Noob & Screen sizes

Ashley, the supporting multiple screen sizes is good, but only covers a very small percentage of what is needed for mobile. Mobile is a completely different beast to PC games, and you have to have both landscape and portrait layouts (I would love to put them on the same layout, but havent figured out how to do this, as you cant change anchor parameters at runtime). Also, you have to implement swipe, getting rid of the address bars, Handling wildly different screen sizes, aspect ratios and pixel densities.   Those 12 points I put in are essential to supporting mobile - the competition all do swipe, no address bars and landscape/portrait etc, so we have to.

If I wrote a supporting mobile tutorial now, it would be 10 pages or more - its not easy (not because C2 is bad, but because its genuinely hard, and not many people are doing it - they use phonegap etc).

I thought I had finally a perfect solution to cover all of our target platforms, now the iphone5 has come out with yet another resolution, and I expect it will be difficult to detect it server side (i.e the useragent string will be the same)

Well, doesn't letterbox scale do most of that for you? It will handle different aspect ratios, wildly different screen sizes, and different pixel densities too, as well as providing a basic implementation of handling orientation (just scale to fit the new size). You can create a customised anchor by using the system viewport expressions. Are you sure you are not making it unnecessarily complicated by reinventing the wheel in crop mode?

Ashley & nutmix,... so how big should a background be to develop a static (like tetris) game that fits in most devices??

And for a scrolling game like a racing game??

Thanks!!!

People don't seem to understand that letterbox scale is totally inappropriate for commercial mobile games.   The black bars are not acceptable to any customer, and when you rotate to landscape, most of the screen is black bars so you cant even use the gui as the buttons are too small.

The GUI has to cover the entire screen keeping the aspect ratio.

None has black bars in their casino/gambling games. Look at the html5 slots from companies like IGT, NetEnt, Probability etc. (e.g. on William Hills and paddypower mobile websites).

We have developed about 100 Flash games, and a number of games based on the BigWorld and Unreal engines. For us, all desktop and mobile applications will be done in Flash and Air, as this is a superior platform if one has the flash expertise.

However, where Construct 2 offers huge value is in its HTML5 mobile games development - there is no competition in this space.   When it gets a few more mobile focused features, I will be able to sell it many times over. :)

BrianOD

WE use 1024x1024 for our backgrounds, as this is the max resolution of the ipad 1 & 2 and 3 with retina turned off (which is why we export the project into two separate versions - one for ipad 1&2 and one for ipad 3 as you cant turn off retina display at runtime).   An easier option for you might be to scale the game up for ipad 3, and keep retina display option on. This is because detecting the difference between ipad 2 and 3 requires javascript (cant be done using useragent).

Scaled versions of the game look good, and surprisingly don't seem to impact performance.

There are android tablets out there with greater than 1024, we currently dont support these as we dont have time to test them.

Android is your biggest nightmare - stick to iphone and ipad to start with (but dont expect it to run in iphone3 - its shockingly slow - we get 1FPS compared to 200 on ipad 3). Unfortunately, you need javascript to detect the iphone 3 (not 3gs) to put up a "not supported" page.

Actually - just had an idea - it might be possible to write a quick speed test in C2 when the app starts up (e.g. move a sprite with some effects), and if it gets less than say 10 fps then put up an unsupported message.

nutmix thank you for your response I am learning a lot <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I suppose that the 1024x1024 background is for static (no scrolling) games, isn?t it?

To develop (for instance) a racing game, how big should the background (circuit) and the screen size be?

That depends on which way you can scroll. If say you want to support the ipad in landscape mode, and you can drive "up" the screen, then you could have a background which is 1024 wide (the width of the ipad2), and as long as you like (depends how far you want to drive!) Check out the spaceblaster example projects in the c2 install dir. By coincidence, it has a background size of 1024x5120. I think this wraps round, so you don't go off the top.

nutmix Wow... so If I want to develop a racing game that supports the ipad, do I have to design a (at least)4000x4000 background???

Does every device support that size of background?? I mean, GamerGon told me that the biggest background iPad 1 & 2 can support is 2048x20480, so with that background I can not design "big" circuits....

bfff, so difficult....   <img src="smileys/smiley5.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

BrianOD that's what I found searching on google because I needed to know it too.

Remember to have in mind the VRAM that every sprite uses too. With big backgrounds you have to be careful.

4000x4000 background will use:

4096x4096 (near pow of 2) x 4 (RGB) = 67108864 bytes.

67108864 / 1024 / 1024 = 64 mb.

... and Construct 2 loads your entire game in memory, so, if you have a racing game with 5 levels of 4000x4000 you will be using more than 320 mb of RAM always since start...

• IPAD 1 only has 256 mb of RAM, so it's impossible even if it would support 4000x4000 textures.
• IPAD 2 has 512 mb and iOS uses between 80 and 120 mb.

GamerGon & nutmix

So, in other words, the problem with big backgrounds is in the limits of the hardware? Are there the same problems with other engines/languages?

Because I have downloaded & played in an iPad racing/platform/rpg games with several levels and quite big backgrounds... and I still can not figure out how to develop something like that...

And what about platform games? Although there is just horizontal scrolling, the layout must be quite long...

Even the famous angry birds has many levels, and each one has its own background...

I know, I am very noob and I may look retarded, but I have been thinking of this the whole week-end and I still do not know how to start, and even if it is possible to develop what we have in mind...

Thank you!!

I would not even think about supporting ipad 3 native resolution - just go with ipad 2 res (1024x768) and switch off the retina display mode in the project settings. The ipad will automatically upscale the result, and most players would not be able to tell the difference - it looks good.

Your PC would noteven be able to handle ipad3 resolution, unless you own a macbook pro with retina display, or stack 2x 30" displays as I have.

nutmix

Ok, let�s assume that I work with 1024x768, and I want to create a "Mario" platform game... Doing the GamerGon calculations,...that means that each level shuold be at least... 3-4 "screens" long, that�s (1024x768)x4(screens)x4(RGB) = 12,582,912 bytes --> 12 mb per level

Al least 20 levels, means 240 mb plus sprites, etc.

So I think that it may work in an iPad, but in other medium sized mobiles or tablets, it will not work properly, am I right??

I think you should load levels only when they complete the prev one. Not sure how you do this in C2 though.

I think you should load levels only when they complete the prev one. Not sure how you do this in C2 though.

GamerGon Ashley

Could this be the the solution?? How can we do that??

brian:

PLEASE take my advice, I beg you:

If you are a total noob and NOT very into coding, then don't go for a "cross platform multi i-can-do-everything" game that runs in EVERY resolution/aspect ratio.

START SIMPLE!

The worst decision any hobby coder / game developer can make is going for a project with too large scale.

Try something easy. REALLY easy!!

Start off by programming a calculator, re-code tetris (if you don't want to publish it it's no problem), or re-code Pong.

There are several advantages of that:

1. You'll learn while you only focus on the problems of the code/the engine, without worrying about the game design / fun facts / graphics.

2. You'll have fast success feelings.

3. You learn about yourself: Is this really the right thing for you? Are you motivated long or enough, or did you only think it would be cool, but are annoyed after 2 days?

4. ...that should be enough already.

Only use placeholder graphics. Play with blocks, blobs and triangles. Don't spend 90% of your time searching high quality graphics/drawing them yourself.

If you have acquired some experience, THEN you can start with cross platform/multi platform.