Spring RTS Engine

Um, just had this crazy idea...

I know that people have made working bloom shaders... so I was thinking to myself, "why not a sharpen operation, to give better contrast values on screens at lower resolutions?".

At any rate, this may be an OK algorithm to try (it has some other stuff in there that might be cool, too)...

http://www.skywar.org/wiki/index.php/GLSL

Isn't AntiAliasing a much better method of making lower-resolutions look better?

No. The problem is that UI elements are all based on Trepan's code, which assumes a graphical resolution of 1600/1200 (I figured this out when dealing with some UI elements recently).

Moreover, there's a bigger issue. Today's players are very rarely playing on CRT displays- they're using LCD displays that have a fixed size in pixels- smaller displayed resolutions are, therefore, emulations, and the LCD basically fuzzes everything up.

AA would make things even worse.

UI elements already look horrible at low resolutions. People like me, who are developing fixed-size UIs, can simply swap in UIs that have been pre-shrunk to look all right. But a sharpen shader would help a bit more, by increasing the contrast and cleaning up the fuzziness.