Question for people with completed games

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bobbk
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Question for people with completed games

#1 Post by bobbk »

A question for those of you with completed games, especially with games that have a higher resolution (1280+)

Do you ever get complaints about having restricted resolutions, like players not being able to play because of a high resolution or being unable to run it in a window?

Is it ever an issue?

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Re: Question for people with completed games

#2 Post by luminarious »

Why would a game be unable to run in a window?

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Re: Question for people with completed games

#3 Post by bobbk »

Say someone's max resolution is 1024x768 but your game window runs just a bit bigger at 1280x800

I read a similar thread earlier, but I wanted to know if anyone had any real complaints for players about this

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Re: Question for people with completed games

#4 Post by Vatina »

My game was in 800x600. Never heard anything.

I am a little annoyed about high resolutions myself though - like the ones in Jack Norton's games (I can't remember the numbers).

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Re: Question for people with completed games

#5 Post by luminarious »

bobbk wrote:Say someone's max resolution is 1024x768 but your game window runs just a bit bigger at 1280x800
Ren'py will automatically resize the window to fit the screen, I just tested. But I still think 1024*600 is optimum size for windows.. :)

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Re: Question for people with completed games

#6 Post by chronoluminaire »

I once had a complaint about When I Rule The World being too high-res at 1024x768, by a friend who wanted to play it on his 800x600 machine. (This was five years ago.) That's the only such complaint I've had.
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Re: Question for people with completed games

#7 Post by Jake »

bobbk wrote:I read a similar thread earlier, but I wanted to know if anyone had any real complaints for players about this
I think the only modern complaint about screen size that I know of is that many 'netbook' PCs produced these days still have resolutions lower than 1024x768 in at least one dimension.

That said, I've only ever seen one of these devices actually used by a human being, and that was my mother - who not only isn't likely to be playing any VNs anytime soon, but also moved to a Macbook Pro a short while later 'cause for all its portability the... uh... screen was too small. ;-)



The 'windowed' complaint, though, I can certainly understand; I know it annoys me when things like VNs start up in full-screen mode by default, on the whole. And I guess a 1024x768 window on a 1024x768 screen isn't much different, to be honest...
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Re: Question for people with completed games

#8 Post by jack_norton »

Vatina wrote: I am a little annoyed about high resolutions myself though - like the ones in Jack Norton's games (I can't remember the numbers).
I use max 1024x768 which I think should be completely fine - 6 years old PC with the first VGA were able to display 1024x768 :mrgreen:
In some of my new games I'm trying 800x600 again though.
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Re: Question for people with completed games

#9 Post by bobbk »

Jack, Any reason for the switch to lower resolutions? Have people had compatibility issues with the higher rezes?

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Re: Question for people with completed games

#10 Post by jack_norton »

No, the main reason is that the art for one of my next games was drawn at low resolution so looks bad at 1024x768. Nobody had ever troubles with that resolution since pytom added the automatic scaling down when going fullscreen in those EEC laptops with max height res of 600px or lower.
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Re: Question for people with completed games

#11 Post by Sin »

I've said it before: there's no reason today why you can't go 1024x768.
Personally I think you should go higher if possible, but most 2D engines aren't set up to enable that.

Artists will draw high-resolution art anyway and then scale down to whatever resolution they need. With modern 2D engines this can, and should, be done dynamically in hardware.

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Re: Question for people with completed games

#12 Post by number473 »

To be honest, I have the reverse complaint. A 800x600 screen doesn't make up a quarter of my screen, and I want some shiny high-res graphics. Ah, but a lot of people still can't display such high resolution so it's wasted, or it just gets scaled down anyway. I still think 800x600 is still too low by modern standards. 1024x768 is more reasonable, Anything besides a netbook should be able to display at least that.

edit: But I haven't completed a game so I'm just stating my opinion ^^;
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Re: Question for people with completed games

#13 Post by Vatina »

Well, I can definitely see that high-res is good - but I'd like to be able to choose window size myself then. Depending on how involving the game is I often end up just playing in windowed mode - and when the window is 1024x768 I often have to move it around first to be able to see most of the bottom, and it takes up too much space.
For fullscreen a high-res is wonderful though.

I know not everyone would want to complain about such a thing, but since the OP asked for such complains, he got one :P

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Re: Question for people with completed games

#14 Post by Spiky Caterpillar »

Artists will draw high-resolution art anyway and then scale down to whatever resolution they need. With modern 2D engines this can, and should, be done dynamically in hardware.
Depends on artist workflow - some do work at the target resolution of the game rather than highres-and-downscale, and downscaling can destroy fine detail. (Whether or not that matters will obviously depend a great deal on the art style, but, all other things being equal, I think I'd probably find a native 1280x1024 game on my 1600x1200 monitor prettier than a native 1920x1080 game downscaled.)

That being said, where are my native 1600x1200 games?
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Re: Question for people with completed games

#15 Post by Sin »

Spiky Caterpillar wrote:Depends on artist workflow
For sure.
Spiky Caterpillar wrote:That being said, where are my native 1600x1200 games?
Sure, why not? Though at some point you need to start worrying about memory.

Aside: The largest image I've tried putting into Novelty is 4000x5000 pixels. You can do it, but it eats up more than half my video memory (Geforce 260GTX) and it won't even load on my netbook. The netbook has a texture size limit of 2048x2048, which still is quite enough.

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