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I don't think there is an easy solution to this.
I do think that you should design the game engine acording to targeted audience. So you should optimize your game engine acording to the most comon aspect ratio used on your targeted platforms.
I don't think making different UI's for different aspect ratios is a solution. For instance if you make a bigger UI for users with widescreens you won't achive the same gameplay expirience with those who use standard monitors and would have smaler UI. Especialy if widescreen UI contains more information. So becouse using differen UI won't offer the same gaming expirience showing more world would be much easier solution to do.
But if you do intend for all of your players to have the same gaming expirience then you should lock your games aspect ratio so that only resolutions of that aspect ratio are posible. Also in this case you should take care so that all ingame object are drawn the same size regardles of the screen resolution.
Now as for using different resolutions (DPI's) you should use several instances of your graphics optimized for several different resolutions. Using only graphics optimized for high resolutions and scaling them donwn will make them look blured an lose some importand detailes. (slowly scale down any of your photos in your popular photo editing tool and you wil quickly inderstand what I mean). Also using grapphics optimized for small resolutions and caling them up will make them look pixelated (each pixel will look like smal square).
Offcourse you don't have to make graphics optimized for every posible resolution, you should make your graphics optimized for most oftem used resolutions and then scale them for other always using the one wich are the closest to the target resolution (les scaling means better results).
The best way is to use vectored graphics but as it has been sad not all of the graphics can be vectorised. So this means that the grephics must be developed acordingly from the verry start.
@Little offtopic
Widescreens could be easily used for making games with hotseat multiplayer by splitscreen method (verticaly spliting the scren into wto parts).
Below in your post you suggest using vectored graphics. Now, if the artwork is rendered using vectored approach in the first place (e.g. Flash, 3D Studio Max, Maya, etc.), then using proper downsampling/multisampling will not make the graphics blurred. In fact, an antialiasing technique that is properly made should work with the image in such way that you will not perceive any visual artifacts or even realize that the image has been downsampled.
Putting cheap/crappy editing software (which may include popular software products such as Photoshop, by the way) as an example does not support your argument.
There is an entire area of sciences that deals with such issues, called Colorimetry. The proper downsampling needs to be made in perceptually uniform color spaces, including but not limited to CIELAB, CIELUV, DIN99, ATD95, CIECAM among many others.
Speaking of vector graphics, has anyone ever used AggPas to do a game? (Sorry, for being slightly off-topic ...)
Best regards,
Cybermonkey
Ok, I think we're on the same page then. I like this concept as it tries to eliminate the problem (which is basically what the link in your previous post was about). It may require some more work in the design phase of the game but at least this tackles the multiple aspect ratio problem.
As I see it UI is not the only thing that can be changed when using different layouts (though I wrote that in my previous post). If you commit to using several layouts you'll also commit to to think about if anything in your game can change across different layouts.
E.g. when writing console games you have the full tv screen area you can draw on. However there's also a safe area. This is the area all important gameplay and huds should be placed in. This is due to the fact that some tv sets covers up parts of the screen border. The safe area is guarenteed to show up on all tv sets. Likewise you could possibly define a "safe area" in your game that must be displayed exactly the same across all screens. The area outside can then be used differently for each layout. Some will show extre gui stuff. Others will maybe just show extra parts of the game world that doesn't have influence on gameplay.
The point about ensuring the same display size of assets across resolutions is however a good point.
I believe that you can use just one asset and then downscale and still get good results. Sure if you're porting a pc game to a smartphone then it could make sense to create new assets optimised for smaller screens. But it all depends on the game in then end. For a pixel perfect result downscaling obviously wouldn't be a good way to go.
Regarding vector art. Yes in some cases vectors will do, but in many cases it won't.
Imagine I've written something clever here inspiring you to make something awesome. If that happens give me credits
Have you tried what I sad in my post about downscaling (slowly scale down any of your photos in your popular photo editing tool and you wil quickly understand what I mean).
You should understand that highres graphics would use much more memory for storing them. So if you have a lot of graphics you could soon find out that your game won't be able to run on most older computers, becouse they would lack the necessary graphic memory to store all of those highres graphics in it. Also using higres graphics requires more procesing power from the graphics card especialy when using scaling as this requres even more procesing. So it is posible that many older computers wont have graphics cards wich would be capable of renderning your game with decent FPS.
Yes you could downsample your graphics at the verry start of the game, but this will increase the games loading time quite a bit. And noone likes wating long for the game to load.
Anywhay if it would be so easy ass you think everyboddy would be using this aproach. How many games have you ever seen using this aproach. I don't recal any of them.
This is only going to cause an issue if an image is repeat-ably down-scaled, thus reducing the quality by lots. Only being down-scaled once is going to be just fine.
I can see the memory and loading times being an issue, but it might work...
How could you tell if a game used the down-scale approach anyway?
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