Resolution for a game

Anikom15 · 2010-01-08 01:24:14

Ok, what resolution should I use for a fullscreen game that I'd be making? I mean, I'm debating between 800x600 and 1024x768, so what should I choose?

caelestis · 2010-01-08 01:26:45

What kind of game? 2d? Then consider the size of the artwork, you might need to upscale for 1024x768. The bigger size may be useless if you are just going to upscale all your sprites.

Trent · 2010-01-08 01:28:33

Neither of those 4:3 aspect ratios will look good in fullscreen on my 16:10 screen. What kind of game are we looking at here?

Anikom15 · 2010-01-08 01:38:12

2D, the artwork doesn't exist yet.

pauldonnelly · 2010-01-08 04:00:21

Since this is 2010, I'd think hard about making your game support a wide variety of resolutions, including widescreen without stretching. If you draw your tiles with OpenGL, this should be pretty easy. The textures themselves will blur at higher resolutions than they're drawn for, but the edges will be crisp. LCD screens can't just change resolution, but your game can. If you pick a fixed resolution your game is going to look terrible on most displays.

drcouzelis · 2010-01-08 16:28:23

I'm not sure if you are asking what resolution people want to see, or what computers are actually capable of. I'll answer the second one, because I think it's a more fun question.

It depends on how you plan on programming your game engine. If you use hardware accelerated graphics (for example, making a 2D or 3D game with OpenGL) then you can make the resolution any size you want. Unfortunately, anyone without hardware accelerated graphics won't be able to play your game. You could implement scaling to make it fit the user's native screen resolution. I do not have any experience with this.

All of the personal game projects I have worked on use non-hardware accelerated graphics. I think there are three factors that determine how fast a game can run. I assume you want around 60 fps.

Resolution: The higher the resolution, the slower the game. I usually choose 640x480. My games can run in windowed mode or "fullscreen" mode, which is still 640x480, just, well, fullscreen.

Color bit depth: The higher the bit depth, the slower the game. I used to use 8 bit color because it is way fast and fun to make a game in. (I personally think so) My current game runs at whatever setting the user's monitor is using.

How much you "redraw" each frame: If you game only redraws a tiny part of the screen every frame (for example, in a pinball game, you only redraw the ball and the flippers) then the game can be very very fast with a high resolution and a high color depth. The alternative to that is to redraw the entire screen every frame, which is slow. I usually make 2D sidescrollers, so redrawing the entire screen is my only option.

In my experience, if I make my game with a resolution of 640x480 and 24 bit color that redraws the screen every frame, then it will run on most of the computers I want it to run on. (including 10 year old computers... I think)

I'm interested in what your experience (and anyone else's experience) with frame rates and resolutions is.

If you decide to go with OpenGL, then never mind.

If you already knew everything I wrote about, then I apologize. It was still fun to write out.

Anikom15 · 2010-01-09 17:57:17

Alright I'm going with 640x480. I don't care if it looks like crap, it's not important right now.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-01-08 01:24:14

Resolution for a game

#2 2010-01-08 01:26:45

Re: Resolution for a game

#3 2010-01-08 01:28:33

Re: Resolution for a game

#4 2010-01-08 01:38:12

Re: Resolution for a game

#5 2010-01-08 04:00:21

Re: Resolution for a game

#6 2010-01-08 16:28:23

Re: Resolution for a game

#7 2010-01-09 17:57:17

Re: Resolution for a game

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