A severe lack of care for modern display technology

[nbd_knws_m]

On my never ending mission to play a fan game meeting all my expectations as they should be in the year 2025 one topic in particular has caught my attention as I am looking to one day sit down and spend a few months or possibly years developing my own adventure ticking all the boxes and I will have you know that I am one hell of a picky person.
The topic in question being:

Unwritten rules of pixel art in video games
This is only addressing one out of many, although this by far has me personally stressed out the most.

You would be surprised how little people talk about what makes pixel art good from a screen compatibility point of view.
The by far most common native resolution of fan games released in recent times is 256 x 192. In fact it matches that of the Nintendo DS, a device specifically designed around two identical set display resolutions. For the console this is perfectly good, after all those were hardware limitations.
However this is where the elephant in the room joins the conversation:
Display are commonly in a 16:9 aspect ratio @ 1280x720, 1920x1080, 2560x1440 or 3840x2160 (4K).
Yep. A little weird isn't it? This does not work for fullscreen application. Or at the very least not without non-integer scaling. I will say it outright: Integer scaling is mandatory for pixel art to be of quality.
For reference, my setup's main display is a 27inch 1440p 165 Hz monitor. 1440 divided by 192 equals 7.5 which in fact will not result in a clean and crisp image. Or at least not the way fan games are on average designed to function. Without making use of pillar/letterboxing players will in the vast majority of cases be facing bilinear, linear or bicubic scaling. This does not preserve image quality on a pixel art level.
Pedro Medeiros, artist of the hit title Celeste, has created a wonderful blog post on this matter with many more media coverage of other creators in the space. https://saint11.art/blog/scaling/
Simple search terms like "Pixel Art Canvas Size" will net you useful results to look into as well if one individual's perspective does not seal the deal.

As a result of my personal research it is highly recommended to instead target either 320 x 180 or 640 x 360 as these can nicely integer scale to the aforementioned most commonly used 16:9 resolutions on modern displays. But wait. You are perhaps wondering why the first number is a good bit higher than the second and that is because
4:3 kinda sucks? I mean, sure, it can work well and after all the community has produced some relatively good works yet it is outdated. Like outdated outdated if you get me. And it is wasted space, wasted potential really. Why not use it to either display some useful data like the current party status, location on the world map, gym count, whatever floats your boat or widen the viewport. Hell yeah, more to see of the overworld at a given point in time. This may require a little bit of adjusting for map creation but it really changes the perspective. Quickly having pulled up Gimp (I swear 3.0 finally makes it worthwhile using) and my Rejuvenation v13.5 save file I edited this together and integer scaled to 2560 x 1440:

A little large ehh? Well it finally fits my screen and look at all that extra space coming into play. also lost a little in the process as I had to crop 6 pixel top and bottom at this is effectively 320 x 180 integer scaled 8x.
Rejuvenation for once looks and feels like it was almost designed to be played on a PC. . oh wait.
Ignoring the pink tint as I cannot be bothered to set my system clock to a different time here's the regular view normally:

Night and day different but a little detail you might not see at first is this:

Stretching artifacts. Big bad. In this scene it may be bearable in others it won't and this can be a major factor in creating a fan game that's okay vs good or incredible.
You can even go as far as to ignore the aspect ratio stuff and stick with 4:3 but please choose a height that is either 180 or 360.

But why not Width x 270? It scales well to 1080p and I use a 1080p monitor.
Good question but you are missing an important factor: 1440p is becoming more and more mainstream. At least for 4K you are looking at a simple 2x multiplier in either direction but 1440p does not work this way. Instead it's the equivalent to 720p, something commonly found and used on handheld devices like the Steam Deck. I know it's actually 16:10 with a 1280 x 800 resolution but plenty of games will run at 1280 x 720 with black borders top and bottom aka letterboxing.
This matters a lot! And I do not understand why hardly anyone even questions the current meta of designing their games from the ground up.

