How to make a picture look pixelated.

[zoopboy]

Hi guys, im in the process of making a game where I need to pixelate a picture, losing image definition without changing its physical size.

The way I thought of doing this was to zoom the image down, then zoom it back to the original size, thinking the pixels would be larger, and showing less detail in the image.
I didn't take into account that the zoom function uses the same original image to do the process though.

I then thought if I could zoom the image down, then save a copy of that image to memory or create another object using the smaller image, I could use that image/object to zoom back to the original size, thus loosing the required definition.

I do need to keep the original image as the player will be shown this at some point in the game.

The problem I have, is that I cant find how to save the zoomed image to memory to be used again.

I hope this makes sense to you guys and thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

[AyreGuitar]

zoopboy - You'd probably need t use the Screen Capture object to capture the scaled down image, then reload it into an Active Picture (with Picture Resize set to Fast) that's the same size as your original image. The other thing to consider is do you really NEED this effect for your game? You might find the Zoom or Zoom 2 Fade-in/out transitions look good enough, or some other process that's easier to achieve.

[nim]

I'd use the Surface object. Blit the background, Resize Surface to [something pretty small], Resize to original size.

[zoopboy]

Thanks for your suggestion AyreGuitar, I did know there was a Screen Capture object but thought it would be simpler if I could store a copy of a zoomed pic then use that. Also I want this process not to be seen by the player, just the end result.

Wouldnt it take quite a long time saving and loading the image from the screen capture?

The game is for iOS, does the Screen Capture extension work on iOS?

Also I dont think i will know the size of the picture, as it will be loaded in by the player from ones they have. I will probably have to limit it to a maximum size but will not know the original size.

The effect i'm after isn't a visual effect for transitions, im going to use it to make the image a player is looking at less obvious. I want to have different stages of pixelation depending on the difficulty settings.

[zoopboy]

Thanks Nim, where can i find the surface object extension?

[nim]

http://clickteam.info/looki/Extensions/Released/

[zoopboy]

Thanks nim.

[Jaffob]

These are pretty convoluted solutions. Firstly, if you need to take a screenshot, don't use the Screen Capture object; in this case you only need to take the screenshot through Windows.

I haven't tested this, but the easiest way would probably be to scale down the object, right-click, do Create -> Active Object, and scale the new object back up. If that doesn't work, try a combination of copy/paste operations, or use an external image editor if need be.

[Eliyahu]

Why can't the pixelated version just be stored as a different animation?

[AyreGuitar]

zoopboy - If it's for an iOS project, then you might have more luck posting in the iOS forum.
I don't think the surface object has been converted for iOS.
I have done a very limited conversion of the Screen Capture object for iOS (you can find it in the iOS Extensions subforum) - all it does is capture the whole screen, so probably not useful for what you want.