Graphics dilemma: what resolution and aspect ratio to pick

[SN1984jm]

I'm at the very beginning of thinking about making an adventure game (how ambitious of me). One thing that keeps troubling me in this early stage is what the best resolution and aspect ratio for my game would be. I'm thinking about widescreen, since it makes the scenes seem less cramped and I enjoy using widescreen for drawing scenes in general. The problem is that AGS only seems to go up to 640x400 for widescreen, that's just not enough for the level of detail I usually work with.
Then there is the question of what GUI to use. I really like the MI1 or MI2 style (which requires backgrounds of even 20:9 aspect ratio), but the verb coin, or standard GUI might also be a good idea (I also like the clean look of the remastered versions of MI1&2).

These are important decisions to make, since changing from one to the other might be an awful lot of work if you've already made your graphics for one certain style.

How do/did you decide?

[Gilbert]

To answer your question, AFAIK AGS does not support any wide-screen resolution yet.

640x400 and 320x200 weren't wide-screen resolutions. They're supposed to be displayed as 4:3. With CRT displays you can use a variety of resolutions without scaling artifacts, and so you can have resolutions such that the pixel aspects aren't square. It's until flat panel displays (Plasma, LCD and the like) have become popular that most people would prefer resolutions with square pixels. (because these retarded displays can only display pictures perfectly in their own native resolutions and they're manufactured such that the pixels are square). That unfortunately makes people consider 640x400 and 320x200 16:10 wide-screen resolutions nowadays, and yes, you may consider them wide-screen and design your game as such without problems, but many people don't know that if they stretch old games made with such resolutions to a wide-screen they're actually not getting correct pictures.

[SN1984jm]

So this "wide-screen-look-alike-resolution" only causes problems on wide screen monitors with the old games. Because it seems, like you said, you can create your game in 640x400, and treat it as wide screen, without problems (I've noticed that the game setup allows you to correctly expand the 640x400 game on the entire widescreen, without strange effects, using graphics filters).

Long story short, it seems I can continue using this resolution and treat it as widescreen, while waiting for a new AGS release which allows for modern wide-screen resolutions (Or am I missing the point?).
As long as I have these small resolutions, I am playing in windowed mode anyway, which seems to look just fine.

[Anian]

Might if I jump on the wagon here.  
The widescreen thing is bugging the hell out of me as well and since I'm planing on using 3d graphics (as in prerendered backgrounds), with around 180-200px high character sprites, I was thinking of 800x600 resolution...

One solution I thought would be nice like the thing I think XBLA (or other examples where there's conversion for older games) use, where on 4:3 games you have graphics specially made so they stand on either side of the widescreen monitors, instead of the black strips that you get now when using the widescreen option. Just still picture that basically a frame/background for the game window.
I really don't know nearly enough, but it shouldn't be that hard to implement, should it?

[Snarky]

Well, AGS doesn't support any widescreen resolutions at this time, so it doesn't become relevant.

The first step for implementing support for different aspect ratios would probably be more resolution settings in the game options, and (as now) padding unused portions with black. So people could make widescreen versions of the game where they just added a frame along the side, but it would have to be a separate version.

However, there have been calls for some way of letting games dynamically adapt to different aspect ratios. If that was available, it should be very easy to fill in the unused edges with whatever you like.

I imagine allowing dynamic game resolutions might require major changes in the engine, and I think it will also be much harder to script games like that, not to mention designing the GUIs. Anytime you can't be sure of the precise size and layout of something on the screen, making it look and behave right in all situations becomes much harder.

[SN1984jm]

I'm still not really clear on one thing: Is it possible to use for instance the 800x600 resolution, but make the game in such a way, that the bottom and top 800x75 strips (In case you wish to have your backgrounds and game at 16:9) are completely ignored?

For example, could I make all my backgrounds in that case at 800x450, and adjust some setting somewhere, that the top and bottom of the screen are out of reach for the cursor?