Now the road does not end here just yet when it comes to running fan games on your monitor or handheld. As much as changing aspect ratios and resolution can assist with enhancing the player experience, one part of the equation is missing: Frametime consistency and refresh rate compatibility.
I believe an image would speak for itself on this:

Why?
Why for the love of god is it so bad? Low% sitting below 30 fps on average whilst most of the gameplay remains constantly fluctuating somewhere between
39 and 43 fps or at least it would seem this way according to PresentMon, a commonly used tool for monitoring performance. But can you not be this laggy, please?? It is one thing for plenty of games to be having bad VSync and frame limiter implementation but not even achieving a flat 60 with hardware well capable of hitting into the thousands given how little load such a fan game has on the CPU CPU Busy reveals this being a pure CPU limitations when uncapped with speed up. and yet the engine is such a letdown for something publicly shared in the past 5 years time. Even in 2020 this was unacceptable, after all people always find ways to talk down on Scarlet and Violet's performance issues on the Switch 1. Funny enough it's not much worse than this and the only reason as to why I can see it be more discussed for those games is their art style. One being full 3D environment probably rendered at around 720p natively whilst most fan games as mentioned are using a 256 x 192 canvas size whilst also primarily a flat 2D plane. Both aren't good though and motion reveals this quickly. Attempts have been made to compensate for this jittery nightmare, more precisely smooth pixel-snapping cameras. The pixel-snapping being of most importance here as a this video really explains it all:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK9wym71F7s

Needless to say this might be okay to some but remains a mere band aid fix to others, myself included. You are not solving the problems that are: High input delay, Framerate dropping out of Variable Refresh Rate range for modern high refresh rate displays, Framerate remaining fully tied to game speed like an emulator
This another big deal and one you should care about if you care about your personal well-being playing video games in general. Of course there will be individuals seemingly unaffected, either by running a stinky old 1080p 60 Hz display or "being used" to 30 fps visuals. Either way it gives me severe headaches and eye strain within just a few minutes of playtime, no good at all.


So please let's make a change even if it won't affect what is currently available. I do not see there to be a need for further discussions on fundamentals set by the pixel art community at large. However if you really do have some input on the matter to share, feel free to do so with legitimate points not a simple "No. Screw you."

EDIT: Forgot to address the second larger elephant, namely refresh rates and related induced headaches. Added reference links too.

 

[AenaonDogsky]

On my never ending mission to play a fan game meeting all my expectations as they should be in the year 2025 one topic in particular has caught my attention as I am looking to one day sit down and spend a few months or possibly years developing my own adventure ticking all the boxes and I will have you know that I am one hell of a picky person.
The topic in question being:

Unwritten rules of pixel art in video games

Hi, I believe all of your requirements have already been met in Essentials, especially from a particular MKXP version onwards.

Requirement no1: Res size =

Very easy to change, and there is some work that needs to be done in terms of UI repositioning in every UI script, as well as some graphic asset resizing adjustments, but pretty much everything else is automatic. The resolution can be changed by the developer here:

Requirement no2: Scalability to 16:9 and 16:10 res.

This is also easily achievable, I have implemented it in the game I'm currently working on, and I'm playing on a 1440p monitor with no side bars.

this is how it looks natively before choosing any larger size. Excuse one building's pixel discrepancy, that's on me not using consistent pixel asset densities.

Requirement no3: Integer Scaling

So far, I am using these settings (Accessible via the mkxp json file) and I've had 0 issues fullscreen on my 1440p monitor.

Notice that while I haven't enabled Integer Scaling, it is an option and with it disabled even, my game looks perfectly fine at fullscreen, with none of the issues you've encountered with older fangames (I'll get back to the "old" part in a second).

Requirement no4: Framerate

This, in older versions, can be changed in the Settings Script itself, but on later Essentials versions inside the mkxp file. I have simply set it to sync with the monitor but it can be manually set to 60. Notice that ALL Essential games default to 40 unless changed by the developer. It cannot be changed via external programs (with a few exceptions) because it's an internal cap.

To elaborate on the older versions a bit more, before MKXPs implementation and especially before v20, increasing the resolution would cause a lot of lag, as the engine and RGSS version was unoptimized for this sort of behavior. Moreover, even when setting the max fps manually to 60 at the default 4:3 miniscule res, the game wouldn't always hit 60 if not run on a strong CPU.

However, the newer versions of Essentials run smooth like butter, and I'm using a large 230x186 map with almost 310 (!) events on a 704x396 resolution at 60fps, with zero framerate issues.

What happens is that many of the fangames you are playing, especially the more popular ones, have been in development for years and are still running on frankesteined, albeit old base engines, and literally nobody ever set their games to 60fps because they didn't feel it was necessary for the experience (and would get major fps drops anyway). Finally, many of the new, popular Spanish-Community fangames run on frankesteined v18s or even v16s which are like a decade old by this point (and they also avoid connected maps because of the old map connection crash bugs). So this plays a big role into your current woes. Especially before v21, which is the most recent engine version, all of what you desire would have been impossible.

That said, now it's easier than ever to make a fangame look and play modern.

