Scale Factor and Resolution On Mac

[avenged110]

Having only recently discovered this project, I was curious about the resolution and scale factor differences between OpenRTC2 0.0.6 and RCT1 on OS X 10.9.5. I play RCT1 on my MacBook using WineBottler almost without issue, and am able to set the window resolution in-game to 640x480. This results in a view that is capable of getting "close" enough in-game for me to see things adequately (and looks relatively decent in terms of graphics), but can also be zoomed out with the in-game controls. In OpenRTC2, the only way to get effectively as "close" is with the "scale factor" option. However, this results in terrible graphical quality (at least on 0.0.6, I feel like it looked better on 0.0.5). Could someone please explain to me either why this is the case (and something we just have to live with), or how I can achieve something that is at least comparable to RCT1. I would hope that OpenRCT2 would be able to perform and look at least as good as stock RCT1 running on top of a compatibility layer (I know 0.0.6 is still an early release, but this seems applicable regardless.)

Edited March 1, 2017 by avenged110

[X7123M3-256]

RCT2 sprites are bitmap images. In order to enlarge them they have to be upscaled. This goes for RCT1 as well - LCD screens have a fixed native resolution, if you're running a game in 640x480 mode the graphics driver will upscale the image.

OpenRCT2 will upscale with nearest neighbour (I think), the monitor scaling is probably something like bilinear or bicubic resampling, which may account for the difference.  @janisozaur experimented with more sophisticated upscaling, which did produce good results but I think it proved too CPU intensive and was not merged.

Edited March 1, 2017 by X7123M3-256