Would creating a game for 1920x1080 be a prob...
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/Would creating a game for 1920x1080 be a prob...
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| ....when it comes to users using a lower resolution and possibly diferent aspect ratio? I've designed quite a bit of graphics around 1920x1080 at this point. Bad idea? |
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| Yeah. A hell of a lot of monitors don't support resolutions that high. 1024x768 is the defacto standard. |
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| 1024x768? Really? You'd design around 4:3 aspect ratio? With all the widescreen monitors out now, i'd of thought it would be more appropriate to design around a higher resolution than that and a widescreen aspect ratio at that. |
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| 1024*768 isn't a defaco standard any more. Lot's of cheapo laptops/netbooks don't like anything above 1024*640, plus 4 by 3 isn't a very common aspect ratio these days. Your best bet i guess would be to default to whatever the users desktop res is. Scaling down images is better than scaling them up. Cheers Charlie Last edited 2012 |
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| That's what I'm trying to ascertain. What base resolution to design in. If higher to lower is better, then is 1920x1080 to hi to start with? |
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| >>>Scaling down images is better than scaling them up Having large images scaled down to fit a smaller window is an awful waste of resources. It makes the download unnecessarily large, and uses much more vram than it needs to, and it increases load times. 1024x768 *is* what BigFishGames now recommend. My game runs at that res fullscreen, and in whatever size window will fit on the desktop (down to 640x480). |
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| Interesting GFK.I guess it would also depend on the scale and detail of the game in question as to whether having the option for hi-res is a waste of resources. In this case a 2d first person dungeon crawl rpg. I guess I could rescale all the graphics down to a more compatible resolution with a program. However, it's going to screw up all the x,y coords catalogued from my cropping and editing images though isn't it... That would be painful. |
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| http://gs.statcounter.com/#resolution-ww-monthly-201111-201211-bar Check the stats there Basically its all 1024x768 it makes sense to develop for that, hell we used to target 800x600 so 1024x768 is a step up ;) The 'Other' worries me tho, I hope thats not 800x600 or there are a lot of people living in the 90s! |
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| Looking for the desktop resolution would tell you what the system is capable off, but one downside of that is that it still isn't fool proof: Even if you can see that the desktop runs at 1920x1080 and the system is capable of supporting that resolution, you have a (small) chance of a crappy low-end videocard not having enough video RAM to support your game opening a *second* environment at that resolution at the same time. |
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| lol. Yikes. That "other" is a just a slight anomaly isn't it. lol. Helpful stats though. Thanks. |
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| A lot of the "others" could be mobile devices with stupid resolutions (which don't really count for anything anyway). |
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| Here are the Steams stats for Nov '12: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey 1920 x 1080 29.47% 1366 x 768 18.69% 1680 x 1050 9.56% 1600 x 900 7.28% 1024 x 768 4.08% 1280 x 800 3.39% 1360 x 768 2.43% I guess it depends on your target market... Last edited 2012 |
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| I guess it depends on your target market... Steam's survey is mostly going to be gamers, ie, your target demographics.The "survey" posted a few posts above is all but useless for game developers since it includes businesses (enterprise) and not many businesses purchase games to run on their systems for employees. |
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| The Steam survey looks at the desktop resolution, but doesn't tell you that much, really. Pretty much any high-res (1920x1080) user will be able to handle 1024x768 gracefully, but low-end displays *will* fail when you try to open a large resolution mode... There are an *awful* lot of 19" flatpanels out there that won't support anything larger than 1280x1024 (or 1366x768 widescreen) But whatever you do, NEVER try to open a screen by default that's larger than the desktop itself is running under, there's a good chance that will fail. Your /safest/ bet is probably follow suit with the large portals like bigfish, and settle for 1024x768... Of course you can give the user the ability to change resolutions to a better looking one after that. (And do double-check the list of supported resolutions before trying to open anything, since there's still a small chance that the desired resolution doesn't exist -- e.g. some of the older netbooks will only go up to 1024x600) |
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| The "survey" posted a few posts above is all but useless for game developers since it includes businesses (enterprise) and not many businesses purchase games to run on their systems for employees. I don't know, quite a few of us game developers know how to make games that are able to run on a large number of systems, and the optimal resolution for games, certainly 2d ones is now 1024x768 as it is the one most supported except for the odd net book with crazy dimensions. |
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| I don't know, quite a few of us game developers know how to make games that are able to run on a large number of systems, and the optimal resolution for games, certainly 2d ones is now 1024x768 as it is the one most supported except for the odd net book with crazy dimensions. Unfortunately, certain game developers do not realize that game players are their target audience and not enterprise clients. Games generally do not have site licenses for a reason. |
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| We know our target audience just fine, we target to them and hit that target, if you make a game that runs exclusively at 1920x1080 expect to see a lot less sales (if selling is your objective ofcourse) It is a moot point however as blitzmax has very good virtual resolution capabilities and if you utilise them your game should look good and work in any resolution. |
