighbor (left) and bilinear (right) scaling looks like.



Here's what nearest neighbor (left), HQ4x (middle), and another scaling filter called 4xBR look like.



I know what you're talking about with regards to single pixel lines with characters being in the background, though. I can't stand that either. If you run the setup in the game folder and there is an option to choose "normal2x". or "normal3x", etc that will solve that. Some games have 320x200 based artwork but have high resolution dialogue portraits for instance and that ups the game's resolution to 640x400 or something similar, which causes sprites in the background to be rendered in higher res.