(2D) High res background sprites

ezsilman

Hi all. I'm not sure whether what I'm doing is a correct method for achieving what should probably be a quite simple and standard thing.

I am using Unity 2D camera settings.

I want to work in the highest resolution possible (which on my monitor is 1920x1080 anyway), but obviously once built it should be playable in different resolutions according to the player's selections.

My main background sprite has a resolution of 5333x3000 pixels. And all of the smaller objects in the scene are relative to that. Using the 2D Demo camera settings, an orthographic camera with a size of 3 is way too small. I need something more like 14. But then all of the Playerstart2d and marker2d and other AC editor graphics appear WAY too small, as they have a much lower res.

However, I then discovered the pixels per unit setting and I changed this settings on my sprites from 100 to 250. Therefore, I was able to use an orthographic camera size of 5.5 and it all looks okay to me, and I can see the AC icons again to be able to work properly. Is this the right way to do things? To change the pixels per unit on my sprites from the default 100 to something higher?

I also thought about changing the AC editor icon sprites to a lower pixel per unit setting (from 250 to about 100 or something) but I don't want to edit any core as it will get overwritten from updates.

ChrisIceBox

AC works best at a scale that allows you to see it's various icons clearly - walk speeds, pathfinding algorithms, etc are all configured to work at this size by default (though can be changed, of course).

Changing the pixels per unit setting is definitely the way to go.

ezsilman

You mean changing the pixels per unit setting for my background sprites and not the AC icons, right?

klarax

Well, I'm no expert tbh.

But I can tell you what I have learnt from the past 6 months doing 2D sprite stuff, and what works for me.

My artist usually sends me the entire background and its usually big. 7xxx by 4xxx or something. (yes the bg is made up of all separate layers for ordering, but the general scale of it)

This is basically way to big for backgrounds, well if you want your game to have a normal size build.

Unity can only compress images that are power of 2. so all or any images should be 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 etc in size.

An image of 2048 x 2048 image will compress to around 2 meg. 512 x 512 will usually be about 0.5meg. See the difference? And that's using compression power of 2 compression.

Width/ height should be one of these values, 2048 x 1024 will still work for compression.

As time goes on you will get to know, that the smaller the image, the lower the size needs to be. I.e. a small rock could be 128x128 as its smaller in scene...

The scene below uses a 2048 image, and looks good, even when the cam zoom in.

On a side note: im using 512x512 for each character.

Anyway, i hope this helps somewhat.

ChrisIceBox

@ezsilman: Yes, I was referring to the background sprites.