Sharp Sprite is the implementation of Rotated Grid Super-Sampling (RGSS) for the Defold engine. If you use down-scaled high-resolution images in your game and you want to get rid of blurriness (because of mipmapping) or sharpness (because of disabled mipmapping), then RGSS is for you:

How does it work? RGSS samples the texture multiple times with an offset on each sample and averages the results. For this, it uses a 4x MSAA rotated grid pattern, sometimes called 4 rooks.

Also, check out the demo.

You can use it in your own project by adding this project as a Defold library dependency. Open your game.project file and in the dependencies field under project add:

https://github.com/indiesoftby/defold-sharp-sprite/archive/main.zip

Or point to the ZIP file of a specific release.

Sharp Sprite contains materials that are drop-in replacement for the standard 2D materials:

• /builtins/materials/gui.material → /sharp_sprite/materials/gui.material
• /builtins/materials/particlefx.material → /sharp_sprite/materials/particlefx.material
• /builtins/materials/spine.material → /sharp_sprite/materials/spine.material
• /builtins/materials/sprite.material → /sharp_sprite/materials/sprite.material
• /builtins/materials/tile_map.material → /sharp_sprite/materials/tile_map.material
• /builtins/fonts/font.material → /sharp_sprite/fonts/font.material or /sharp_sprite/fonts/font-singlelayer.material
• /builtins/fonts/font-fnt.material → /sharp_sprite/fonts/font-fnt.material
• /builtins/fonts/label.material → /sharp_sprite/fonts/label.material or /sharp_sprite/fonts/label-singlelayer.material
• /builtins/fonts/label-fnt.material → /sharp_sprite/fonts/label-fnt.material

• RGSS requires the OES_standard_derivatives OpenGL extension to run. It's universally supported by WebGL 1.0, by the most of OpenGL ES 2.0 devices (Android stats and by all iOS devices).
• RGSS is sampling the texture 4 times. On mobile GPUs, it can have a significant performance impact. You should always check the game performance on your target devices!
• Sharp Sprite's implementation of RGSS is blurring at 1:1 scaling.

• RGSS doesn't use mipmapped textures. You can turn off the mipmapping in your texture profile and save 30% of disk space.
• If your sprites use both Defold standard and Sharp Sprite materials, then it's a good idea to split them by tags to avoid breaking of draw batching:
  1. Copy Sharp Sprite material to your project and apply tag tile_rgss into it.
  2. Modify your render script to draw the tagged sprites.

Based on an original idea by Ben Golus - Sharper Mipmapping using Shader Based Supersampling.

The snake image is from Kenney.