1024x768 Casual Games

Looks like the new Bejeweled Twist has made the jump to 1024x768 and 80x80 tiles. Luckily I don't have very many tiles done so I can redo them all. Bout time!

Def man. 1024x768 has been around forever. We had a 10 or 11 year old computer in here, who's monitor could display 640x480,800x600 and 1024x768.

Thing is the most popular selling PC atm is the netbooks's which only go up to 1024 x 600, so 800x600 still seems the way to go.

For default, yes. But its not that difficult to support any resolution the hardware can cope with.

Indeed... I would have thought the Bejewelled clones would be using SVGs by now!

Doing so would set yours apart from the pack, so check out Inkscape (pretty good free SVG authoring tool) or Xara Xtreme (similarly good) and play around with the things.

(Xara Xtreme is an odd one. The version I got from the Ubuntu repositories seems to be free of charge, but their web site makes no hint at it :/)

Edit:
Aha! Links!
http://inkscape.org/
http://www.xaralx.org/

some Cards or (Drivers ?) supports only 800/600 for TV out .
thats why i support this in my Games.
I think 1024/768 is the standard resolution here since 7-10 years.

mfg

"I think 1024/768 is the standard resolution here since 7-10 years."

Not for casual games. 640x480 is still the most common but 800x600 is the new standard it seems for casual targeted games. (Puzzle, hidden object, etc, etc)

640x480 is not big, and it's not clever! :P Really it's just too small on modern machines to look good. 800x600 is really only a smaller step up. I work in 1280x1024 on my 4:3 system and 1440x900 on my widescreen system.

I think game design would do well to work in 4:3 and widescreen formats, how the space is used if you have fixed resolution 2D graphics is an opportunity to be creative with alternate HUD layouts or just show more of the map surrounding the player.

640x480 is the Wii resolution and it's doing just fine. ;)

800x600 is best default choice; it's not just the resolution, a lot of weaker systems graphics struggle at higher than 800x600 even if its capable of going higher.

And if most people ran their PC on a standard definition NTSC television, that would be very pertinent information.

My current game is 800x600 and next will be 1024x768 (and will probably support widescreen) but not higher.

Why not higher?

I made Gunslinger Solitaire in both 1024x768 and 800x600... gave both to Big Fish Games, they only sold the 800x600...

And I didn't do anything special coding for the two versions (although I now wish I had, having seen Gfk's Magicville)... I resized all the images by the ratio difference in GIMP and changed the x,y in the code... it turned out to be a lot of work to maintain both versions!

So for Haunted House Quest, I only did 800x600 and my next game will be 800x600... unless Gfk wants to share his code ;-)

Quick question for Gfk, do you use BlitzMax's SetScale command for your cool code or something homebrew? If you use SetScale for the whole screen, how quick is it?

Cheers!

I was using my own scaling functions for all drawing/scale operations. It was as fast as you like but it caused problems with rotation on non-4:3 displays.

Grey Alien recommended using a projection matrix so I ended up using that. No noticeable overhead at all and I got it up and running in a few minutes (after I spent the best part of a day ragging out all my own scaling stuff).

Here is the one I used, written by Yan.

My game logic always runs at 800x600. That's the resolution you set the virtualGraphics object to. Then, set your required graphics resolution as normal. Et voila.

"And if most people ran their PC on a standard definition NTSC television, that would be very pertinent information. "

Oh please......The "pertinent information" being the "resolution" itself (640x480) is still capable of representing a graphic scene. Blimey...

re: Projection Matrix

The only problem I've found with using the projection matrix (and I'm stuck with this for my game) is there is some slight artifacting when things get scaled up rather than down. And there is also some edge artifacting when overlaying objects with zero transparency over other objects. Again, it's the edges being processed by the gpu which causes slight "smoothing lines" to appear. Hard to explain, but it's there. Even with gaps around the objects, etc, etc.

Even my aged game Cardwar featured a 1024x768 res and that was 2006.

Wouldn't waste my time on 800x600 games these days for sure.

I use 640x480 in my new game. It will have more or less simple 'blocky' graphics so in that sense it wouldn't look much better in 800x600.

I ran a test on my brothers wide-screen monitor and it stretched the game, but it still looked good.

Are there cases imaginable where a 640x480 blitz game would run into real problems on certain new hardware?

