Java Images - "1 to 1" image scaling

Question

I want to have a pixel-styled look for my test game, but when I scale them to the size I want them to be displayed at (50x50; the actual size of the tiles is 16x16), it gets that ugly smoothed out look I dont want to have.

img = new Image("test.png").getScaledCopy(50,50);

Size of test image is 16x16 and I want it to be displayed at a size of 50x50, but like 1:1 scaled, not the ugly smoothed out way.

A bit like in the sandbox game "Minecraft", the block tiles and such are much smaller than the displayed ones, yet they are not "smoothed".

Thank you a lot for any help :)

Answer 1

In your case, the anti aliasing filters look crummy because you have a very small image (16x16) and are upscaling it only a small bit (to 50x50). In your case, you likely want a sharper image, so you'd likely want to go with nearest neighbor interpolation, rather than the built-in default (either bi-linear or bi-cubic, not entirely sure which is the default).

Image original = …;
original.setFilter(Image.FILTER_NEAREST);
Image scaled = original.getScaledCopy();

So in your case, it would be something like:

Image original;
Image scaled;
original = new Image("test.png");
original.setFilter(Image.FILTER_NEAREST);
scaled = original.getScaledCopy(50, 50);

Please note that this won't be a true "1:1" scaling, since the scaling factor is not an integer ratio (ie: 50/16 isn't a whole non-decimal number). If you were to upscale to 64x64, you could have a "1:1" rescaling, since 16*k=64, where k is an integer.