Christmas Special Ranks

[Giant Chicken]

What's the shame Christmas rank and why does Greengoop have it? Did he get banned or something?

[CosmicStrider]

Awesome new Christmas Special Ranks guys! Those are pretty nice! I updated my post listing them all with those!

Our ranks are on the list for the world to see? I'm very flattered, thank you~

It's nice to see so many different ranks, everyone put a lot of heart into them.

I think I might make a Black Spy rank every chance I get. It was a lot of fun to put together, and I've got plenty of material to work with! (And with Chronic's help, I finally understand how GIMP works a little!)

[ChronicTraitor]

Awesome new Christmas Special Ranks guys! Those are pretty nice! I updated my post listing them all with those!

(And with Chronic's help, I finally understand how GIMP works a little!)

Thanks for changing our ranks into something special, Santa! The Spies suit us perfectly, with us being twins and all.
Despite our ranks, I promise you we've been nice all year! I for one love Christmas, with all the lights and the seasonal hot cocoa mix.

All the kind words are greatly appreciated as well, it's what makes the Christmas Special Ranks truly Special!

I'm glad to have helped Cosmic with GIMP as well, I know how annoying some programs can be to get them to do what you want!

[Reese Riverson]

What's the shame Christmas rank and why does Greengoop have it? Did he get banned or something?

I can only answer the first part of the first question.

The shame Christmas Rank is based off one of the main Shame Ranks that are on this forum:


It along with the toilet rank are used as punishments for misbehaving members who refuse to listen to staff warnings.

[Giant Chicken]

Fair enough, thanks for telling me.

[Santa]

Thanks for changing our ranks into something special, Santa! The Spies suit us perfectly, with us being twins and all.
Despite our ranks, I promise you we've been nice all year! I for one love Christmas, with all the lights and the seasonal hot cocoa mix.

Ho ho ho! You are quite welcome, my dear!

Christmas cheer for all to see!

Remember folks! Christmas day is a week away, if you want your chance at wearing a Christmas Special Rank, please make sure you submit your request today!

[lyndo64]

How much longer do our special ranks last?

[DaveRattlehead]

How much longer do our special ranks last?

As it's a Christmas special rank, I guess we'll keep them at least until the first week of 2024. Unfortunately, Christmas doesn't last longer

[Hunchman801]

Yeah, I was thinking of keeping them until after New Year's Day. Christmas wouldn't be the same if it lasted forever!

[Reese Riverson]

Yeah, I was thinking of keeping them until after New Year's Day. Christmas wouldn't be the same if it lasted forever!

Yeah, as proven in the Christmas everyday episode in the Fairly Odd Parents. People got sick of Christmas... again!

[Elite Piranha]

Btw, I recently visited the forums on mobile, and the ranks still look blurry to me, am I the only one?

[Reese Riverson]

Btw, I recently visited the forums on mobile, and the ranks still look blurry to me, am I the only one?

You're not the only one, it's primarily due to the small resolution of these images. Mobile screens and modern displays are higher resolution than what was the norm when this forum was first made.

So basically what happens is the web browser or OS has to scale up the images on high DPI screens, and generally things turn more blurry with the way they scale it. Most websites get around this issue by using higher resolution images so they can look nice and clean for high DPI screens, and use smaller or scaled down versions for systems not enforcing scaling beyond 100%.

[Steo]

It's a shame it can't just use some form of integer scaling with nearest neighbour, even just to bump it up a certain amount and then do the rest with some bi-linear filtrering or something if the user zooms in. It seems to only be using something like bi-linear altogether, at least it looks like it.

[Elite Piranha]

Thanks for the explanations (I had to look up what Steo said because I'm a dummy ).

I really regret not bringing this up when Plum was developing a new rank list, at the time I was using older devices with lower resolutions, so the images looked fine to me, but now that I have newer devices, I can see the difference.

[Steo]

If I was to show an example, this would be my pfp with simple 2x nearest neighbour:

imgonline-com-ua-resize-KfAwOnLwcI.png (13.11 KiB) Viewed 1179 times

This would be 2x with a filter applied:

imgonline-com-ua-resize-pHqCc94pMwkTZrHB.png (31.86 KiB) Viewed 1179 times

You can see that with nearest neighbour it seems blocky, but also sharper due to it. The other issue is like I mentioned, nearest neighbour can only work properly for integer scaling (2x, 3x, 4x, etc.), so even if this could work, it would have to use integer scaling in nearest neighbour depending on the DPI, and do the rest with some filtrering depending on the zoom level. I also don't know if this would work either way, and it would probably have to be so complex as to use 2x nearest neighbour then actually downsize again with cubic, because I assume even 2x is too big.

For me, the images look fine until I zoom in, in which case they look like a bilinear mess.

[Hunchman801]

If we were to use higher-resolution images for the rank list, I think it would make more sense to recreate them from the original images rather than attempt to upscale them using various methods. This will however not be possible for the many joke ranks whose original images were lost long ago, in which case AI upscaling could be a good alley to explore. Nearest neighbor only makes sense if the original sprites were very small to begin with, and bilinear upscaling is pretty much equivalent to what the browser is doing already on higher-resolution displays.

[Steo]

That makes sense in terms of recreating from the originals if it were to be done yeah. I also see what you mean, sprites such as those from Rayman 1 would work best with nearest neighbour. I noticed that the ranks were upscaled in the Alive video for RPC also.

[ItzalDrake]

Oh, when I made that video I didn't upscale them with AI but recreated them from scratch!
Idk if you noticed, but as I couldn't find the original image for the Spyglass pirate rank I used a different one so it looks different in the video
I still have the Photoshop file I used to make the ranks for the video, if you want I could share it

[Giant Chicken]

When are the special ranks going to be removed? Its been almost a month since Christmas and I still see them.

[lyndo64]

When are the special ranks going to be removed? Its been almost a month since Christmas and I still see them.

SHHH! don't tell them that!