Am 27.08.2018 um 01:01 schrieb Kenneth:
> "omniverse" <omn### [at] charternet> wrote:
>>
>> Sounds like either icon and or low resolution game characters, that would be my
>> guess anyway.
> 
> Do game sprites or characters *need* to be rendered at 'small' scales? In other
> words, if for example a sprite is originally rendered at, say, 500X500 pixels,
> will a game engine automatically downsize it if need be? I've (obviously) had no
> experience with this stuff, so I'm just curious.

As far as I know, GPUs (and thus presumably also game engines) work best
with power-of-two image sizes, e.g. 512x512 pixels. Game engines may
also provide tools to manually downsize images.

Game engines will also typically create downsized copies of textures, to
prevent texture aliasing when rendering the texture at small scales.
Often squashed versions of textures are also created, to prevent texture
aliasing when the texture is viewed at a shallow angle; this is called
anisotropic filtering.

Such extra resources may be created either at compile time (increasing
the size of both the game installer as well as the installation) or upon
first running the game (increasing the size of the installed game as
well as the time it takes for the game's first start). Technically it
would also be possible to create them on the fly upon loading the
texture (increasing the startup time of the game or loading time between
scenes) to save disk space, but I'm not sure whether this is actually done.

> I guess the same question might also apply to Windows' own screen icons: Are
> they initially 'made' (rendered) at the exact pixel size that shows up on
> screen?

Icons for Windows are provided in different sizes by the software
author. Whether they hand-paint each variant or create them by up- or
downsizing is up to them. IDEs typically provide tools for either
approach, though they're often of poor quality and you're better off
with using an external image processing tool like Photoshop.

Again, sizes are typically powers of 2 (and I'm not sure whether Windows
even supports "odd" sizes).

Originally the various sizes served to display different sizes of the
icon (e.g. one size for the Windows Explorer's list view, one for the
icon view, etc.), but nowadays I guess they may also serve to cater to
different dot pitches, e.g. 4K vs. normal resolution.

I'm not sure what happens when the programmer does not provide an icon
large or small enough - whether Windows will up- or downscale the icon
on the fly, or whether the icon will simply be scaled by the GPU at
render time. I presume the latter.


Modern Windows' own icons come at ridiculously large sizes, up to at
least 256x256 pixels (as can be seen in the Windows Explorer's "extra
large icons" view).

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