Minimum Resolution..

After reading the HD support thread a week or so back, I got curious...

What is the MINIMUM resolutions any of you are targetting in your game development? Has anyone had any amount of luck creating a resolution independent solution for 2D graphics? I've personally thought of targetting no less than 1024x768 (*maybe 800x600*)

I've been wondering about the best approach for tackling the HD issue. I'd rather show more of the playfield than stretch/distort the graphics. But, for heads-up displays/score/health-meter type stuff, the placement of these seem to only work best if you anchor it to the sides of the screen.

Anyone have some insight or recommendations?

Thanks!

If you are really interested in how to support many display settings, look into good web design. The graphical tricks that are used in web design can be applied to anything. That is one of the best places to look. Again, you can also look towards how OSs handle things.

Making things doc to the left and right and center of a bar, that never needs more space than the minimum. Also, evenly spaced items on a bar, these are good HUD options.

Showing more of the playing field can effect gameplay, if it doesn't have a large effect, you can do that. If that would have an effect, another option is something like what Ultima Online does. It has an 800 by 600 pane, that you can move around like a window. It has all the other tools as floating windows. This kind of thing was done a lot back when resolution was much smaller. Sim Tower, Sim City 2000.

These are all good options.

Don't lock yourself into traditional view schemes. If the game is single player and having a bigger view will effect the gameplay. That is of much smaller concern than in a multiplayer game.

It is part of the game design. Gameplay isn't just genre, story, and details. It is everything.

i would say 1024x768 is the prefered option for most gamers as its a good balance between vis vs performance, however, most laptop displays are weighing in at 1280x768/800 now, and some people hate stretched graphics.

It depends what your minimum specification is.

If you want your game to work on a 600MHz PC with 8mb onboard graphics, then its no good supporting a minimum of 1024x768.

My game supports up to four fixed resolutions (as many as are available on the users PC); 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024, all in fullscreen and windowed.

My default resolution is 800x600 fullscreen, as this seems to be the preferred default setting for portals.

The way I do it, is to have a tX:Float() and tY:Float() function. When I set a graphics mode, I get a ratio and store it - game logic is always based on 800x600:

Function initialiseScaling()
	xRatio:Float = GraphicsWidth()/800.0
	yRatio:Float = GraphicsHeight()/600.0
End Function

Function tX:Float(val:Float)
	Return val*xRatio
End Function

Function tY:Float(val:Float)
	Return val*yRatio
End Function

Then, where I normally have:

SetScale(0.5, 0.5)
DrawImage image,x,y

This becomes:

SetScale(tx(0.5), ty(0.5))
DrawImage image,tx(x),ty(y)

As I said before, the game logic is always running at 800x600, so I don't need to include this transformation in sprite movements etc. Its just the visual representation of the game thats scaled. So, any occurences of setScale, or screen coordinates must be multiplied by xRatio or yRatio - thats what tX() and tY() do.

Note that 1280x1024 is a 5:4 aspect ratio, not a 4:3 one (which would be 1280x960).

I go down to 640x480 with Naked War but I'm doing everything 3D so there's no faffing around with 2D stuff. Not that it looks great at 640x480 but it's playable.

I would definitely support down to at least 800x600.

800x600. If it's good enought for Big Fish Games, it's good enough for me.

I don't think that desktop systems need to have support for less than 1024x768 .. but the said laptops are another story. My laptop is 1024x768, 15". Question is whether laptops gain popularity in recent times. I can imagine MrsHousehold to have a small laptop for casual games/internet/email. Small enough to be able to store it in some corner, out of sight.

some laptop graphics cards are woefully inadequate for BMax unfortunately.

I think you have to consider 640x480 as being viable for a number of people even though 800 and 1024 are more popular. Apparently 1024 is now the most popular.

I'm working on a solution to do resolution-independent graphics, to support widescreen and different aspect ratios, keeping everything the right proportion and as much detail as possible. You pretty much have to get into playing with the projection matrix to do that.

I don't think the player should have to suffer `side effects` produced by your game not being comprehensive enough in its understanding of the issue of resolution. You as the designer should be sensitive to the fact there are many different resolutions and aspect ratios and try to get your game to work with all of them without noticeable loss of quality or wierd stretching or whatever. I'd consider it a bug or lack of feature if everything appeared stretched out in a different resolution than the one you intended. Of course, you have control of what options you offer, so you could just fix to a given resolution or set of resolutions and ignore the rest.

There are some drawbacks to supporting different aspect ratios and widescreen etc, in that you have to start considering how to use the space, what happens when you have a different proportion of width and height, does the game area get bigger, does that affect gameplay or give an advantage, do you shrink the graphics or keep it in proportion, etc.

That might be over-simplifying it a bit, but I understand where you're coming from.

The web scales the placement of the content, not the content itself. The web utilizes percentage-based "tables" to allow upward scalability to consume screen real estate in a consistent way. This is the approach I'll probably be taking for the HUD and static data on the screen because I don't think I'll have to worry too much about keeping those elements the same visual size from resolution to resolution.


I agree. If you were to compare this type of thing to home video...

If a movie is released in fullscreen (formerly called "pan and scan"), when they make the transfer, they literally have a scripted camera that focusses in on notable action of the scene. It moves, it zooms, it pans where appropriate to fill the 1:1.33.

If we were to follow that metaphor/pattern, we'd have to have different code to handle the "focal" point of the action, and make sure that things happening on opposite ends of the widescreen playfield do not (as you said) alter the gameplay significantly.

With that in mind, I'm wondering if constraining the playfield to a "black barr'ed" area would be a better approach.

I'd allow the statistical data to be placed on the screen in about the same place (scaled in the way web way). That would put those elements outside the black bars in a traditional display, and put them in as an overlay on a widescreen display (similarly to how they do sub-titles in movies)

Back to the original question though... I'm not necessarily targetting a low-end machine, but also not a bleeding edge one. Demographically, my stuff will probably skew toward Naked War more than Holiday Bonus. So presumably, I can get away with a slightly beefier machine, right?

I don't think i'd go with adding black bars, that totally defeats the purpose. If someone has a nice widescreen display resolution, they *want to use it* fully, they aren't going to choose a widescreen mode only to have you chop off a large percentage and not use it.

Now you're arguing at cross purposes with yourself. You can't do everything you said about keeping the display 100% consistent across resolutions without having black bars. If you choose not to have black bars, you're going to be scaling things differently or leaving gaps at some resolutions and not in others.