Do you use the Bilinear Plus and Motion Blur filters?

[Plombo]

As some of you know, I'm working on replacing the image scaling filters in OpenBOR that are licensed under the GNU GPL because our own license is not actually GPL-compatible.  At least two of the GPL-encumbered filters seem rather useless to me - "Bilinear Plus" and "Motion Blur".

--------- Warning: Gruesome technical details about image scaling algorithms below. ----------
"Bilinear Plus" is someone's attempt to make a bilinear filter where none of the pixels in the scaled image are copied directly from the source image.  Actually using the filter and comparing it to the regular bilinear filter shows that the problem it's trying to solve is not really a problem, and it produces an image that looks much worse, unintentionally losing detail from the original image and making the picture look jagged.  (It's worth noting that whoever created this filter was not an OpenBOR developer.)

"Motion Blur" doesn't make the picture look bad, but it's indistinguishable in practically all cases from "Simple 2x" (which does nearest-neighbor filtering for those of you who know what that means).  It only blurs the motion from the previous frame, and since most OpenBOR mods have things moving at most 1 pixel per frame when running at 60 FPS or higher, all the filter does is apply a small amount of antialiasing on a tiny number of frames, which is almost impossible to notice.  As far as I can tell, the only noticeable thing it does do is the unintended side effect of blurring the first "Loading" screen with the select screen.
--------------------------- Gruesome technical details end here. ---------------------------

Since these filters are not very useful, they don't seem to me to be worth reimplementing from scratch, so both will probably be removed in the near future.  But I'm not the only person whose opinion counts, so I'd like to ask you (yes, you!) to answer this poll.  And if you do use one of these scaling filters and don't want to see it go, I'd appreciate it if you'd say why you prefer it to the others.

[magggas]

My vote was sure : No, I don't use either


Off topic:
I liked this part of your post:

..I'd like to ask you (yes, you!)

[utunnels]

I don't use them.
My favorite so far is dot matrix or tv2x.
I don't even like 2xsai and its variants, they look too lossy in some situations.

[Liu-Kang]

Meh, I don't really like either very much. I'm fine with normal, or with some mods like the one I'm making look good with "16-Bit Advance Mame2x" IMO.

[BeasTie]

@Plombo thanks for the info, I'd been wondering for a while what these actually did, I never noticed any difference with these filters either.

[Bloodbane]

 I don't use any of them. Last time I tried (so long ago), the result is not appealing so I never use them again.

 Thanks for the info BTW

[Plombo]

So after almost two weeks, the vote seems to be unanimous: 10 people for "I don't use either" and none for anything else.  I'll go ahead and remove those two filters to continue with the removal of GPL-licensed code in the engine.

[BeasTie]

Well TBH I can't use any filters unless I'm in SDL windowed mode, SDL fullscreen won't actually go full screen for me.  (just the same size with black borders) it only really works for 320x240 res.  Mods that are 480x272 get left with black borders.  Same with 960x540 (the modes I use mainly)

SDL modes stretch image heaps too when you have widescreen, even if you choose don't stretch, it obviously still does.

Opengl mode doesn't seem to have this stretching problem.

OpenGL fullscreen looks great, but only bilinear filter. (got windows7 running in 1600x960 res)

- Is there problems with SDL and video modes?
- Is it possible to add scanlines/TV as an option under OpenGL?