Recommended Resolution?

[JJames19119]

Welcome to (soon to be) 2008. High end computers are all the rage and so many games are taking advantage of them, so why should we be left in the VGA era?

I'm going to take a step beyond 640x480 and even 800x600 and go all the way into 1028x768. However, I wanted to go straight to 1280x1024. I wasn't sure about this idea though since a lot people are still using this resolution and below. Making it 1280x1024 would effectively block out everything on anyone using that as their desktop resolution and bleed off others who have it set lower. This can be especially troublesome for laptop users. I could have it force full screening upon using but that might annoy a lot of people. I could also make it to where the application can be resized downwards but it might screw with quality and speed something awful.

So I want your guys' opinions on this. As the majority of the Sonic community who plays and rates fan games the most, I want to know what the better option is. And no, going below 1028x768 is not an option. Please tell me your thoughts.

[DimensionWarped]

You really haven't communicated this out well enough.

What kind of game are you making?

Are you using any particular toolset?

Do you have hardware acceleration for this?

Because I'll tell you right now... trying to go to 640x480, bob forbid 1280x1024, will induce heaps of lag if you don't have hardware acceleration.

As for what you are after ideally baring performance, you might consider giving a wide screen resolution a try. Honestly, there isn't much need for 1280x1024... particularly for a sprite based game. You'll hit a very crisp level of detail around 800x600 and any higher might make the sprite work a pain in the ass.

Oh, and you might consider not pinning yourself to standard resolutions... maybe give 1024x600 a try or something weirder. You can always add a black border or something to fill in the full screen space.

[JJames19119]

You're right, sorry. I was kinda in a hurry when I posted that. >>;

Anyways, the problem in itself has to do with MMF2. Without hardware acceleration, scrolling the frame munches up so much CPU, it's explosive. I've found out that even running in 1280x1024 that it's STILL faster then a 640x480 scrolling the frame. It's really distressing.

I do realize that with a sprite based game, anything above 800x600 is extremely crisp but in order to get it to a level to where frame scrolling isn't necessary, it'll have to be 1280x1024. I could do 1028x768 but I sacrifice some quality and probably even more CPU.

MMF2 is an extremely poor choice to use for Sonic games unless you intend on using a very complicated yet optimized engine or just plan on using it with rather high end computers. I can't seem to get scrolling frames to work at all without some terrible slowdown, and my computer isn't that bad.

I know at least 60% of the people who have computer use at least 1028x768 now so I thought this might just be a viable option.

[GSF]

Well, that depends a lot in the computer. Once I made a speed test at 1024x768, it did work well, but when I tried it in another computer (AMD 1.2ghz 256MB RAM) it screwed up.

The Machine-independent speed thing never gave any differences, really.

If you're making a Sonic game, even 800x600 is too much, since the Genesis resolution is 320x224, and the GBA's 240x160.

Unless your graphics are totally custom, you'll have problems due to sizes.

And almost everyone has 1024x768, except for some laptop users or people who uses 800x600 because they can't read well at a high resolution. (In these situations, all the PCs I saw supported 1024x768).

[Aaron C-T]

My Asus R1F and Macbooks, I believe, use 1200x800. Not sure if that helps any for picking a res, but there's some info anyway.

[Mark the Echidna]

My monitor can't reach 1280x1024 XD'