Turning off antialiasing in Löve2D

Question

I'm using Löve2D for writing a small game. Löve2D is an open source game engine for Lua. The problem I'm encountering is that some antialias filter is automatically applied to your sprites when you draw it at non-integer positions.

love.graphics.draw( sprite, x, y )

So when x or y is not round (for example, x=100.24), the sprite appears blurred. The same happens when the sprite size is not even, because (x,y) points to the center of the sprite. For example, a sprite which is 31x30 big will appear blurred again, because its pixels are painted in non-integer positions.

Since I am using pixel art, I want to avoid this all the way, otherwise the art is destroyed by this effect. The workaround I am using so far is to force the coordinates to be round by littering the code with calls to math.floor(), and forcing all the sprites to have even sizes by adding a row or column of transparent pixels with the paint program, if needed.

Is there some command to deactivate the antialiasing I can call at program startup?

Answer 1

If you turn off anti-aliasing you will just get aliasing, hence the name! Why are you drawing at non-integral positions, and what do you want it to do about those fractional parts? (Round them to the nearest value? Truncate them? What about if they're negative?)

Personally I would leave the low level graphics alone and alter your code to use accessors for x and y that perform the rounding or truncation that you require. This guarantees your pixel art ends up drawn on integer boundaries while keeping the anti-aliasing on that you might need later.

Answer 2

In case anyone is interested, I've been asking in other places and found out that what I am asking is already requested as feature: http://love2d.org/forum/tracker.php?p=2&t=7

So, the current version of Löve that I'm using (0.5.0) still doesn't allow to disable the antialias filter, but the feature is already in the SVN version of the engine.

Answer 3

Another possible work around may be to use math.floor() to round your integers as a cheap workaround.