(By the way the game will switch to windowed mode automatically if 640x480 full screen is not available.)

Apparently I was too subtle the first time, so I'll try once more. Television screens and monitors are very different things. Things which look acceptable and - more importantly - legible on a TV screen will not necessarily do so on a PC. Feel free to continue comparing apples and oranges though.

Is 640x480 still widely supported on all new/current graphics cards?

I agree that for casual games you need to support 800x600 and perhaps 640x480, at least as an option, even if you default to or provide support for higher resolutions. For non-casual games I think you can go as high as you want so long as you have some room for fallback to lower modes.

Hmm, that's interesting. It could be an issue for people useing the PM to upscale to fit a natural widescreen resolution.

I doubt it.
Heck, 4:3 is hardly supported in this day and age, although that's not so much the graphics card's problem.

Keep in mind that by having a fixed 4:3 aspect ratio and 1990s resolution, a game potentially alienates any player who does not play computer games on an etch-a-sketch. In essence, that game will find itself in a rut where it looks like the only interested people have godawful hardware, but in fact the truth is that the people who have new hardware all tore their eyes out in horror and thus could not proceed to the store if they wanted to.

Why don't you use a 3D sprite based system like Sprite Candy? It's resolution independent so it's much better than creating images in multi resolutions. Throw in a nice launcher or in-game settings window and that's it.

Maybe I will switch from 640x480 to 800x600 just to be sure.

I am not so sure about not having a fixed 4:3 ratio... if you offer a wide-screen option, that could mean the player can suddenly see more of the game world, changing the gameplay.

"Feel free to continue comparing apples and oranges though."

My only point was/is that 640x480 has enough pixels to represent a game just fine in 2008 if the developer chooses to use that resolution.

GA - Yep. Now I understand why some developers prefer a fixed res where the graphics aren't re-sampled by the gpu projm. Transparent sprites don't seem to be affected, but if you have a full background and render tiles with no transparency ontop, you can see visible "antialias" lines where it's smoothing the tile edges onto the background. Doesn't happen 100% all of the time, depends on the amount of scaling done from the original to the destination size. Never happens if the original and dest size is the same ofcourse.

Personally I support 320x240 and upwards, the main reason for this is not all netbooks cant support 1024x768 so it would seem prudent that support for at least 640x480 is there. After all netbooks made 10% of the sales for all laptops in the past months.

I've removed any numbered resolutions from our new game.

The options page allows Full, Medium and Low resolutions. Full is the same as the desktop res, Low is half res (a quarter the pixels) and Medium is somewhere in between. If there aren't many suitable modes I drop the Medium option. I also allow the player to choose between Full screen and Windowed and Standard\Widescreen. The game is 3D but all 2D stuff is 3D as well so it's fairly resolution independent.

OK MGE, thx. I'm pretty sure I know what you mean. Wouldn't you get the same effect if you drew a sprite at a sub-pixel coord but not scaled? (I've seen it)

Yes that's correct. I'm drawing at integer coordinates, but the proj matrix is scaling at fractional values, which is more than likely causing the artifact.

So basically tile based games will not do so well when scaled up. Other games may look OK.

It should at least be mentioned that setting a monitor to non-native resolution is more painful for it than simply scaling the graphics. Even if they are raster graphics meant for 640x480. In one instance the output is horrifying, in the other the output still has the potential to look okay (since you have control over how it gets scaled). So nobody get any weird ideas with fixed resolution...

Nice idea with un-technical resolution setting, John! I really like that :)
I've noticed some games that don't cope with being played on different monitors, where if they were originally set to a resolution the current monitor doesn't support they behave really strangely. Setting it in a relative fashion is sure to solve that. Nice!

"So basically tile based games will not do so well when scaled up. Other games may look OK."

It unfortunately appears that way. After I get my game done, I'll start a new thread and post some demos where we can see the effects of the proj matrix better and get some other eye balls on this. ;)

But how would you implement different aspect ratios, with no difference in gameplay? (Adding black borders left and right would solve this but doesn't look nice.)

I don't see the problem with a fixed 4:3 resolution. It will get stretched on wide-screen monitors but in my experience the result doesn't look very bad.. but maybe it differs per game.

4:3 is still very much used. I don't have a widescreen monitor, and no-one i know has one.

I have a desktop for "not Casual Games" and it can handle any resolution the card can, so for "hard core Gaming" I dont care.

