Best Res to reach Max Customers?

Is it safe to assume that the majority of people who have PC's will be able to have a screen res of 1024/768?

Or would it be best to stick with 800/600?

Why assume? Why not support a variety of resolutions?

assume nothing, believe everything.

actually, imo you should default to 640x480 and then allow the user to set their own res.

I try to work specifically at 1280x1024, because lower resolutions often appear blurred on my monitor.
You should try to support everything, if possible :)

1920x1200

800x600 should be minimum these days. If the customer can't run at 800x600, chances are they can't run your app well enough to consider buying it either.

even my old crapped up like pentium nothing computer from like 1996 or something like that can run on 1024x768 but i would default to 800x600 and still allow the customer to choose. The customer is always right, especially when it comes to his computer and not yours.

800x600 I still have a monitor that cant support anything higher!

and 16 bit depth

800x600 and 32 bit imho.

I say 640 X 480 ... it works on everything. Look at Pop Cap games ... that's all they run in!

I'm still using one! :/ Well, it's supposed to do 1024x768 interlaced, but I've never been able to get it to do that. Not that I'm too bothered - interlaced, yuk!

It would be best to let the user chose. Recently I got the urge to play a game of The Sims again (don't ask). Spent nearly two hours installing everything. 5 minutes playing, and 2 minutes uninstalling. Playing it at such a low resolution on my 1920 x 1200 laptop screen was just unbearable.

1024x768, ppl should upgrade their monitor rather than going to the cinema + coke&popcorn and order pizzas for the whole familly afterwards. Monitors aren't that expensive anymore..

> The customer is always right,

i agree with this notion.

it depends, if the developer only want to support a mimimum of say 1024x768 then that's their decision. but if you want to access the widest possible audience, then it's 640x480, 16bit.

personally, when i look at demos of products and they only work in a res higher than my monitor, even though i can run at that higher res, i find it annoying and immediately loose interest in the program. others may well have this same attitude.

800x600 minimum here I think. Everything looks poor at lower res, even more so now that CRT's and most monitors have a native res much higher.

A lot of casual gamers don't actually know how to change settings on their computer and are unlikely to bother finding them in your game. With so many games and not a lot of time people rarely give games more than a few minutes to get hooked so it's always a tricky question.

Not that my opinion means much, I typicaly don't play casual games, and prefer 1024x768 gaming and 1280x1024 for applications on my medium spec system.

ok, here's the thing. I'd say yeah 640x480 16 bit BUT looking at all those web stats out there, most customers have XP and you know that they are probably on some Dell crap with TFT minimum, and hardly anyone would browse the net in 640x480, and these are the people downloading your game.

Also, and this is a big one, portals no longer accept games that aren't well produced enough. This means using 3D effects like Max can do. Now if you have a card that can do 3D stuff, DirectX7, it can do 800x600, maybe not 32 bit but HIGHLY likely. So if your game is in Max, doing it in 640x480 may mean portals won't accept it and players will think it looks old style. Also if they run it in windowed mode on their 1024x768 (whatever) TFT, it will look tiny and silly.

I think higher than 800x600 is not good right now though. Maybe in another year or two.

> A lot of casual gamers don't actually know how to change settings on their computer

true, but casual gamers aren't the main target audience, this type of people shouldn't be the rule but the exception.

although i do agree that there is a stong argument for a default of 800x600,32bit, especially if using Max as Grey says.

aren't the main audience for what? They are the main audience for "casual" games right?

Best bet is to use a projection matrix, and when the user first starts the game, hunt through the list of resolutions they support and pick the best one.

You must not have had many customers. Not only is the customer nearly always wrong, but in 99% of the cases, ambiguous, and heterogenous.

If you're selling a product, you need to stop focusing on customers, and start focusing on market segment. If you're selling a solution, by all means, focus on the customer. But from what I can tell, most of us are making products, not solutions.

Thats why you're not selling. You don't sell products, you sell solutions.

You're so very wrong, flameduck.

i know, the customer is usually stupid, but he had money. So if you want to get paid, then just play along.

Says who?

FD: what are you selling then? Can we see it on-line?

I *was* selling a solution oriented accounting and payroll program (written in BlitzPlus), and no you can't see it online, as we where bought out by our largest customer, and they have no intention of sharing it with others. Problem was, it was rather difficult to make any decent money of selling a solution and maintaining 1 code base that did 17 different things for 17 different customers.

I'm still working on my degree, once that's done, a group of developers with a common passion for a particular genre of videogames (including but not limited to yours truely) and a group of third party investors are forming a company, focused on games and products, as opposed to applications and solutions. The projections look pretty promissing so far.

I can't really say much about it at this stage, but remind me again in Janurary 2008 and I'll see if I can't hook you up with a demonstration somewhere in your local area.

Aww man... I'm washing my hair in January 2008!

Seriously though, 21 months away is a lifetime in terms of computing / gaming, I hope your "projections" are accurate.

i'd go with 800x600 as min res.

Amazed you managed it in BlitzPlus. What database did you use? Anyway, been there done that in Delphi for the last 9.5 years!!! www.merlio.com Sold it to the goverment too (3 times) amongst other big fishes. I'm still maintaining a single code-base and one huge ass ini file that allows it to do different things for 100s of customers, it's a biatch, but pays the bills (when I can be arsed)

If you're not making an über casual game like poker or such, but a 3D game for gamers, I wouldn't go lower than 1024x768 as the default resolution.
Come on, face it - even the low low end Dell PC's can do that resolutions nowadays.
People that are serious about their gameplaying, will have computers that can atleast handle that.

Come to think of it, please put in support for 16:9 aspectratios aswell, because thats even more common now on laptops aswell as desktops.

800 X 600 for true 2d (not 3d accelerated) and let the user choose for anything else. 640 X 480 is not as well supported by PC's these days - especially laptops.

Also TFT screens have an optimum resolution so a choice is preferred.

It's a tricky question. Noobs might think your game is crap if it starts at 640*480 on their $2000 christmas present. Cavemen might get upset if they got 1fps or black screen from too high res. The way I normally do it is to get the resolution/bitdepth that their desktop is in and default at that. Enumerate all the other modes the system supports and put those as your user selectable list.

If you check the web for internet website development they usually show survey results that MOST people are still using 800x600 as the majority resolution size. The 1024 size IS increasing in popularity but it isn't the most widely used, at least the last time I checked.

Thinking back to the good old days where 320x256 or 320x200 was a default resolution, it's interesting to even think of working at 640x480 yet alone anything higher. Bear in mind the extra bandwidth you'll need, graphics-wise, to do everything that hi-res at a good speed.

I would probably offer 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768, unless it were a type of game that people could feasibly play at a higher res - you could always just give the option. 640x480 for some people is already pushing it.

Oracle. It wasn't really too bad tho' although I must admit I did have a few "I should've @#!*ing done this in Java" moment.

They're not my projections, and 21 months is a fraction of the time it takes to make a game like this.