 

[nbd_knws_m]

Hi, I believe all of your requirements have already been met in Essentials, especially from a particular MKXP version onwards.

Requirement no1: Res size =

Very easy to change, and there is some work that needs to be done in terms of UI repositioning in every UI script, as well as some graphic asset resizing adjustments, but pretty much everything else is automatic. The resolution can be changed by the developer here:

Requirement no2: Scalability to 16:9 and 16:10 res.

This is also easily achievable, I have implemented it in the game I'm currently working on, and I'm playing on a 1440p monitor with no side bars

this is how it looks natively before choosing any larger size. Excuse one building's pixel discrepancy, that's on me not using consistent pixel densities.

Requirement no3: Integer Scaling

So far, I am using these settings (Accessible via the mkxp json file) and I've had 0 issues fullscreen on my 1440p monitor.

Notice that while I haven't enabled Integer Scaling, it is an option and although I haven't tried enabling it, my game looks perfectly fine at fullscreen, with none of the issues you've encountered with older fangames (I'll get back to the "old" part in a second)

Requirement no4: Framerate

This, in older versions, can be changed in the Settings Script itself, but on later Essentials versions inside the mkxp file. I have simply set it to sync with the monitor but it can be manually set to 60. Notice that ALL Essential games default to 40 unless changed by the developer. If you don't manually go there to do this, it won't magically happen on its own.

To elaborate on the older versions a bit more, before MKXPs implementation and especially before v20, increasing the resolution would cause a lot of lag, as the engine and RGSS version was unoptimized for this sort of behavior. Moreover, even when setting the max fps manually to 60 at the default 4:3 miniscule res, the game wouldn't always hit 60 if not run on a strong CPU

However, the newer versions of Essentials run smooth like butter, and I'm using a large 230x186 map with almost 310 (!) events on a 704x396 resolution at 60fps, with zero framerate issues.

What happens is that many of the fangames you are playing, especially the more popular ones, have been in development for years and are still running on frankesteined, albeit old base engines, and literally nobody ever set their games to 60fps because they didn't feel it was necessary for the experience. Finally, many of the new, popular Spanish-Community fangames run on frankesteined v18s or even v17s which are like a decade old by this point (and they also avoid connected maps because of the old map connection crash bugs). So this plays a big role into your current woes. Especially before v21, which is the most recent engine version, all of what you desire would have been impossible.

That said, now it's easier than ever to make a fangame look and play modern.

I guess I am partially to blame for not knowing of changes made to Essentials over time as only PSDK has caught my attention as of the past like two years monitoring their discord server for updates. Thus it might be good to spend the next few days tinkering with Essentials V21 myself. As it stands what's most important to me is that gameplay speed isn't tied to framerate unless below a certain threshold (on really slow systems unable to keep up) so it's nice and smooth for where appliccable. Although it does make me wonder if camera movement can be jitter-free and not pixel-snapping like what's being discussed in the video linked above.
And then there's the forced integer scaling which the "integerScalingActive": true setting may be able to deal with as some may be running 21:9, 32:9 or 16:10 aspect ratios or worse be on a laptop that's like 1366 x 768 where 640 x 360 integer scaled 2x (1280x720) would only fit with automatic pillar/letterboxing in fullscreen and not let the display stretch the image automatically.

 

[AenaonDogsky]

I guess I am partially to blame for not knowing of changes made to Essentials over time as only PSDK has caught my attention as of the past like two years monitoring their discord server for updates. Thus it might be good to spend the next few days tinkering with Essentials V21 myself. As it stands what's most important to me is that gameplay speed isn't tied to framerate unless below a certain threshold (on really slow systems unable to keep up) so it's nice and smooth for where appliccable. Although it does make me wonder if camera movement can be jitter-free and not pixel-snapping like what's being discussed in the video linked above.
And then there's the forced integer scaling which the "integerScalingActive": true setting may be able to deal with as some may be running 21:9, 32:9 or 16:10 aspect ratios or worse be on a laptop that's like 1366 x 768 where 640 x 360 integer scaled 2x (1280x720) would only fit with automatic pillar/letterboxing in fullscreen and not let the display stretch the image automatically.

I would assume that the answers to these questions would be found by tinkering with the above given settings. Animation speed and a few other things are no longer tied to framerate as Maruno has changed most animations to be frame-agnostic. V22 will also eventually come out, and with newer MKXP implementation (I assume) so if messing around with what is currently provided doesn't yield the best results for you, you might want to keep an eye on that.