Pictoria

Weekly Report 5: Nametags and Zooming ​

January 4, 2026

This week we completed the picking system previewed in last week's report and used it to implement player nametags. We also added the ability to zoom out - we've included a demo later in this report.

When a player is hovered, their nametag is displayed. Alternatively, press N to toggle nametags for all players

Nametags ​

Players now have nametags that appear when you hover over them or if you press N to turn on nametags for all players.

This is a basic feature, but at least players aren't anonymous anymore.

We'll be adding features to enhance player identity in the future - including being able to click a player to open a window containing information about them as well as social options, e.g. to add them as a friend.

Zooming ​

This week we also added the ability to zoom out.

Zoom out for a bird's eye view of your composition

We prioritized this feature because it facilitates working on larger compositions - especially on small screens.

Scene Scaling Modes ​

The last major feature we worked on this week was a scaling mode setting. This feature only pertains to devices with high DPI screens.

What is scaling? On devices with high DPI screens, operating systems usually scale up the UI (e.g. 150% or 200%) - you'll see options for this in the Windows display settings for instance.

This scaling has a downside for Pictoria: if OS scaling is enabled with typical values, the OS scales Pictoria's 3D world up, applying a bilinear filter which causes slight blurriness.

Some sources recommend manually increasing the canvas size so the OS doesn't need to scale up, but that means Pictoria has to render textures larger than their original size, which causes blurriness/artifacts too.

Most games actually render textures using linear filtering and so always have this slight blurriness - it's not unbearably bad - but Pictoria aims for pixel-perfection where possible.

Why pixel-perfection? It makes it easier to create art and tooling for Pictoria (we experienced this firsthand when writing a script that turns MagicaVoxel scenes into Pictoria properties).

So, to enable pixel-perfection on devices with scaling, we added a scene-scaling-mode setting that lets you choose between "display scaling" (the default, which uses OS scaling) and "pixel perfect" (which overrides the OS/browser scaling up to ensure crisp rendering).

Use "display scaling" if you're casually exploring Pictoria and "pixel perfect" if you're creating something that needs it (you'll know).

Miscellaneous Improvements ​

  • Settings menu: Added a settings menu - for now it's just for zoom and scene scaling mode settings.

Bug Fixes ​

Several bugs were fixed this week:

  • Vitals canvas blurriness: Fixed an issue where the location and pix values in the vitals component (top left of screen) appeared blurry on high DPI displays
  • Spacebar click propagation: Fixed a bug where pressing spacebar would trigger click events on focused elements
  • Chat bubble shadow: Fixed the shadow rendering on chat bubbles
  • Buy skin mode: Fixed initial selection dimensions in the panel
  • WebGL2 context issues: Fixed problems with the WebGL2 context during image generation

What's Next ​

With nametags and zooming complete, we've got just one more planned feature before closed alpha: player status indicators. These will show when a player is in a create mode and hence unable to see proximity chat - letting others know to use @Mentions (see weekly report 4) if they want to get their attention.