Graphic improvements in GM6.1

[Godmaster]

I'm here again, but now, with more difficult questions about graphical improvements on resolution, that we see in nowadays videogames emulators.

I'm wanting to know how do these improvements in Game Maker, that can clean missing pixels, improve the broken ones and keeps the resolution bigger.

There they are:

http://www.hiend3d.com/hq3x.html

http://scale2x.sourceforge.net/

I wonder they can use external dlls instead of an internal algorithm.

Someone know to do this in gm?

[Spike]

Ha! If only. I've been looking for one of those forever now. I imagine it will be done for GM7, which has a whole section inside the interface designed for DLLs.

[Damizean]

Unless Mark implemented shaders, doesn't look like we'll be seeing this anytime soon. These magnification filter need a high speed pixel access rate, or else, it'll take forever to display a single frame :s

[Kain]

Although many many people have pestered Mark to add pixel shaders in GM, I don't think we'll be seing it any time soon. I'm pretty sure Mark said he had no plans on implementing it any time soon if ever for various reasons.

Anyway, as said, these filters require pixel-level manipulation of the data and as it is, there's no way to do it real-time with GM's drawing system. The closest you could get would be to save the screen to a file and apply the filter to a file, but not only are the screen save functions not quite practical for real-time use, GM exports its images in 32-bit bitmap form, and scale2x requires 24-bit pixels. Wouldn't be difficult to convert real-time, but the problem, again, is that the you couldn't integrate it real-time with GM's drawing system.

[Mark the Echidna]

Yeah. That's right. I won't be adding Pixel Shaders any time soon.

*killed*

Maybe since the DLL's can access GM runtime's window handle, they can have access to the device context... Wouldn't that allow filter operations to be done?

[Kain]

I don't know enough about Windows and DirectX programming to answer that adequately, but I know of at least half a dozen people in GM communities who are and who would have made these DLLs a hundred times over if it were that simple. I just don't think that you can get pixel-level information real-time unless GM itself allows for shaders, otherwise it'd be importing and exporting of data into mediums that can and the importing and exporting couldn't really be done real-time.