Full screen, windowed, and resolution

Hey, I'm sitting here wondering: What do most people run their games on? Windowed mode? Fullscreen? And what resolutions do your games normaly run on?

Asking from a developer prespective(what do you makes your games run on?) and a gamer prespective (What would you rather run on windowed or fullscreen?)

I think 800,600 is a pretty standard resolution, but for example, 800,600 in full screen looks pretty crap on my 1680,1050 monitor.

Also, It's not to hard to change between windowed or fullscreen in realtime right? (I should try to implement this into my project)

Just curious, incase I have to end up choosing between fullscreen or windowed for my game.

You should give the player as many options as possible.

Depends, if I'm playing an FPS or MMO I rarely use windowed mode, however if I'm chatting (AIM, MSN, XFire, Yahoo!, etc) I prefer windowed.

Again, make as many options available to the player. Try to get in as many resolutions as you can, and try to get wide-screen support.

Shouldn't be.

It kind of is in b3d, because changing the graphics mode dumps all the loaded 3d stuff. (at least im -almost- sure it does :/)

I think the closest you can do on this is to use the win32 decls to erase the window border and title bar to make it appear as fullscreen (but not "true" fullscreen) and back again to having a window.


Yuk!
Use 1024*768 as your minimum. Very very few pcs now cant support that. I would even go as far as to say 32 bit only, but there are still a few very old intel gpus still around that only support 16.

My next game will be 800x600 32-bit with a safty fallback to 16 bit if required. It will start in full-screen but have a windowed option for players who want that.

My new monitor doesn't support 800x600. Might be a 16bit mode though. Tried running some older games, that are locked to 800x600. No go :o(

Trouble is, almost everyone is switching to flat screens @1280 width. 1024 on these screens looks -acceptable- but 800x600 while it looks ok on a crt, it looks terrible on >17" lcd.
Some cheapo flat screens dont even support fulscreen 800x mode/refresh anymore. My other one (sec disp.) doesnt.

I've seen quiet a few casual games that launch full screen use your native desktop resolution when you launch the game (Peggle comes to mind). So the flicker from your desktop to the game is much less jarring because your monitor isn't changing resolutions. But they setup the projection matrix to match the original game. So if it's an 800X600 designed game, it uses your monitors full res (ie 1920X1200) but the graphics are 'scaled' to fit the monitor with black borders on the left/right (in the case of widescreen).

This also allows you to give the user pretty much any option for resolution as your game becomes resolution independent. You could even go as far as having a 'high-res' version of textures. That is something I've seen in larger retail games, but haven't seen personally in casual games. When the resolution is above some sort of threshold the graphics are switched to the higher-res versions and don't get blurry for users with larger monitors.

Yeah I guess 800x600 will be phased out by hardware soon.

I play intensive single player games in 1680x1050 FullScreen, where I can forget about anything around me and just focus on the game (like C&C4, BioShock, Crysis, Stalker, DeltaForce).

I use windowed 1024x768 mode (on a 1680x1050 screen) for WoW, since the playing sessions are not so intense, and often waiting is involved where I can do other things with my PC while still keeping an eye on the WoW window. Also the TeamSpeak2 window is often needed in WoW playing, since I need to see who's speaking in a Raid.

If you want to keep it simple then just make your game in fullscreen 32-bit at 800x600 and 1024x768 resolutions.
Lots of games do that.

Those games look horrible on a 1680x1050 LCD. Then it's much better to take the Desktop resolution and use that as FullScreen. You can get the Desktop resolution with a few commands in BlitzMax:

Extern "Win32"
	Function GetSystemMetrics:Int(Axis:Int)
End Extern
Global SX:Int=GetSystemMetrics(0)
Global SY:Int=GetSystemMetrics(1)
Graphics SX,SY,32,60,2

Yeah, the game is in blitzmax, but the problem with the above is that the images then seem really small and out of place... Is there any way around this?

I code all of my games in widescreen mode now and pick the closest resolution the game will fit in and then render black pillars or bars if needed. Using an optional proj matrix the game can also run in lower or higher resolutions as needed. Run in lower resolutions the game runs faster for instance.

I think some people go with 640x480 or 800x600 as their resolution, but without properly supporting higher res, ie you select a higher res and the graphics are still low-res. That's nowhere near as inviting as playing at a high res with high-res graphics. Certainly these days 640x480 looks pretty blocky for most games.

I like to run everything windowed. If I want something full screen, then i run it as a maximized window. This way I retain mouse control to my second monitor where my browser window is, email, etc...

As for the graphics are smaller. What you have to do is find out what the size ration is between your native game resolution and the users display resolution, then scaled up all of your graphics to match it.

Or better yet, to make it look better, make your game want a high resolution, then scale your graphics down for people who want lower resolution. Graphics tend to look better when scaled down, not up.

800x600x32 fullscreen by default.

My game logic always runs in 800x600, but the game can be projected onto any size display.

Thanks for the replies... I've decided to stick with 1024x768...

Ran around and looked at like 16 different computers, all the monitors were 1024x768 or above...

With the bit depth thing, i've put 32-bit on the game, is there a win32 function to get the monitors color bit? Will the game crash if the bit-depth is more than the monitor can handle?

By the way, the GetSystemMetrics() function is very useful, but I can't find the bit depth thing on this list:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms724385.aspx