How to mimick pico8's 128x128px game scaling?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

I want to work with small pixel sizes i.e. 8x8 px, but those are really hard to see with the default output behaviour of solar2d’s editor. How do I go about mimicking the kind of environment u have in the pico8 engine where the engine game content will scale according to the window size?
Maybe solar2d already does that but the window size is just locked?
Or just a scaling option in general I can trigger to make everything 2x 4x etc. Using obj:scale() would just make everything a blur. Making everything twice as big b4 import doesn’t thrill either.

Even just some kind of method to ‘zoom’ in on sections like an 8x8 pixel sprite would be useful so when I can see the pixels when making the game. When I export things to the web they blowup in size even if they are made in an 320x180px environment.

I like to work with the engine in the top-right corner small enough so it only takes like 320x180 pixels up. I suppose another option might be to make a larger size game, but then shrink the window down to that corner if that’s possible…but the assets being bigger would require more resources to generate which isn’t ideal.

#2

display.setDefault(“magTextureFilter”, “nearest”)

display.setDefault(“minTextureFilter”, “nearest”)

You can try it in main.lua

-More detail

#3

Oh okay so that gives u nearest neighbour scaling then so its not blurry (had to rewrite the " since sublime thinks its quotes). When I googled it gave decade old posts that said they didn’t have nearest neighbour scaling in solar2d. That will be useful.

Is there a way to scale the game based on the window size like in pico8? Like if I make the pico8 window really small the entire 128x128 output scales down, if I make it big the pixels r huge so u can see the individual pixel details properly.

#4

Working with tiny pixels can be tough! Try setting up ‘nearest neighbor’ scaling in Solar2D’s config to avoid blurring when scaling up. You could also render your 8x8 art on a larger canvas in the editor, then scale it down in-game. Another option is to keep a fixed 320x180px game window and scale up (2x, 4x) for clarity. Hope this helps!