Or not to confuse the editor, import the backgrounds as 800x600, but just leaving the top and bottom black, and then using some game setting to keep the cursor within the 16:9 region?

That would be an acceptable workaround for the time being.

And another thing, is using a resolution of 1024x768 really that slow on todays computers?

[Khris]

No, it should run fine even on older PCs.

You can limit the mouse using mouse.SetBounds().

[Anian]

That would be an acceptable workaround for the time being.

But then on widscreen monitors you'd have a 800x450px screen with black all around it (2 strips upp and down, 2 strip on the sides), it'd be like staring into the game through the bottom of a dark box. How's that better than just having just 2 strips of black on the sides, unless you're thinking of setting up your monitor every time you start the game...  

Trust me, even on good lcd monitors and tv's, stuff that lingers on the screen (GUIs, HUDs etc.) can get burnt in on the screen and full on black will definetly leave a mark for a while after you finish playing. The black strips on top and bottom of the screen are nice effects when watching a movie, but they're not really good for your monitor in the long run (and you'd play even a short game for more than what a usual movie lasts.

[SN1984jm]

That would be an acceptable workaround for the time being.

How's that better than just having just 2 strips of black on the sides

But I have a wide screen monitor and want a wide screen game, this doesn't result in side strips, unless the game is in 4:3 format. So I'd either have black all around (which could be fixed by game settings), or it would fit nicely on my entire screen.

About the game options, isn't there a way to make some setting default, for every start of your game executable. Maybe launching it using a batch file or something?

[Khris]

What game options exactly are you referring to? The ones in winsetup?

[SN1984jm]

Yes that's the one. I believe you can set some letterbox option there? I haven't tried it yet, but I have read about it.

[Snarky]

No, that option just makes games in 320x200 and 640x400 run in 320x240 and 640x480 resolution, with letterboxing to fill in the rest of the screen. It's really just a compatibility option since not all graphics cards/drivers support those low non-4:3 resolution.

If you do make a letterboxed game in 800x600 and run it on a widescreen monitor, you're going to have black borders on all the sides, and there's really nothing you  can do about it. Widescreen TVs usually have an option to blow up a letterboxed 4:3 image to fill the whole screen and cut off the letterboxing, but PC monitors generally don't.

[SN1984jm]

Oh, I see, that really is too bad. In that case I'm going to have to make my game in either 640x400, or a higher resolution with the 9-verbs gui, to fill up the screen with non-blackness (In that case you'd still have the black bars on the side ofcourse, but it would be better than black on all sides). The last option would at least leave a wide background.

[Snarky]

That's what Theo did for The Journey Down. The freeware version runs in 320x240 with the inventory taking up the strip at the bottom, and the upcoming commercial version will run in widescreen HD with a popup inventory (if they can manage to implement widescreen support in AGS; which would be nice).

[SN1984jm]

Nice. Getting the inventory at the bottom is probably just a coordinate change right?

[Snarky]

Coordinate change from what? You can position all GUIs (menus, inventories etc.) in AGS wherever you like, yes; but if you want things to pop up when you move the cursor to particular areas of the screen (instead of being always-on or appearing when you press another menu button), you have to write a little bit of code...

Except for menus that appear on the top of the screen, which there's a special built-in setting for (just to make it easier to create Sierra-like UIs, I assume).

It's still quite easy though, and the Tween Module demo game has a nice code sample for how to do it. I found changing the inventory behavior from the Sierra-like style to something more in the vein of LucasArts or Kyrandia to be a bigger task.

You should probably check out the tutorials and other parts of the manual to get some idea of how to go about customizing the inventory.

[SN1984jm]

Thanks a lot, I've tried out this tween module and the widescreen-inside-4:3-configuration, and it looks promising. I think I've made up my mind on what the layout of the game is going to be like. I can always change the inventory and menu styles later on. At least now I can start designing backgrounds and the like.