Speaking of vector graphics, has anyone ever used AggPas to do a game? (Sorry, for being slightly off-topic ...)
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?
Games:
Seafox
Pages:
Syntax Error Software
itch.io page
Online Chess
http://gameknot.com/#paul_nicholls
I have a tendacy to dig trough the games files to see which components do they use (sometimes can be easily seen from various dll files wich ship with game). I try to identify resource files containing graphics, sounds, etc. Many times I need to use various unpackers so I can actualy see ingame resources like graphics and sounds.
Do mind that I don't do this with intention of stealing any of theese resources, but seeing them can usualy tell you a lot about the way how game works. This is actialy the way how I learned most about game mechanics up till now.
And NO I don't do revesre enginering of the games code.
ok, cool
Games:
Seafox
Pages:
Syntax Error Software
itch.io page
Online Chess
http://gameknot.com/#paul_nicholls
Note that if such game content is encrypted, you'll be breaking the law in some countries just by using the quoted approach. In either case, you are not making a sound argument here. Many 3D games (FPS/RPG/etc) use rather huge textures, which are later downsampled.
In addition, if you load all graphical resources to system memory, even legacy computers with 256 Mb of RAM (plus another 1 Gb of swap file) will handle it since graphics typically has relatively low footprint compared to sound, music and video files. Nowadays, a typical low-end machine will have at least 1 Gb of RAM, so you don't need to worry about loading hi-res graphics at all. If you are worried about video memory, then you should know that both Direct3D and OpenGL load/unload managed resources to/from video memory on the fly, so only the stuff that is being drawn is usually stored in video memory.
Yes I know that. I never bother decryptic any content, if I can see some content by using some easy unpacker (usualy found on the web) I do otherwise I don't bother too much.
Yes but most of them requires computer with quite powerfull hardware to run.
Also 3D graphic engines sometimes use huge textures wich are actualy colections of smaler graphics (theese are not to be considered as high resolution graphics) and then only portions of theese are used as different 3D models textures. This aproach is usualy used to speed up the thexture lodaing into graphic memory. Also if theese colections are properly organized they can use les graphic memory that it would be used if all of the small textures would be loaded one by one.
256 Mb of ram won't alow you to load much graphics in it especialy if we're talking about some highres graphics.
As for the swap file it's size varies a lot. On Windows based system the size of a swapfile or. pagefile as named by Microsoft is 150% of the size of RAM by default. So if you have computer with 256 Mb of RAM the size of the swap file would be 384 Mb. Loading any graphics from the swapfile to graphic memory would be werry slow due to slow hard drive acces. This will result in lots of slowdowns or some graphic content not being drawn when it is suposed to.
Take GTA San Andreas as an example. If you play this game on a low end computer and do some flying with the planes you could sinply crash into the tree before it would be even rendered (texture for the tree isn't loaded into graphic memory fast enough).
Also you should take into consideration that you would ned RAM for other data to. So unless you have smal levels, a few of ingame objects, you can forget about having any higres graphics on pre mentioned computer with only 256 Mb or RAM.
Partly true. But nowadays when there is posible to exploit graphics card processing power to do other things besides just drawing graphics you should note that theese operations also use video memory.
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