Screen resolutions

When making a fullscreen game, would be wise to have a size of something like 1024�768 as the standard resolution of the game? Since most people seem to use that size or larger, however then the game will appear stretched for widescreen users, do you think it matters? Or should there be an option to change the resolution of the game so that it fits nicely on most monitors?

For portability you'd want to stay around 640x480 or so, most computers nowadays are still between 800x600 and 1024x768 resolution... higher resolution are the vocal minority.

But don't quote me on that. I just suggest to make everything windowable.

according to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution

Resolution % of Internet Users

----------------------------------------

Higher than 1024�768, 57%

1024�768, 36%

800�600, 4%

Lower than 800�600, < 1%

Unknown, 3%

-----------------------------------------

So maybe its best to make games 800 x 600 then.

[quote:38qxyah2]Note: These statistics were gathered from visitors to a website dedicated to web technologies, so there may be an over-representation of both higher resolution monitors and lower resolution handheld devices. Updated to January 2009 results.

I don't think casual gamers frequent web guru sites.

There's no reason to do 640x480 anymore, it's way outdated. I suggest using 800x600, as it seems to be what a lot of casual games use. These days though, I think 1024x768 is the standard, and this analytics company seems to agree: http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox31.html

Regardless, lots of people playing your game are going to have different resolutions, and it's an annoying problem, because you have to either change the amount of viewable area, which could change the gameplay for those with widescreen/higher res monitors, and program the UI to work with them, or stretch/shrink the screen, which can look bad on some monitors (LCDs in paticular. CRTs look fine, but not many people use those anymore).

1024x768 is pretty much the standard these days, and has been for around the last 5 years.

I would suggest, if you were to make different resolution support, to simply go for 800x600 or 1024x768 as your 4:3 aspect resoltion, and then do one in 1280x600 or 1440x768 for widescreen.

Anyone who buys a new monitor these days, and gets correct advice from the place/person they buy it from, will be running 1680x1050 at least since most modern screens run this or higher as the naitive monitor resolution. Running a newer screen in anything less casues moire issues and makes the screen look like it has very poor picture quality.

~Sol

thanks for the feedback, really appreciate it!

I guess theres loads of people who have laptops out there, with tiny little screens!

is 1280 x 600 a real resolution? doesn't seem like its the right ratio. Wouldn't it be 1280 x 800 instead?

1024x768 is too big for a windowed game; I use 2048x768 dualscreen and it's annoying to have a window bigger than one monitor, and by the stats a lot of people still use it single screen anyway.

The screen is also redrawn fully every tick so there's the issue of rendering speed if you have a lot of heavy rendering going on - smaller windows will generally render faster.

Then there's the issue of VRAM usage - textures are always put on power-of-two sized surfaces in VRAM, and the runtime has to create several textures the size of the window sometimes for purposes like effects rendering. If your window is bigger than 1024x768, these runtime textures now have to be put on 2048x2048 sized surfaces, which could potentially use a lot more VRAM.

You can use the 'change display resolution' though to set whatever resolution you like at runtime; this would be handy for users to pick what they want. It might be wise to start up the first run with a small window, allow the user to pick their display resolution and fullscreen setting, then use the system actions to set them when the game begins.

thanks for clearing that up. Yeah, it seems like giving them a couple of choices would be the best idea at start up.

640x480 is the size most suitable for a windowed game, stretching that over fullscreen is fine and will look fine. 1024 is wayyy to big for a casual game, a hwa game is gonna lag on a weak card at that res. 800 is what you'd use for a game that you want to be big. 800x600 at fullscreen is what i think world of goo runs at. it may even be 640x480.

is 1280 x 600 a real resolution? doesn't seem like its the right ratio. Wouldn't it be 1280 x 800 instead?

Yes. It's a 16:10 ratio.

~Sol

1440x900 is also 16:10

1440x900 is also 16:10

Actually it's 16:9 lol... 1440x768 is 16:10

*EDIT*

Yikes nvm they are BOTH 16:10 aspects!

~Sol

I live in the third world and everyone has 1024x768 here now

XD

I'd say it's safe to go with it. On the other hand, most boxes here can't handle a 1024x768 directx window smoothly even if it's doing very simple stuff, due to CRAPPY INTEL VIDEO CARDS (ahem).

I live in the third world and everyone has 1024x768 here now

XD

I'd say it's safe to go with it. On the other hand, most boxes here can't handle a 1024x768 directx window smoothly even if it's doing very simple stuff, due to CRAPPY INTEL VIDEO CARDS (ahem).

Come on guys... jeez...

My PC from 8 years ago can run a 1024x768 DX game... upgrade or something! A GeForce 9400GT is like $50...

I used to run 1024x768 on my Pentium 166 with 32Mb of RAM and a 1Gb Hard Drive... fuck.

~Sol