MGE: couple of things:
OK, I posted about the edge artifacts issue before. It's like this:
1) Integer coords, no artifacts, but won't look ultrasmooth when scrolling unless you lock refresh rate to 60 and move 60 pixels per second.
2) Float coords, individual tiles. Each tile will have an anti-aliased edge, this can't be avoided and is OK because it makes the scrolling look smoother BUT the anti-aliasing is a bit crappy due to lack of source data on adjoining tiles for the anti-aliasing so it can look bad on some tile edges.
3) Float coords, one big tile (or mesh). Aha, this looks best because the anti-aliasing takes into account the adjacent tiles. This is the one that I want to achieve.
There is a real different between 2 and 3, I've seen it with my own eyes, in fact I posted a demo about it in a thread a while back. Your 512 tile test is also better than if you rendered them individually, try it.
"Integers won't look that smooth though." Worked fine on the Nintendo, Genesis, ST, Amiga, etc. ;)
. It looked smooth on those games because they always scrolled by an integer amount. So for example and Amiga game scrolled at 50 pixels per second which was the screen refresh rate (for PAL systems). So 1 pixel per frame = smooth. For modern games you want different scroll speeds and also the framerate is not fixed thus it will not look totally smooth. Even Turrican in an Amiga emulator no longer looks smooth unless you run your screen at 100Hz.OK, I posted about the edge artifacts issue before. It's like this:
1) Integer coords, no artifacts, but won't look ultrasmooth when scrolling unless you lock refresh rate to 60 and move 60 pixels per second.
2) Float coords, individual tiles. Each tile will have an anti-aliased edge, this can't be avoided and is OK because it makes the scrolling look smoother BUT the anti-aliasing is a bit crappy due to lack of source data on adjoining tiles for the anti-aliasing so it can look bad on some tile edges.
3) Float coords, one big tile (or mesh). Aha, this looks best because the anti-aliasing takes into account the adjacent tiles. This is the one that I want to achieve.
There is a real different between 2 and 3, I've seen it with my own eyes, in fact I posted a demo about it in a thread a while back. Your 512 tile test is also better than if you rendered them individually, try it.