Questions tagged [graphics]

A very generic term referring to visual part of a game. Try to avoid unrelevant usage and instead tag for specific graphics type (2D, 3D), API, framework or a library you are using, if possible.

Game graphics is a variety of computer graphic techniques have been used to display video game content. The predominance of individual techniques have evolved over time, primarily due to hardware advances and restrictions such as the processing power of central or graphics processing units.

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24-Bit Colordepth not enough?

I noticed that in very soft gradients, the 24-Bit colordepth is not enough as you can see the transitions of the color. This pops out the most in dark scenes or night skies. Why doesn't anybody change the colordepth to two bytes per channel? I know…
RenX
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How did they make the screen move in Dangerous Dave?

I've made games in BASIC when I was a child, and I was curious about how the graphics were done in the 1988 version of Dangerous Dave made in C++; especially because they didn't have any worthwhile graphics packages those days. Remember how when…
Nav
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Clear reference implementations of MLAA?

Does anyone know of a clearly written reference implementation of morphological antialiasing (MLAA)? Intel provide a paper and reference implementation at the following address, but I find the code very…
pauldoo
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How can I create animated card graphics like in Hearthstone?

In the game Hearthstone, there are cards with animated images on them. A few examples: http://www.hearthhead.com/card=281/argent-commander http://www.hearthhead.com/card=469/blood-imp The animations seem to be composed of multiple…
Appeltaart
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How to emulate Mode 13h in a modern 3D renderer?

I was indulging in nostalgia and remembered the first game I created, which used Mode 13h. This mode was really simple to work with, since it was essentially just an array of bytes with an element for each pixel on the screen (using an indexed color…
David Gouveia
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Does a game have to explicitly support SLI/Crossfire to take advantage of it?

This is more of a general curiosity question than a howto question. Just as the title says, do games have to explicitly support SLI/Crossfire to take advantage of multiple graphics cards or are they linked in such a way that you don't need to write…
TheLQ
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What's the difference between Alpha and PreMulAlpha?

I've seen videos comparing the two but it looks like there's no difference and they don't explain what's the difference
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Do games depend on the OS to scale resolution?

I'm having issues with my computer related with scaling when using different resolutions other than the native. So I started to wonder, in PCs, is scaling handled by the card driver or the game engine? Does it depend of what engine we are talking…
Roberto
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What steps can developers take to improve the graphics of their games?

My understanding is that the differences in graphic quality between games for systems like Xbox One and PS4 and Pixar-style movies stems from that the former are rendered in real-time. But even with real-time rendering, it looks like some game…
user62633
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Basic Collision Detection Math

First a bit of background. I have yet to read a book on game development, though I do plan on picking one up sometime. A long time ago I made a simple pong game, followed by a simple Arkanoid-type game. In both games I figured the collision…
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Effect of graphics card on game programming

I know the question can be pretty funny to some, but I have been thinking, does a gaming graphics card like agtx and a professional graphics card like quaddro have any effect on game development during texture rendering, materials, importing…
AngryAppy
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Algorithms for Physically based shading models

For real time interactive graphics, it seems to be practical now to use physically based shading models. I want to write some shaders to incorporate into an openGL based game engine that I'm writing and I wasn't sure of what algorithms to read up…
dev_nut
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What's the difference between using hardware-accelerated APIs and the OS's drawing API?

On Windows, I can do drawing with the OS API without OpenGL or D3D. The code I am writing will make calls to a device driver and tell the GPU what to do regardless, right? How is using OpenGL different exactly? Do these libraries have code that will…
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What are the differences between EGA and VGA for MSDOS API?

How different is the API for EGA and VGA for MSDOS applications? We're talking about the API that was used in games like Doom, Quest for Glory, Duke 3D, etc. More specifically, how much work would be involved in changing an application's use of EGA…
Wisteso
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Is it possible to give an animated GIF a transparent background?

I'm making a Fire Emblem-esque game. There are very cute 2D frames I made for each character, and, like a game like Fire Emblem, I want these characters to animate constantly. To circumvent the graphics programming involved I came up with a novel…
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