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In light of the post made by gamewank we've started discussing to finally fix the resolution lock of 800x600. I thought it would be a clever first step to draw from the experience spellofplay has around resolution management. What traps have you fallen in, what is most important to think about regarding textures, handling positions, scaling and so on.. any experiences from your development of twtpb or other games here that could help us? |
Submitted by SolidBenny
Mon, 04/06/2009 - 14:23
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Resolutions in TWTPB
In twtpb there are currently a number of fixed resolutions with a pretty wide range. I think this worked out pretty good since it allowed me to actually test that the ui works for these different resolutions. I'd recommend this as a first step.
The game itself runs in 800 x 600 and this is later scaled on the view side of things. Also the ui elements are defined in this resolution and later scaled. The tricky part for me was to handle different aspect ratios in some good way. I also don't use bit mapped fonts that can look really horrible when scaled.
Something to look out for when supporting multiple resolutions in a tile based games are the borders between tiles. Floating point errors seem to be creeping up and sometimes leaving visible black lines between tiles. One possible solution to this problem is to render the tiles to an off screen surface with a native resolution and then scale the resulting image to the screen resolution.
Returning to TWTBP I'm now working slowly towards free resolutions. Mostly to get it running on my eee PC that has the weird res of 800*480, some issues seem to surface from this conversion. I'll keep you posted on the progress.
thanks a lot for these
thanks a lot for these pointers.
oh you're actually doing it like us then. We got some horrible results when changing to non-factor resolutions of
the original 800x600. especially on fonts (we use bitmap fonts). our ground layer is drawn with one call (with a linestrip grid) per layer so there shouldnt be any seams.
aren't we doing it backwards though? its usually a bad idea scaling things UP rather than down. i know the textures will need to be larger and use more memory but it should look much better that way.
how are you handling widescreen resolutions? does non-ws resolutions stretch on wide screens?
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Solid Core Entertainment
Developer of Roadclub
Bitmap fonts are horrible in
Bitmap fonts are horrible in this way, as you say a really big texture for the font could fix the problems. In my experience too much down scaling creates a very blurry impression, and for fonts you really want that crispy look. Leading up to the messy solution of having several font textures (optionally do custom mipmaps in dds for example), imho using some system font is then both better and easier.
In twtpb I have the advantage of not having a very defined background and more over the background is just for viewing pleasure. This means I can do some funky scaling and I can keep the aspect ratio of the textures. That is the planets should be round on whatever system you are on (I hope).
Game play in TWTPB also lends itself well to not having an exact visual representation so I have opted for keeping the aspect ratio of most elements (at least as I remember it now)
And you are of course right in the fact that the higher the target resolution you aim for, higher resolution textures are needed.
you're right of course.
you're right of course. changing the font method now scares me though
bitmap fonts are really best for big menu headers and such and system fonts should be used in flowing text. something to remember next time.
so you scale drawing to keep stuff round for example on wide screen resolutions but some elements you let get stretched because it doesnt really matter?
i believe some versions ago i thought the planets were elliptical but that may be fixed since then.
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Solid Core Entertainment
Developer of Roadclub
From the top of my head I
From the top of my head I think i mostly use a factor of the height to scale stuff, so that wide screen do not stretch abnormally.
And yes the planets where elliptical some time ago (the common wide screen stretch syndrome) but this has been fixed.