Game resolutions and options

[zoombapup]

So I'm looking at doing some prototyping in PTK and I start off with blitting a background into the main window.

Then it hits me, I can load a graphic and blit it to the screen, but it has to blit the size of the graphic to the screen or a sub-rect of it. Only, well I've got a 640x480 image and I've created a 800x600 window :)

Now I'm not aware that there's any other way to do the blit to stretch it in PTK, I'm assuming there is somewhere. But what I wanted to ask is how you guys deal with resolutions in casual games? Do you just fix everything at a single res? Do you allow some kind of config file based resolution setting? If you do that, how do you handle stretched blitting? Do you just scale everything proportional to screen dimensions, or have you got some other scheme?

I'm used to the relative ease of use of 3D, so this is like going retro for me, wondered what others were doing.

[Coyote]

So are you departing from the ranks of the Torque faithful, Phil? :)

[zoombapup]

Yes and No really. There's something quite theraputic about doing your own thing without trying to "fit in" with someone else's way of architecting things.

I'm doing some semi-casual prototypes and figured I wanted to try out some ideas without having to think in TGB. So I went for as simple as possible (I tried playground and sexy before going for PTK) and PTK is pretty much as simple as you can get :)

I still work with torque, but I'm mainly only interested in Torque2, which is a long way off. So right now I'm doing some casual stuff with PTK and some 3D shaderific sillyness with XNA 2.0

Although I still have to prototype some AI stuff in Torque yet.

So yes and no :)

[jcottier]

Yes, most casual game run at 800x600 only. I don't know PTK, but usually, if you want to display a full background, you don't strech a 640x480 (will be to ugly). I have my own class that can load a jpg and display it on the screen (splitting the jpg in different texture. I chose to have 256x256 for max texture res, but most people says that 512x512 is fine).

Just run any casual game and you will see that 98% of them have only this in the options:

Sound Volume
Music Volume
FullScreen/Window

Some games support also software vs hardware but I do not. Supporting DX7 hardware is good enought AFAIK.

JC

[Jamie W]

So I'm looking at doing some prototyping in PTK and I start off with blitting a background into the main window.

Then it hits me, I can load a graphic and blit it to the screen, but it has to blit the size of the graphic to the screen or a sub-rect of it. Only, well I've got a 640x480 image and I've created a 800x600 window :)

Now I'm not aware that there's any other way to do the blit to stretch it in PTK, I'm assuming there is somewhere. But what I wanted to ask is how you guys deal with resolutions in casual games? Do you just fix everything at a single res? Do you allow some kind of config file based resolution setting? If you do that, how do you handle stretched blitting? Do you just scale everything proportional to screen dimensions, or have you got some other scheme?

I'm used to the relative ease of use of 3D, so this is like going retro for me, wondered what others were doing.

Hi Phil,

I've not had a problem with scling in PTK, I just force the screen resolution to what I want it to me (640x480 for me). Have you tried blitArbitraryQuad? Could scale from 640x480 up to 800x600, I'm sure.

bool
KGraphic::blitArbitraryQuad( float sx1 , float sy1 , float sx2 , float sy2 , float sx3 , float sy3 , float sx4 , float sy4 , float dx1 , float dy1 , float dx2 , float dy2 , float dx3 , float dy3 , float dx4 , float dy4 );

Blits a quad to another quad ( doesn't have to be rectangular )

[Spore Man]

you can simply have 2 versions of the background, and load/blit the applicable version.