However I have just gotten, (cos they are giving them away with loads of things), one of those little mini note/web book thingies. Which should really be able to play "Casual Games", and infact has become my system to play such, but it only has a resulution of 1024 x 600.

You wont beleive the amount of curseing Ive been silently directing at software writers of 3-4 years ago, who en-mass seem to have decided to make 1024*768 the min for their games.

SO, idealy as said, make the game scalable. If possible make widescreen a viable option. BUT dont abandon *600

>It should at least be mentioned that setting a monitor to non-native resolution is more painful for it than simply scaling the graphics.

Yeah, that's why I made my game use the desktop resolution for it's 'Full' option. Presumably everyone has that set to the native res of the monitor and those that don't obviously don't know or care about that stuff.

I get annoyed when games choose their own resolution on LCD screens. They should default to the desktop res if possible. Obviously this is trickier for pure 2D games.

Absolutely. And as we all know the Wii is absolutely notorious for it's cutting edge graphics. Hello?

Also guess what? If I try to display your 640x480 NTSC screen on my 1680x1050 LCD monitor, it's going to look absolutely horrid. So stop. Making a "2D" game that suits any resolution is something the graphics card will do for you automatically, if you ask it to, so not doing so makes you look at best incompetent.

Yes. On my hardware 640x480 games are unplayable (as it's an unsupported full screen resolution) and playing it in a window I imagine is going to be an exercise in frustration.

Compared to what? The only other options I see is:
1) It's stretched out distorting the graphics, making everything look horrible.
2) Like above, except the GPU keeps the aspect ratio correct, adding black borders anyway.
3) It's not scaled at all, and you're playing a postage stamp size game on your 22" monitor.
I don't see how adding black borders is not preferable to either of those options, except maybe option 2, which is the same difference.

So nobody you know has bought a new screen or laptop in the last 5 years?

The only non-widescreen display I have is my old TFT screen which oddly enough has a 5:4 (1280x1024) aspect ratio. However distortion on that from 4:3 isn't too bad.

Amen!

They do sell monitors that aren't widescreen. I don't see the big deal though. I don't alot of graphics work, so i, and other people who don't, probably don't appreciate the benefits of a widescreen monitor.

My point was, 4:3 is still definetly still being used.

How does this work? For example when creating a game using 2D images in Blitz 3D.

Edit: perhaps using "Sprite Candy" as Mortiis mentioned above, or use BlitzMax I suppose?

Another question I have is this: suppose I would still create the game in a fixed resolution, relying on automatic scaling being done by the monitor where that is necessary, would it help if I create two fixed resolutions to choose from, one 4:3 and one wide-screen, so that at least with respect to the aspect ratio, the automatic scaling would be a bit easier and give better results?

In other words, what is the bigger problem, the low resolution or the wrong aspect ratio.

I am getting a bit nervous about this. Surely I should be able to keep recycling my Blitz Basic code from 2002 till the end of time. -_- ;)

Neither do I. I appreciate a widescreen monitor because I code a lot. I don't see why someone who works with graphics would want a wide screen monitor. They would probably want an almost square (5:4 would probably be perfect) one.

The difference between coding on a widescreen display and on a 4:3 display is amazing, particularly since practically all IDE's think it's a brilliant idea for you to have long panels, sometimes on either side of your code window, significantly reducing the amount of space you have for actual code (This is one area were sadly Eclipse is almost as useless as Visual Studio). Since I do code, quite a lot, it's important for me to have as much code editor real estate as possible and widening the screen by about 600 pixels helps immensely. Until you've tried it, you probably won't understand it.

Well it wouldn't work on *actual* 2D games, which was why "2D" was in quotation marks, which I realize now was probably a bit of a stupid idea. I was talking about a solution like Sprite Candy/BlitzMAX, where you use the 3D hardware to do your scaling for you.

It depends. They have a kind of synergy effect going, but in my opinion the wrong aspect ratio is the worst, and makes the low resolution even more painful.

I used to thing like that all the time. I used to jump through (often) ridiculous loops to generalize existing code to fit new problems. Not so much anymore. Now I realize that you keep learning new things, and the elegant solution you conjured up 7 years ago, is pretty embarrassing by your current skill level, and sometimes rewriting a bit of code really is the path of least resistance. In either case, as long as you enjoy programming, you shouldn't fret about it too much.