Forum:Retina 200% scale, future images

Forums: Yew Grove > Retina 200% scale, future images

This page or section is an archive. Please do not edit the contents of this page. This thread was archived on 30 June 2017 by Liquidhelium.

As you may know, retina has been around for some time now. Since what, the iPhone 4? Yeah, well it's implemented in basically all smartphones now. It's on a lot of Macs, Windows-based ultrabooks, and it may be the new norm sometime. Specifically, I'm talking about the 200% scale thing it does. So let's say the actual width of a phone is 1080 pixels. The actual DOM width would be 540 pixels.

What I'm proposing is, pretty much any images displayed on articles that exceed 50% of their native resolution should be categorised as a non-retina image. Or maybe it's too soon to start considering? What about aliased inventory images (they seem to be the last aliased, low-res thing in RS3)? Bren 11:59, June 23, 2017 (UTC)

Discussion

Comment - Sorry, what? Fswe1 17:01, June 23, 2017 (UTC)

Comment - For starters, "Retina" is a trademark that Apple uses to describe their displays ([1]). For the plebs out there who still use Windows, a Retina display is basically a display with sufficiently high resolution that the human eye can't discern individual pixels at a normal viewing distance.

That being said, I'm like 99% sure that the RuneScape client draws things based on pixels, regardless of screen size, so that retina displays just give you more screen space without actually increasing the resolution of anything (source: I play on a Mac with a Retina display). From a programming standpoint, it'd be quite difficult and annoying to increase the pixels on things randomly based on physical size.

So, I'm pretty sure this proposal is technically impossible/pointless since there is no such thing as a Retina (tm) image in RuneScape. --Liquid^Talk 17:17, June 23, 2017 (UTC)

RuneScape actually just ignores your screen's @2x density entirely (default behavior for applications without Retina support) and goes with your screen's physical size, meaning that if you have a HiPDI screen with 2880x1800 resolution, it produces graphics for a 1440x900 screen instead. It's scaling up images to 200%, instead of properly rendering at native resolution and then scaling down by 50%.

The most obvious example of this is how all text is pixelated. In this screenshot the bottom line is actual in-game text, 12px Museo Sans (forced to scale up to twice the size); the middle line is 24px Museo Sans (how text optimized for Retina display should look like); and the top line is 12px Museo Sans (without resizing). If the client really drew things pixel-for-pixel, everything would be 50% smaller and text would basically be unreadable like the top line. In any case, Bren is talking about how images render on the wiki, not in the client. --Iiii I I I 08:23, June 24, 2017 (UTC)

Comment - I asked Wikia about this recently and they pretty much refused to work on supporting high density displays. Here was their response to my ticket:

Fandom has currently revamped our platform image service capabilities using WebP to improve performance. Now that we have improved the performance aspect we may begin to tinker with the algorithms to tune how we display them across devices. However at this time, there is not a current plan to focus any time soon intensely on the ResponsiveImages concept.

ResponsiveImages being the setting that outputs larger images for HiDPI displays. I've already hardcoded @2x support for the wordmark and page header background, since they can't/don't change from page to page, but it's obviously not feasible to do for all images on the wiki. I'm not sure there's anything we can really do on our end given Wikia's position. --Iiii I I I 08:23, June 24, 2017 (UTC)

Closed - Per 3i+1, seems not technically feasible right now. --Liquid^Talk 00:26, June 30, 2017 (UTC)