Anti-aliasing

[Intio]

I have a vague memory of reading a discussion (not on these forums) where anti-aliasing with thinBasic was mentioned.

Perhaps this was meant as OpenGL functionality which may be included in TBGL at some future point, so I was wondering if AA is possible within TBGL.

If it will be introduced in a future version of TBGL, will we be able to specify LINES, POLYGONS, etc. to have further control over it? How about the level of AA?

Thanks for any information.

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Intio,

thank you very much fot interesting question.

TBGL is designed to be widely compatible even with older hardware.
The fact AA is not included in TBGL are mainly Intel cards - according to my tests they still do not support multisampling of any form ( and yes, it is year 2009 ). ATi and NVIDIA are no problem, sadly Intel graphic "card" is installed on lot of computers.

I will think about possible implementation, for example anisotropic filtering ( one of the greatest inventions in last years ) is supported in TBGL in way that when you try to run it on incompatible hardware, it falls back safely to second best mode, which is %TBGL_TEX_MIPMAP.

Would you agree to implement antialiasing in similar way ( working on good hardware, switched off on uncompatible one )?


Thank you,
Petr

P.S. When you enable AA in drivers, TBGL has no problem with it now

[Intio]

Ahh, now that explains why, when testing Ocai (made using Basic4GL), I found that whenever I tried testing on Intel integrated GPU computers the AA never quite looked right. It always seemed like it was being 'faked' somehow, despite the fact that these test machines were more powerful than the development laptop I was using to create the game!



Would you agree to implement antialiasing in similar way ( working on good hardware, switched off on uncompatible one )?


I think that would be perfect, if a GPU chipset doesn't support it then so be it. I'm presuming that players who have such old Intel hardware are used to not having up to date features ;)

P.S. Would you mind taking a quick look over at the thinAir General forum? I've posted a question there too.

Thanks Petr.