What's No Smoothing, Bilinear and Bicubic?

I'm trying to improve on my graphics by importing  higher res images. Initially I use No Smoothing, but I would like to know the differences between the other 2 options in the dropdown menu. I tried searching for it in Stencylpedia, but got no matches found.

And how do I ensure that whatever dimensions I set in my 480x320, has the exact replica, just blown up bigger when I import to a larger screen device?

I read about the different scaling modes, and tried it all, but there are disadvantages as indicated in Stencylpedia.

Thanks.

I have same question, but no one bothers to explain.  Highest resolution, though, is achieved via 4x bicubic, but no explanation of this can be found anywhere. Looks like, the Stencyl creators really did not know what they did or, are not interested in making Stencyl popular

Also, you can read here
http://nickyguides.digital-digest.com/bilinear-vs-bicubic.htm
But, none explain any basics of Stensyl anywhere except you search non-related resources yourself, which makes stencyl  unpopular by definition

No smoothing is best for pixelart. In that case, pixels are scaled up and down to keep their shapes (i.e. squares). Bicubic is best for small games when you are scaling up to higher resolution. For instance, with your 480x320 game scaling up to 1334x750 iphone 6, you would want it to scale with bicubic.

From my experience, the best graphics come from making your game 1x at a high resolution (such as 2048x1536 for ipads) and bilinear scaling down to the other resolutions. I never use 4x, 3x, 2x, or 1.5x because it saves multiple copies of the images and can make your file size massive. I think it should be defaulted to just 1x because I don't think people utilize the other scales properly, anyway. The first thing I do with any game is uncheck the other scales in settings.

Now there is caveat to what I was just saying. With pixel art, a lot of times black lines will appear on the screen. This is simply because the system is looking for data and the chances are that your actor pixels do not perfectly match. When this happens, a black line appears at the edge of the picture that did not scale. I have not played around with settings enough to figure out how to get rid of that.

Long story short, the best resolution is large images and large game screen scaled down with no smoothing (for pixelart) or bilinear for other art.

From my experience, the best graphics come from making your game 1x at a high resolution (such as 2048x1536 for ipads) and bilinear scaling down to the other resolutions. I never use 4x, 3x, 2x, or 1.5x because it saves multiple copies of the images and can make your file size massive. I think it should be defaulted to just 1x because I don't think people utilize the other scales properly, anyway. The first thing I do with any game is uncheck the other scales in settings.

In that example above, would I assume you are not planning on running on low end devices, low ram etc (mainly android)? I would imagine those large files with hi res would kill the memory and performance on a small budget phone?

In that example above, would I assume you are not planning on running on low end devices, low ram etc (mainly android)? I would imagine those large files with hi res would kill the memory and performance on a small budget phone?

The exact opposite. As with this thread: http://community.stencyl.com/index.php/topic,48523.0.html, going with large images at 1x decreases the file size over have smaller images with 4x, 3x, 2x, 1.5x, 1x.