scaling issues - blurry when down-scaled

[Ooops]

Hello.

 

I'm new here, and having made my first HTML5 game, I have trouble with scaling.

 

Being my first game, I didn't make all the smart moves  I've made my game and art assets to fit a 800*600 resolution. But of course many mobile devices are smaller than that.

I'm using GameMaker: Studio and followed their instructions (as well as other advices I gathered from various places) and my game scales to accommodate smaller screen. The problem is that, while everything still is at its logical place, it looks very blurry and the text is hard to read.

 

It's especially awful when using webgl. Even a very modest down-scaling (say 600*450) makes the text hard to decipher. Canvas rendering is somewhat better, but of course forcing canvas prevents the speed boost given by webgl. and there still comes a time when it is small enough that it looks like crap (like at the 480*320 resolution which seems like a requirement for old mobile devices). Without Webgl, I find also that Chrome handles down-scaling less graciously than Firefox (which looks almost OK down to 480*320)

 

Is there a way to chose how down-scaled graphics are rendered (linear, bicubic, that sort of things)? Or are there any other tips and tricks to keep in mind to achieve a good scaling?

 

Thanks for your help.

[Filipp_BSG]

Up.

Experiencing the same issue when managing canvas scaling via GMS; although, when pinching the webpage down even a little, the blurness immediately comes off (left – untouched, right – pinched down; iPhone 6, Safari):

The game above is 1280x1920, so, it's not because of scaling up to fil the screen. I guess that we should manage canvas scaling not via GMS, but via JS (since GMS' method gives such ugly results), but what is the best way to do that?

 

[mattstyles]

If you scale to non ^2 ratios then you're always going to get issues, whether or not they are visible is dependent on the exact ratio being scaled to and the type of interpolation used to try and handle scaling.

I'm not exactly sure how images get rendered into canvas but is it possibly you're also having issues with the dpi of the device its running on? i.e. is downscaling for the resolution change then trying to upscale somehow for the dpi.

[Filipp_BSG]

I've figured out that the blur was caused by <viewport> HTML tag on iOS and by <MobileOptimized><HandheldFriendly> meta on Android. Too strange...