Widescreen Casual Gaming

[Chroma]

I'm not sure if anyone else has addressed this but I'd like to address widescreen casual gaming.

As everyone knows, widescreen TFTs are becoming more widespread. As a result, when people play games that only have a 800x600 resolution, the screen is stretched. It does detract sligtly from the game IMO. Well to be honest. I think it looks like crap.

I raised this issue on the BlitzMax forums and after a bit of discussion it was brought up that 1280x800 was the accepted widescreen standard. So I'll be adopting a widescreen resolution of 1280x800 and I urge you to give this option also in your casual games. Hence, in my Options menu I'll have Resolution: Normal or Widescreen. Of course Normal will be 800x600 and Widescreen will be 1280x800.

Anyways, please post your opinions and/or comments. I'd like to know what you think.

[Emmanuel]

I have three laptops here and they're actually in 1440x900; and this widescreen TFT here displays 1680x1050.. There isn't really a standard resolution.

At minimum, you can support aspect correction. If you wish to support the additional screen real estate, you can use a similar method and have an alternate version of all assets for a 16:10 ratio at the resolution you mentioned (or higher), and upscale as needed. In any case, if you're creating a casual game, be sure to detect and provide the best setting by default, without the player touching anything.

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[elias4444]

Or, just provide an option for windowed mode, rather than forcing fullscreen on the user.

[BantamCityGames]

I've been wondering this as well. I believe all the resolutions mentioned are of the same aspect ratio so if you make it available for 1280x800 it should scale appropriately to other widescreen resolutions. Its not a bad idea to provide the two modes or even detect what the current resolution is and apply the change automatically.

[ulfster]

i think this is a nice idea i'm thinking of doing this too in my next project. problem will be, most users dont know if they have 16:10 or 16:9 if they own such a monitor. some laptops may even have 15:9...

i would just stick with 16:10 and 16:9 support cause they are most common...

i also really wonder why most casual games dont give you the option to change the resolution? do you really have to expect the users to be this... well... stupid?
why not just let them chose from some standard resolutions? and some widescreen ones?
so if you detect widescreen ratio on the users system, just show a list of widescreen resolutions for this aspect ratio.
if not, show a list of some standard ones, and if you detect nothing show standard.

or you could of cause just let them play in windowed mode, and stick with standard.

[svero]

Some engines adjust by stretching the graphics and remapping the cursor and leaving some black bars on either side of the screen to maintain the correct aspect ratio. There are also some graphics cards that have a built in feature to do this in full-screen through the driver. Check the popcap engine, if it's still available from their site. It does aspect ratio correction.

[jonaswills]

w00t! Our engine supports any resolution, it will auto-detect available ones for your graphics card and have them selected in the options menu. I was really impressed when it could run those sideways widescreen resolutions, the graphics card ended up turning the screen 90 degrees so if your monitor was tilted your could play that way too.

It was also sweet to go to the computer store and plug it into one of those cinema mac displays and run it on giganto resolutions... lots of fun!

We mesed around with the config and tried running 4000x800 and it worked too, not very playable, haha, but it was neat to see it go across three monitors! :-D

[zoombapup]

I run both 24 inch and 30 inch monitors, so I definitely buy into the widescreen thing.

I'd probably just go for using the aspect ratio of the current resolution (before doing graphics device changes of course) as a guide for wether the user is running in widescreen or not.

So you'd get the current display device and query its aspect ratio. Then simply setup your game assets based on widescreen or normal based on the result.

[Amanden]

widescreen TFTs are becoming more widespread,and ll be more.Let's pay attention on it and hopr it improve fastly


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[vjvj]

I'm not sure if anyone else has addressed this but I'd like to address widescreen casual gaming.

As everyone knows, widescreen TFTs are becoming more widespread. As a result, when people play games that only have a 800x600 resolution, the screen is stretched. It does detract sligtly from the game IMO. Well to be honest. I think it looks like crap.

I raised this issue on the BlitzMax forums and after a bit of discussion it was brought up that 1280x800 was the accepted widescreen standard. So I'll be adopting a widescreen resolution of 1280x800 and I urge you to give this option also in your casual games. Hence, in my Options menu I'll have Resolution: Normal or Widescreen. Of course Normal will be 800x600 and Widescreen will be 1280x800.

Anyways, please post your opinions and/or comments. I'd like to know what you think.

I'm going through the exact same thought process myself right now. I think that standard art assets look like shit when stretched to widescreen. Casual gamers may not care, but not all of our customers are that casual. Plus, think of the poor artists who have to watch their work go to hell...

My current idea is to do the following:

• Locked resolutions (no resolution enumeration or res choice visible to the user)
• Listbox with the following options:

  "Standard (4:3)"
  "Widescreen (16:10)"
  "Widescreen (16:9)"

• Perhaps a little window in the options screen that lists the current desktop resolution and aspect ratio
• And of course, the app will always default to the desktop aspect ratio anyway, so the first time the user sees the aspect ratio option it will already be set to the right one

Good compromise? Or too confusing?

[ulfster]

way too confusing for my mind. dont expect your customer to know what aspect ratio monitor he owns.

i think you have some options...

1) showing no res at all and picking a standard res for each aspect ratio, set the one corresponding to the current desktop aspectratio at game start.
of cause let the user decide if he wants to play in windowed mode or not.

2) provide a list with resolutions and write in brackets what aspect ratio it is lets say

800x600
1024x768
1280x800 (16x10 widescreen)
1600x900 (16x9 widescreen)

i think if you pursue the philosophy of no res at all its best to detect and set everything for the user. in modern normal games you always have a big huge dropdownlist of resolutions like in the last example but the gamers of those games usually know their hardware by name so they also know the best resolution for them...

by the way, is 800x600 still the standard for the games that dont allow you to set or change a resolution?

