Artwork Sizing Question

[frater]

Hey guys,

I've been working on putting together a system using the new 1.0 hyperspin, and i've been looking at hypersync in particular. I've noticed that for some systems (For instance, TurboGrafx-16) Hypersync includes some excellent cart art, as well as the box art, but the default system theme includes only the box art.

I decided to make a copy of the standard default turbografx theme and modify it to add the carts to the theme in the same way that they are for other themes (such as the n64 default theme).

The problem is, I can't find any way to set the size of the artwork within hypertheme. It uses actual pixel size when I add the cart art. This is a problem for several reasons:

a) I don't want to resize all of the cart artwork. Not only is this an irritation, but the artwork is synced from hypersync, and I'd rather keep higher res art (which can be downscaled) than lowering the size and res.

The art wont be included in the theme - this is a default theme so it should be loading the artwork from the directory to match whichever game is selected. Thus, there's no control over what the end-user will have in their artwork directory. Odds are they'll have a standard hypersync, which as noted above, is quite a large art file.

Is there any way to tell hypertheme to scale the picture to a specific size, the way it does for video? It's seems odd that this wouldn't be possible.

[craiganderson]

I think you have to resize it outside of hyperspin.

somebody correct me if im wrong

thanks

craig

[dark13]

As far as I know there's no way to resize .pngs in hypertheme. Anyway resizing it in photoshop is not a huge work if you use "actions". Open a boxart in PS, create a new action and press record, resize one artwork, save it as .png and stop recording action. Then launch the action on the artwork's folder (select another folder as destination, obviously).

[craiganderson]

http://www.fotosizer.com/

[frater]

Hey,

Thanks for the replies, but I don't think i've made myself clear. I'm not asking for suggestions on how to resize pictures, I can do that just fine.

I was just hoping there was a way to set the scaling for an image in the theme without modifying the file itself. It seems strange that this isn't an option that has been implemented. In some situations, such as creating a default theme, it would definitely be useful.

Take the situation we have now with TurboGrafx-16. Hyperbase contains both box and cart art for the system. What I would like is a default theme that uses both these images for each game - similar to the N64 default theme with the cart in front of the box. This isn't currently possible because the cart art is about the same height as the box art - excellent quality art, but too big for the theme.

To solve this, I _could_ resize all the images. As I said above, obviously not clearly enough, this is not a good solution. Ideally, i'd like my theme to use hyperbase art as-is, so that anyone using the theme and hyper-sync would get the same experience - and not be in the situation where they need to resize the base images in order to use the theme. Resizing the images to make them smaller will also be reducing their quality, so it's not something we'd want to do with the base images.

I'm guessing from the responses I got that there actually is no way to set the size of the artwork in hypertheme beyond resizing the images themselves?

[Styphelus]

There's no way to do this in hypertheme. NO WAY! You have to re-size the image files outside of hyperspin. I use FotoSizer. It's free. You can re-size everything in your cart folder in one easy step.

http://www.fotosizer.com/

Save the original images in a separate folder for future use if that's what you are worried about.

[Retro Goonie]

What is the recommended size when creating 2D box art in Photoshop?

 

Canvas size (width & height in pixels)?

Resolution?

Colour mode?

8 bit, 16 bit, 32bit?

 

Any help would be appreciated.