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Edges of points, help me understand.

Posted: Sun Jun 09, 2013 10:30 pm
by easypeasy
Hello, I'm new to löve, and coding in general really, and I'm loving it. There's something I've been bothered with though...

With fsaa set to 0 and pointstyle as smooth, points have soft edges. Circles have rough edges.
With fsaa set to 4 and pointstyle as smooth, points have rough edges. Circles have soft edges.

Why is that? Am I missing something? Please explain :)

Re: Edges of points, help me understand.

Posted: Sun Jun 09, 2013 10:41 pm
by Jasoco
FSAA is Fullscreen Antialiasing. I believe, if I'm correct, that it means Löve will draw everything 4x the size then scale it down using bilinear interpolating or something to smooth the edges of stuff. Correct me if I'm way out of my ballpark here.

Not sure why points show up the way they do though. Screenshot please maybe?

Re: Edges of points, help me understand.

Posted: Sun Jun 09, 2013 10:51 pm
by easypeasy
Ok, that is helpful to know, but I don't understand why that would make points rough?

Ofcourse, here are two screenshots:
The black ball is a circle, the grey one is a point.

Image
Here fsaa is set to 0.

Image
And here fsaa is set to 4.

Re: Edges of points, help me understand.

Posted: Sun Jun 09, 2013 10:55 pm
by Jasoco
Yeah. That's really odd. I rarely use points though. I always fall back to circles at a radius of like 1 if I need a point currently.

Re: Edges of points, help me understand.

Posted: Sun Jun 09, 2013 11:00 pm
by slime
Jasoco wrote:FSAA is Fullscreen Antialiasing. I believe, if I'm correct, that it means Löve will draw everything 4x the size then scale it down using bilinear interpolating or something to smooth the edges of stuff. Correct me if I'm way out of my ballpark here.

Not sure why points show up the way they do though. Screenshot please maybe?
The antialiasing setting actually uses MSAA (multisample anti-aliasing) internally, which is a fair bit more efficient than that. :P
Image

I'm not sure why the point isn't being antialiased...

Re: Edges of points, help me understand.

Posted: Sun Jun 09, 2013 11:18 pm
by easypeasy
I guess that I could just change all points to circles, but for some reason small points look better than small anti-aliased circles.
I bet nobody has ever encountered this, but me, because I'm the only one using points :P

Re: Edges of points, help me understand.

Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2013 12:16 am
by slime
It works fine for me - looks like it's probably a driver/GPU isssue. What OS and video card do you have? Are your drivers up to date?

The "smooth" point style has various issues on many drivers and I wish there was a better way to do it (without using shaders)...

FSAA at 0:
QTHiIH5.png
QTHiIH5.png (39.42 KiB) Viewed 225 times
FSAA at 4:
scJR59B.png
scJR59B.png (40.72 KiB) Viewed 225 times

Re: Edges of points, help me understand.

Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2013 1:25 pm
by easypeasy
Ah, that makes sense. I'm using Win 7 and have a Radeon HD 4800, so quite old, but not ancient.

I'm convinced drivers are up to date, but I'll do a check and see if I find anything.

I'll make it a habit to use circles instead of points in the future. Thanks!