Resolution

[jordan]

Hey, I noticed some files were being worked on so I took a peek. Opened the swf file and there was a white box. Obviously there's some kind of coding going on behind the scenes, but the fact that it was an 800x800px square struck me as odd. I've seen tons of different resolutions but I don't think I've ever seen a straight up 1:1 aspect ratio, at least not for a game. Even 4:3 is slightly rectangular.

Anyway, while it's easy to change and won't break anything I think we should decide on a working (aka native) resolution. That is, the resolution that the game will be designed in but the player can change later depending on settings.

Here's a huge wiki list of common resolutions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_resolutions

Now, there are so many on there that it's mind boggling, but I think we can safely cut it down to just a few. If you ask around online you'll find that modern monitors (ie: any lcd made in the past 5 years) come in 3 flavors as far as aspect ratio goes. 4:3 (aka standard), 16:9 (aka widescreen) and 16:10 (also known as widescreen, however the 16:10 aspect ratio is exclusive to monitors, so you wouldn't see a tv with that aspect ratio). For the past year and a half it seems like they have been phasing out the 16:10 aspect ratio and going toward the more media-friendly 16:9 aspect ratio, seeing as how more and more people are watching movies on their computer. Personally I'm in favor of going with a 16:9 aspect ratio, not only because it is the newest standard, but also because a widescreen aspect ratio would work better with the movement style. Since we're going with a side-to-side Castle Crashers-equse movement it would also make more sense since you would want to see more landscape rather than more sky.

Resolution is the tricky part. It seems like there are the average joe's who never messed with their resolution since they got the computer and have it set at something like 1280x800, and then there are people who bump their resolutions up to a crazy number like 2560x1600. The nice thing for us is that vectors scale up flawlessly, so the obvious choice is to design for an almost-full screen size for lower resolution monitors.

So, taking all that into consideration here are some common medium-sized resolutions for widescreen displays:

For 16:9 we have: 1024x576 (I believe this was the native resolution for Halo 3 actually), 1280x720 (aka 720p), 1600x900
For 16:10 we have: 1024x640 (common laptop resolution), 1152x720, 1280x800 (a standard 16:10 res), 1440x900

So, what does everyone think we should go with? My vote is for 1280x720.

[MitchRichardson]

yeah 1280x 720 sounds fine to me. Don't mind anything I have in the current tests files, including the 800x800 res, I'm just toying around with the state machine and getting a start on some of the coding. All the stuff in there is currently for shits and giggles.