800x600?

[PyTom]

Here's the screen resolution statistic for renai.us. It's similar to what Mikan posted, but since it's the most public-facing of the three VN-related sites I run, I thought it would be interesting to post anyway.

[rioka]

That's some useful graphs. Good thing too cuz I upgraded BL to 1024x786 from 800x600. <_<

[azureXtwilight]

I was thinking of making the native resolution of my new game 800x600, rather than 640x480. (This would govern the size of the background and character images.) I was wondering:

1) Does anyone still, in 2004, have a monitor not capable of handling 800x600?

2) What resolutions are other games running at?

3) Is there some other reason why 800x600 would be a bad idea?

(I'm also still toying with if I want the game to be letterbox or not. But that's a more stylistic issue.)

1. I can. I don't know who can't
2. Hmmm. Most of the games I have have 1024x768 resolution...
3. No, I like that kind of resolution. But it'll be better if it's 1024x768

[rocket]

Starlight ep1 is 1280x720 and it looks FANTASTIC!
(if I do say so myself)

I choose that rez because it's an HD standard and so optimized for widescreen (which gives the proper cinematic feel). Since it's only about 1/3 of my laptop's screen rez it also didn't seem too wasteful... (^_^);;

Maybe it was a dumb move and I'll re-factor when I get to full asset production mode. Still, I did all the source art for Ep0 at double rez, and in my tests the line drawings look good even without additional detail, they just have more expressiveness in the detail they have. Not to mention that the 3D looks much crisper, and stars look great at that rez.

[rocket]

Here's the screen resolution statistic for renai.us. It's similar to what Mikan posted, but since it's the most public-facing of the three VN-related sites I run, I thought it would be interesting to post anyway.

renaius.png

Hmm... now on second thought compatibility may be an issue eh? (^_^);;;

How does Ren'py handle smaller screens than the sources?

[PyTom]

Um... not well. I think it will fail to start in fullscreen mode, and it will create a bigger-than-the-screen window in windowed mode.

(On the plus side, good to hear Ep 1 is underway.)

[rocket]

Ok, no problem...

Ep1 will be "broadcast" in HD (where available). (^_^)

I'll also run all the assets through a size reduction script to get a SD 800x480 letterboxed version, and make both available for download.

[Guest]

Hi this is the artist for the next ATP game. ATP has finally gone 800x600 from 640x480. Hallelujah.

[rioka]

Hi this is the artist for the next ATP game. ATP has finally gone 800x600 from 640x480. Hallelujah.

lol You said it! XD

[mikey]

Hi this is the artist for the next ATP game. ATP has finally gone 800x600 from 640x480. Hallelujah.

Well... it really is so that after discussions and weighing pros and cons we come to the conclusion it makes optimum sense under the circumstances we have, for this project to be in 800x600 - ant this is four years later after the discussion was first opened. Plus, this is a development decision, the question when the 800x600 game will actually be released is a completely different matter. So by the time ATP Projects has something 800x600 out, this thread will be discussing 1600x1200.

ATP Projects - Yesterday's technology tomorrow!

[musical74]

LOL mikey LOL I needed a good laugh, thank you

I admit to not understanding this mildly....are most games a given resolution regardless what the screen resolution of the monitor is? example: what's the resolution of Garden Society Kykuit? Moonlight Walks? I always thought it was *whatever the screen resolution of the monitor is*....

[luminarious]

In the grand old days of the CRT monitors the resolution of the game would have mattered less, as CRT's don't have a native resolution. With LCD's, Renpy graphics need to be upscaled and thus become blurrier the higher the monitor's resolution is. A renpy game's real resolution is what you see when the game is in window mode.

In a perfect world we would all do our graphics in FullHD resolution and it would then be scaled down to fit on screen, and window mode would be scaled down even more. But right now Renpy doesn't support it, it would make hideously big games (think 500KB or more for a single background). Maybe vector files would be an alternative, but even deviantart doesn't have all that many people doing full-scale interiors using vectors.. most are icons or people..

[chronoluminaire]

LOL mikey LOL I needed a good laugh, thank you

I admit to not understanding this mildly....are most games a given resolution regardless what the screen resolution of the monitor is? example: what's the resolution of Garden Society Kykuit? Moonlight Walks? I always thought it was *whatever the screen resolution of the monitor is*....

Most Ren'Py games are a fixed resolution. They offer you either the choice of playing fullscreen mode (which temporarily sets your monitor's resolution to that game's fixed resolution), or playing in a window at that fixed resolution.

Ren'Py doesn't support any kind of automatic scaling (because that would make the graphics look quite awful), or any kind of switching between different screen sizes based on a user selection or something. (This is probably because a number of people on this forum take quite a lot of pains to reduce the download size of games wherever possible, and a game with multiple sizes of every image would be far larger than a game without it.)

Back when I released When I Rule The World, I got into trouble for making it 1024x768, as one of my best friends (MoonShadow, SunKitten's husband) typically ran an 800x600 machine at the time and so couldn't play it. But that was 2005.

[Leaden]

One another problem with screen resolution: two types of screen ratio (standart 4:3 and wide 16:9). The game must work properly on both types of screen. That means requirement to support two different resolution in one game.

Any cheap solution?

[ficedula]

Most Ren'Py games are a fixed resolution. They offer you either the choice of playing fullscreen mode (which temporarily sets your monitor's resolution to that game's fixed resolution), or playing in a window at that fixed resolution.

Ren'Py doesn't support any kind of automatic scaling (because that would make the graphics look quite awful), or any kind of switching between different screen sizes based on a user selection or something.

It really needn't necessarily make the graphics look awful. Back when we made MorningStar we targetted it at 800x600, so when you ran it, it popped up an 800x600 window. But you could resize the window to whatever size you wanted - although the game did try to snap it to a 4:3 ratio to avoid the graphics looking distorted.

For comparison, here's the game at the normal resolution:
http://www.sylphds.net/ev2/img/morningstar1.png
...and this is it stretched out to a nearly-1280x1024 window
http://www.sylphds.net/ev2/img/morningstar2.png

Simply scaling the graphics up works pretty well - there's no obvious artefacts, even around the parts using transparency. It's a desirable feature for me at least; firstly, if you scale it up well it'll probably give better results than the scaling built into your LCD. Secondly, it allows people running at weird resolutions to actually play your game - if you're playing, say, on a HD-TV, it's quite possible for 640x480 to be too small to actually read easily.

(We didn't allow multiple resolutions for Renaissance but that's because it had shooting sections, and pixel-accurate movement was actually game critical there! But obviously for most VNs that isn't the case.)