Anti- Aliasing a small image?

Question

As you can see above, I have an image of a game I've been working on using Java. Using AWT I added the following:

public static void drawImageRotated(
        Graphics2D g2d, BufferedImage img, double x, double y, int scale, double angle) {

    BufferedImage image = new BufferedImage(
                                     (int)(img.getWidth() * 1.5D),
                                     (int)(img.getHeight() * 1.5D),
                                     2);
    Graphics2D g = (Graphics2D)image.getGraphics();
    g.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING, RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON);
    g.rotate(Math.toRadians(angle), image.getWidth() / 2, image.getHeight() / 2);
    g.drawImage(img,
                image.getWidth()  / 2 - img.getWidth() / 2,
                image.getHeight() / 2 - image.getHeight() / 2,
                null);
    g2d.drawImage(image,
                 (int)x-(image.getWidth()*scale/2),
                 (int)y-(image.getHeight()*scale/2),
                 image.getWidth()*scale,
                 image.getHeight()*scale,
                 null);
    g.dispose();      
}

This is the code which draws the ships onto the screen. As you can see there is a blue and a cyan ship on the screen, the blue ship's rotation being 0 and the cyan having a rotation of just over 270 degrees. The cyan ship is distorted and that's what I want to get rid of. Is there an anti-aliasing for small images like that one (16x16)?

Answer 1

That code seems more complicated than necessary, what you need is to just draw your image with the right transformation matrix.

I don't speak Java so there may be mistakes in this, but it should look something like:

AffineTransform transform = new AffineTransform();
transform.rotate(angle,img.getWidth()/2,img.getHeight()/2);
transform.scale(scale,scale);
transform.translate(x,y);
g2d.drawImage(img,transform,null);

The first 4 lines build a translation matrix, you don't need to worry much about how that works, except that the construction order matters.