Anti-Aliasing

Overview

Anti-Aliasing is a mod for RimWorld that brings modern anti-aliasing to a game that never shipped with any. RimWorld renders thousands of pixel-art sprites and a tile-based world map, and at higher zoom levels the diagonal edges show hard, jagged stair-stepping. This mod smooths those edges with a choice of industry-standard techniques, applied entirely as GPU post-process passes after the simulation, so it costs nothing in ticks-per-second and the game's UI stays perfectly crisp.

What it does

• FXAA — Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing, a single cheap post-process pass. The lightest option, ideal for low-end hardware.
• SMAA — Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing, a faithful 1:1 port of the reference implementation for sharp, clean edges with minimal blur.
• SSAA — Supersampling at 1.5×/2×/4×, the highest-quality method and the only one that antialiases texture interiors, not just detected edges.
• CAS — AMD FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, applied after AA to restore detail without reintroducing aliasing.

Each method is implemented directly from its published reference (the NVIDIA FXAA whitepaper, the SMAA paper and reference shaders, classic ordered-grid supersampling, and AMD's FidelityFX CAS), with simple quality presets up front and fine-grained advanced sliders for tinkerers. It supports RimWorld 1.4, 1.5, and 1.6.

Links

Available now on the Steam Workshop: Anti-Aliasing on the Steam Workshop.

This mod is one of several I maintain that are included in The Progression Modpack — the most popular and longest-running modpack in RimWorld's history. Across the workshop, my RimWorld mods are subscribed to by tens of thousands of players.

Related reading

For more on how these mods came together, read the blog post: Modding RimWorld.