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Is ISBoxer scaling Click Bar Buttons?

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Alge

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League of Extraordinary Multiboxers

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Post Mon Feb 18, 2013 6:52 am

Is ISBoxer scaling Click Bar Buttons?

I apologise for the large images. They are sort of needed to demonstrate the issue at hand.

Recently I tried to create some Click Bars identical to my in-game action bars (which are in a custom UI for which I made the graphics). The results were not quite what I expected.

In the first image below you can see the comparison between the ISBoxer Click Bar image (top 6 squares) and the in-game UI (bottom 6 squares). Both are using the same base image, which is 34x34 pixels. The game (Vanguard) is displaying this image pixel for pixel (34x34) but despite me selecting a 34x34 cell for my ISBoxer Click Bar, ISBoxer seems to be scaling that image down to 32x32 and the scaling/interpolation is reducing the color saturation.

Image

I suspected ISBoxer may want image sizes to be powers of 2, but while that gives better color results, the size of the resultant image is again not what I would expect. The image below shows a comparison between the ISBoxer Click Bar image (top) and the in-game UI (bottom). This time I made a 32x32 pixel image for use in the Click Bars (still with exactly 3 pixels in the border - black, bronze, black) and used a cell size of 32x32 for the Click Bar buttons. The color comes out much closer but now the Click Bar buttons seem to have been scaled down to 30x30. It seems like ISBoxer is adding a 1 pixel transparent border.

Image

In the third image below both the source image (recreated to have 3 pixels in the border - black, bronze, black) and the Click bar Button cell size are 36x36 pixels. Again, the Click Bar Button images (top) appear to have been scaled down (this time to 34x34) with a resultant loss in color saturation.

Image

As far as I can tell neither the Cell Border Size (set for the Click Bar) or the Border Size (set for the image) has any effect in this situation. I made sure Alpha was set to 255 for my Click bar. In case it matters, source images were PNG with the lowest possible level of compression. The same results occur if I use TGA for source images. A side by side comparison of the original image (GIMP XCF format) and the exported PNG or TGA shows no loss of saturation through export.

Could there be something I'm doing wrong or is this something in ISBoxer's image handling?
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Alge

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Post Mon Feb 18, 2013 3:59 pm

Re: Is ISBoxer scaling Click Bar Buttons?

This issue can be partially fixed by making the cell size (in your Click Bar) 2 pixels wider and taller than the image size, i.e. if you want a 34x34 image not to be scaled, use a 36x36 cell. My understanding is ISBoxer places a 1 pixel transparent border around the image. Sorry Lax if I didn't quite understand/explain that correctly.

The colors still seem to be a little off, though not as much. Apparently the final quality of the Click Bar Button images may also be affected by whether you are using dx9 vs dx11.
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Alge

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Post Mon Feb 18, 2013 10:44 pm

Re: Is ISBoxer scaling Click Bar Buttons?

The image degradation I am seeing is greatly reduced or even eliminated in DirectX 11. I used WoW to test. So it seems this may be an issue only with DirectX 9.
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MiRai

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Post Mon Feb 18, 2013 11:17 pm

Re: Is ISBoxer scaling Click Bar Buttons?

I would like to add to this thread, as well. Earlier this morning in IRC I mentioned that I was seeing some odd color degradation in some Click Bar images like Alge. Upon double-checking my Photoshop PSD files (just now), it was indeed my fault that the colors were not correct. I must have not copied and pasted my layer styles correctly, but my issue is resolved.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming. :)
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Alge

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Post Tue Feb 19, 2013 2:51 am

Re: Is ISBoxer scaling Click Bar Buttons?

OK, I found a perfect workaround for dx 9. I kept the Click Bar Button cell size at 36x36 but scaled the source image up to 136x136, i.e 16 times larger than needed. ISBoxer then scales it back down to 34x34 and the color and dimensions in the result are exactly what I want.

\o/ This was going to drive me crazy because I'm more than a little anal.

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