[Nikos Beck]

I vote for giving the player no option. It's trivial to detect the current desktop resolution and just use that.

I'd go as far as offering "regular" and "high" resolution in case the player wants a better picture. The regular resolution can be their desktop resolution and "high" is the next step up. Offering a "low" resolution is asking for trouble; it's purposely showing the player how bad your game can look.

I am debating what to do with widescreen. Should I use black bars or should I have art assets that extend to widescreen? Should my clothing shop have extra floor space? Should it be usable? Should I put other shops on each side so those parts of the screen are clearly not part of the game?

[Grey Alien]

Designing games around two different aspect ratios and positioning all your art assets correctly is a pain and leads to a higher chance of bugs. I found this just by having a slightly different screen size for windowed mode on my early games.

[vjvj]

way too confusing for my mind. dont expect your customer to know what aspect ratio monitor he owns.

i think you have some options...

1) showing no res at all and picking a standard res for each aspect ratio, set the one corresponding to the current desktop aspectratio at game start.
of cause let the user decide if he wants to play in windowed mode or not.

2) provide a list with resolutions and write in brackets what aspect ratio it is lets say

800x600
1024x768
1280x800 (16x10 widescreen)
1600x900 (16x9 widescreen)

i think if you pursue the philosophy of no res at all its best to detect and set everything for the user. in modern normal games you always have a big huge dropdownlist of resolutions like in the last example but the gamers of those games usually know their hardware by name so they also know the best resolution for them...

by the way, is 800x600 still the standard for the games that dont allow you to set or change a resolution?

Not quite sure what you are getting at here, as I already stated that the game would display what your desktop res/ratio is and would default to the desktop settings. So the only thing that might be confusing is the fact that they can change it, when I'm sure 90% of the time people won't need to change it. If that turns out to be the case, I'll just do the same thing but remove the option to change it.

[Jesse Hopkins]

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[Applewood]

The most annoying thing is that picking native res and looking at it's width:height ratio won't get you a perfect result anyway.

Regardless of what your monitor's native resolution is, that doesn't neccessarily track with it having square pixels at that resolution.

When we were adding HD and WS support to our 360 engine, i was running on a monitor I bought specially for the task (native res of 1280x720 like the xbox) which is 16:9 as it happens. However, things were coming out slightly squashed and looked shite. The main offender was a large onscreen radar display that came out oval instead of circular. After a while of banging my head against a brick wall, I resorted to measuring the display surface with a tape measure, and guess what ? It was 16:10. The pixels weren't square, they were slightly rectangular!

Since then, I've learned this is a common hack by monitor providers to cover greater areas with fewer pixels.

So, if you're going to support widescreen because your graphics will look crap stretched from 4:3, detecting native res won't totally solve your problem. You will still need to add aspect ratio correction based on the PHYSICAL DIMENSIONS OF A PIXEL ON THAT MONITOR, or it won't work properly.

And no, there is no way to query this - you're kinda stuck with it. All you can really do is show em a slideshow of resolutions with a square drawn on it and ask them to pick the squarest. Which would frighten anybody off!

I'm sure that previous suggestions will get you close enough, especially for casual gamers, but don't expect it to be the perfect answer - it just isn't.

[ApeZone]

My widescreen laptop allows me to maintain aspect ratio when in fullscreen, so my 4:3 games will have black bars to the left and right without me doing anything. Of course, getting our users to set this option, if their graphics driver even allows this, is another thing. Anyone else have this option? I've got an Intel 945 graphics chip inside. I'm not sure how we can check this option in software.

[vjvj]

The pixels weren't square, they were slightly rectangular! Since then, I've learned this is a common hack by monitor providers to cover greater areas with fewer pixels.

OMG. Well crap... Thanks for the heads up on this, I'd never heard of it. So maybe a widescreen selection between 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 is the minimal way to be sure.

My widescreen laptop allows me to maintain aspect ratio when in fullscreen, so my 4:3 games will have black bars to the left and right without me doing anything. Of course, getting our users to set this option, if their graphics driver even allows this, is another thing. Anyone else have this option? I've got an Intel 945 graphics chip inside. I'm not sure how we can check this option in software.

I know for NVIDIA chips that this feature is implemented in the driver. I'm assuming Intel is the same. So it should probably be treated like any other driver-related item: some users will have it, some won't

[Applewood]

My widescreen laptop allows me to maintain aspect ratio when in fullscreen, so my 4:3 games will have black bars to the left and right without me doing anything. Of course, getting our users to set this option, if their graphics driver even allows this, is another thing. Anyone else have this option?

Yes, my laptop also does this. I think it's quite common if not ubiquitous, on laptops but my pc won't do this even though it offers WS resolutions and I had a WS monitor on it for a while.

4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 is the minimal way to be sure

I'd say so, yes. You can still just pick the desktop resolution for the default full-screen mode, but I reckon you should offer 16:9 or 16:10 for any WS dimensions and maybe put a one-off message up "If this box above doesn't look square, pick the other WS setting from the options menu..."

[MikeRozak]

Random comments:

1) As posted above, use GetSystemMetrics (or one slightly more complex Windows APIs) and use whatever resolution the player users for the main desktop resolution, assuming that's the optimal one.

2) Over 50% of PCs sold today are notebooks. A large percentage of notebooks (60%? and increasing) are widescreen. A smaller percentage of desktops use widescreen, but that percentage is increasing too. Widescreen is a no-brainer.

3) If you can't scale your game window, then put black letterbox bars above/below (as posted above).

4) If your game resolution doesn't scale then make it scale. The days of everyone having 640x480 are long gone. You can expect everthing from 800x480 for a UMPC to 1600 x 1020(?) for a desktop to much greater for a high end machine.