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| We know our target audience just fine, we target to them and hit that target If you know your target audience, then why intentionally use a survey that includes those outside of your target audience? If your point is valid, you should not have to sacrifice candor to make that point.As to using 1920x1080, that would be madness. The Steam survey is only listing desktop resolutions, not the resolutions games are being played at. With the #1 graphics chip being an Intel HD Graphics 3000, the majority of the people using Steam are certainly not running their games at anything close to 1920x1080. |
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| That site (not a survey by any means) shows you what the majority of people are using as their desktop resolution, there are more people with 'normal' pc's than gaming pc's remember and those with gaming rigs are more likely to play only AAA games, hence why the steam survey shows more people with higher resolutions, the original question was should Galdy develop his game for 1920x1080 which is why I mention it, he could do that and use virtual resolutions to scale it to fit any resolution, that way he can still develop it to run nativly at that resolution if you can do it, but also run at 1024x768 if you can not. |
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| there are more people with 'normal' pc's than gaming pc's This was only true in the pre Vista days. For Vista/7, you need a SM2/SM3 capable rig to properly run Windows itself. This is why you should not use a survey that includes business users as businesses have been slow to adopt 7, and most skipped Vista. The majority of businesses stuck with XP systems that are far below the specs of what the average home user has been buying since Vista was released. |
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| Steam's survey is mostly going to be gamers, ie, your target demographics. Steam users are mostly hardcore gamers, therefore if you are targeting casual it isn't your target demographic. |
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| Steam users are mostly hardcore gamers, therefore if you are targeting casual it isn't your target demographic. It is more accurate than including business users. LOLBelieve it or not, Steam sells a lot of indie games that have the same requirements as many casual games. This is why Steam does such a good job of reaffirming CyBeRGoth's point. |
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| Yikes, just noticed that these Steam stats include all the software people have on their machines. |
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| If you look around you'll find many different variations in what is the most popular resolution etc. Each source is different no matter how much they claim reliability and relevance. You also get different results for websites, steam, unity webplayer, other web services, etc. It also differs between platforms - there is in general about 20-25% more people on Windows computers who have a lower-spec graphics display, than on Mac. I like referring to the Unity webplayer stats http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats/pages/web-2012Q4-desktop.html in addition to the steam stats. For example: Desktop resolutions on Windows 1366 x 768 24.3% 1024 x 768 19.4% 1280 x 1024 10.7% 1440 x 900 9.1% 1920 x 1080 6.8% 1280 x 800 6.3% 1600 x 900 6.1% 1360 x 768 3.9% 1680 x 1050 3.6% 1024 x 600 2.0% 1280 x 768 2.0% 1152 x 864 1.7% 1280 x 720 1.4% 1280 x 960 1.0% 800 x 600 0.5% 1920 x 1200 0.4% Desktop resolutions on Mac OS X 1280 x 800 41.5% 1440 x 900 18.6% 1920 x 1080 13.8% 1680 x 1050 8.0% 2560 x 1440 6.1% 1920 x 1200 5.4% 1366 x 768 2.9% 1024 x 768 0.8% 1600 x 900 0.5% 1280 x 1024 0.4% 1152 x 720 0.4% Clearly on Mac 1280 pixels wide OR HIGHER are the most common with only 0.8% using a 1024 width. That resolution is practically obsolete there since Mac's have been using widescreen displays pretty consistently for some years now. On Windows in general there are about 20-25% of the population who have an `underpowered` PC compared to general Mac specs, and those PC's tend to have lower resolution displays, poorer graphics cards, slower CPU's etc - and as the above shows, there's still around 20% of people using a resolution of 1024 pixels or less. But practically all of the remaining 80% are using a HIGHER resolution than that. Resolutions of 1920 or higher are quite a niche still, though. Only about 15% on Mac even less on Windows. Keep in mind though there are like 10x as many Windows users so the percentages can be misleading. 20% of Windows users having a 1024 display is the equivalent to 200% of all Mac users! I think it's a good idea to target HD graphics, as your base graphics, and then scale DOWN to support other resolutions. That way people with HD will really appreciate the extra crisp detail while the lower-res folks will still get decent images. You can't scale UP from 1024 with the same quality. It would probably be a mistake though to only target 1920 display resolutions as that cuts out 85% of your potential audience. There is a trend on websites also in the past couple of years to move towards supporting 1280 as the new defacto minimum screen width, because 1024 has lost it's place as the standard. For the longest time site widths were around 1000 pixels but now they're moving more toward 1250 or so. But they have to also scale down to support 1024 because there is a big upsurge of tablet users, especially iPad 1 and 2 which can account for over 20% of online shoppers now. The tablets are making 1024x768 resolution `come back into style` a bit, but it won't be for long. If I were making this decision for a game I'd say make it at least work well on 1280x720 (since the height is a little less than 768) and let it scale down to 1024x768 without losing any major game elements. Then if you want, support higher resolutions also. |
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| Thanks for all the input. Is there a complete list of commands somewhere? I stumbled upon the topic regarding VirtualResolution, but couldn't find the command in the blitzmax online manual. What else isn't on the that list?! |
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| The virtual resolution commands were a fairly recent addition - check version. txt in the BlitzMax folder for other changes over time |
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