Resolution changes and how to handle assets

[andyb]

Hi,

Most games I've played offer the ability to change screen resolution. Which of course makes perfect sense as not everyone has the same monitor, or wants/needs the same resolution settings.

But what do you do with your art assets? Do you just resize them to match the new resolution? Or do you have different resolutions "packs" of assets for each resolution size?

What do you guys do?


Cheers,
Andy.

[andyb]

Has no one got a tip for me? pretty please with cherries on top :)

[PeterM]

Unless you're doing hardware rendering, which can stretch graphics and still look "nice" because of the bilinear filtering, you will probably need to either have manually redrawn/resized assets for different resolutions, or have your game handle different resolutions with the same graphics.

How you does this depends highly on the game and graphics in question.

[Sharpfish]

Using hardware (3D and 2D in 3D mainly) here means I do one set of 2D assets that using some scaling ratios will scale up and down and still look good at any resolution (even widescreen if you use the correct projectionmatrix/ratio).

If you are not able to scale 2D assets (using relative positions and non-integer scaling) then you probably would need a new set for each resolution if you want it to look the same in each resolution. Which is why many older 2D only casual games didn't bother with more than a standard 640 or 800 resolution.

What are you using for your games? your options will depend on this, but I think almost anything these days is capable of scaling ok if you work with it. If it's a 3D engine with textured quads in "screenspace" as your gui or whatever then before loading them in turn mipmap generation off which helps with quality.

[andyb]

Thanks, that's great. I'm using a 2d engine currently, and it doesn't cope too well with scaling, so I'll probably need to get graphics for each res. Thanks very much.

[Jamie W]

How about just changing the screen resolution, but not scaling. This would mean rendering a larger 'window' of the game world (map).

I remember subspace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_%28computer_game%29) used this method.

I know a lot of 3d games will just scale everything accordingly when you change res, but for 2D games, why not just keep the same scale and show a larger area of the game?

[andyb]

Nice idea. But sadly that wouldn't work for me as the game board will always be shown 100%. I'm not showing just part of the board at a time. But for map type games, that's a neat idea. Thanks.

[Glen Pawley]

How about just changing the screen resolution, but not scaling. This would mean rendering a larger 'window' of the game world (map).

I remember subspace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_%28computer_game%29) used this method.

I know a lot of 3d games will just scale everything accordingly when you change res, but for 2D games, why not just keep the same scale and show a larger area of the game?

I'm using such an approach myself. However, I'm still going to add a scaling option, because the map area is too small on low resolutions and I'm equally worried someone who keeps his monitor at a really high res will see everything too tiny.

I'm not convinced I'd do the same again, it will depend on user feedback.

[Jamie W]

... and I'm equally worried someone who keeps his monitor at a really high res will see everything too tiny.

I would imagine such people are in a very small minority (1%?), what do you think? It wouldn't seem (at least to me) to be worth the extra time and effort to make these people happy.