Would this be unthinkable

one way of doing FSAA to my understanding is to render you scene at 2x the size of the screen res and then scale the image by half and then rendering it to the screen. couldnt we use this idea with blitz to smooth out those edges. as it seams that real FSAA will never work in blitz unless someone does a dll for it.

i know this could be slow on old machines but it should be useable on mid to new pcs

you would probably have to render to a texture and scale the quad to the camera. I think fill rate problems would kill the performance

I thought there may be some way of using the back buffer. i never really got my head round it.

You could do this. Look at the full screen motion blur code in the archives.

How about not rendering it 2x? Say render it 1.2, or 1.5 etc. I wonder if the quality of smoothing results would be that different when down-sized again? Just a thought.

I believe Blitz3D does this already when you enable antialias.

I didn't think you could render at a resolution higher than the screen display...?

Indiepath

the Antialiasing on blitz3d doen't work on 90% of hardware, it not getting fixed so im trying to get a work round for the same sort of effect.

Yeah, If you do a slight motion blur with the frontbuffer, it forces a slight AA to the screen. However, this is not a very good method :)

What about having two quads. Have one quad, SLIGHTY offset position. Render the screen to a texture (render screen, copy back buffer to texture), and texture them the same, giving the top quad transparency. Would also let you do other cool effects too i guess :o)

Maybe Mark should remove the antialias command completely in a future update unless it is going to be fixed?

If I were a new user and this was one of the first commands that I came across I would naturally assume that the language was buggy which we all know is not the case at all.

It would be nice if these loose ends could be fixed as otherwise Blitz 3D is pretty rock solid.

Jason.

I'll just take my custom elsewhere. I want FSAA in my game so I am looking right this moment for solutions like unity3d etc.

Blitz is over, I can learn any language I want. I'm just tired of not having simple things fixed tbh.

Your game doesn't need to have antialias settings as they are included in graphics drivers interface such as ATI Catalyst. And usually, the display driver follows it's user settings when they are not at the "application" mode.

It's very bad practice to ask your users to change driver settings for something you should be doing in-game. Not only can you not switch on the fly, but if every game did that, you'd be going in and out of driver settings several times a day as you switched from one game to another.

Personally I don't like anti-aliasing when I'm playing, but if a game can't give me an option in-game, I'm not going to fiddle with driver settings to force it. It's a programmer's job.

Well we're out of luck with Blitz3D. Personally I prefer having Antialias always on to 4x. Last time I played a game without AA modes is on my older Radeon 8500.

This one here could be nice to have: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=40848

Surely you realise all programmers are the minority and 9 out of 10 gamers really dont have a clue how to enable FSAA in drivers.

Most kids these days are raised on console games, where FSAA is turned on by default for a lot of titles. It just looks "great".

This is really the direction for pc gaming, just turn it on and play it with simple options for "smoothing" etc -- ie FSAA.

Well this is true, yeah. It's a shame, but I think it's pretty clear that short of some kind of workaround of the kind that Pete postulates at the beginning of this thread, B3D is not going to have AA.

Yeah so I'll move to something that does. I think Blitz3D is as primitive as software rendering in terms of todays visuals.

I have a mini driving game finished and it plays quite well its a overhead view game like super off road on the snes, its made in blitz3d and from the distance i want all the edges look very rough. The game runs on even a low spec system at over 100fps so even if the code for faking FSAA was slow it would more than likly only drop the frame rate to 60 or over.

Is there any chance of an of the more able programs here knocking up a dll just to do FSAA. as i think that it would be posible and then it could be included with blitz.

By the way sometimes even setting the drivers to force AA still doesnt work with blitz.

Thats the thing.

I'm doing a similar game, its scaled out and after using Blitzmax with sprites I'd just love to have smooth-edged polygons.

It especially matters when you deal with a lot of small polys.