04-28-2014, 02:25 AM
Hey, everyone, just thought I'd let you know about a fun little project I'm working on. Basically, I'm going through and manually rescaling several textures (HD ones, credit to Hypatia [seriously, check out this texture pack, it's awesome]) in the Wind Waker's HUD so that when they get stretched to 16:9, they actually look normal and the UI mostly appears as if it were designed with widescreen in mind. I'm far from done, although the results are already extremely promising!
Here are some screenshots, if you're keen.
The first thing I worked on as a "proof of concept" was the controller buttons, which you'll notice are now rounded even though they normally appear stretched in widescreen. From there, I continued on and did the hearts, the rupee icon in the corner, numbers, the Nintendo and Dolby logos at startup, everything on the splash screen, some item icons, and the text (blah, super tedious; thank Gaben for GIMP's grids and keyboard shortcuts, though!).
The process itself is rather easy. I take a texture, scale its width to 75% of the normal value, and then to centre the texture I move the scaled image to the right by x number of pixels, where x = (originalWidth - newWidth) * 0.5. This formula would actually be fairly simple to script, and it's something I'm interested in pursuing.
One thing to bear in mind, however, is that this absolutely will not work for all textures and that fitting textures must be hand-picked. Essentially, background HUD elements in particular will not produce clean results with this since other textures are overlaid on top of them. Most (but not all, depending on the background) overlaid textures will work fine, though, such as items or buttons in the case of the Wind Waker. Scaling text boxes themselves also will not generate pleasing results as the text will end up outside of the box; however, text works perfectly if the text is one whole image itself (see the "Info" text next to the A button in the first screen), and it looks decent if it's aspect corrected on an unscaled background (see the "Bait Bag" text, also on the first screen).
All in all, I'm having tons of fun with this concept, and I'm incredibly satisfied with the results it's producing. If I can get all of the high resolution textures loading properly, I'll be able to modify them and almost make Wind Waker look like a native widescreen title.
EDIT
I've added another screenshot to the album, this one with text in it. There are only two unscaled elements in this image: The background of the text, and the arrow. Everything else gets scaled to a proper aspect ratio when forced to 16:9.
This also highlights one of the issues with how text as handled. As you'll notice, the spacing between the text looks rather odd since it's so large. This is a side effect of "squishing" the fonts so that their aspect ratio looks normal when being stretched out. If I ever release a texture pack of any kind using this texture aspect correction concept, I will provide options with and without corrected text.
Here are some screenshots, if you're keen.
The first thing I worked on as a "proof of concept" was the controller buttons, which you'll notice are now rounded even though they normally appear stretched in widescreen. From there, I continued on and did the hearts, the rupee icon in the corner, numbers, the Nintendo and Dolby logos at startup, everything on the splash screen, some item icons, and the text (blah, super tedious; thank Gaben for GIMP's grids and keyboard shortcuts, though!).
The process itself is rather easy. I take a texture, scale its width to 75% of the normal value, and then to centre the texture I move the scaled image to the right by x number of pixels, where x = (originalWidth - newWidth) * 0.5. This formula would actually be fairly simple to script, and it's something I'm interested in pursuing.
One thing to bear in mind, however, is that this absolutely will not work for all textures and that fitting textures must be hand-picked. Essentially, background HUD elements in particular will not produce clean results with this since other textures are overlaid on top of them. Most (but not all, depending on the background) overlaid textures will work fine, though, such as items or buttons in the case of the Wind Waker. Scaling text boxes themselves also will not generate pleasing results as the text will end up outside of the box; however, text works perfectly if the text is one whole image itself (see the "Info" text next to the A button in the first screen), and it looks decent if it's aspect corrected on an unscaled background (see the "Bait Bag" text, also on the first screen).
All in all, I'm having tons of fun with this concept, and I'm incredibly satisfied with the results it's producing. If I can get all of the high resolution textures loading properly, I'll be able to modify them and almost make Wind Waker look like a native widescreen title.
EDIT
I've added another screenshot to the album, this one with text in it. There are only two unscaled elements in this image: The background of the text, and the arrow. Everything else gets scaled to a proper aspect ratio when forced to 16:9.
This also highlights one of the issues with how text as handled. As you'll notice, the spacing between the text looks rather odd since it's so large. This is a side effect of "squishing" the fonts so that their aspect ratio looks normal when being stretched out. If I ever release a texture pack of any kind using this texture aspect correction concept, I will provide options with and without corrected text.
