Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Development => Programming => Topic started by: AquaTsar17 on July 09, 2010, 08:03:19 PM
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I have come across a dilemma. Earlier I asked for some opinions on scrolling vs static dungeons, but recently I realized something problematic with static dungeons. The maximum size of a dungeon floor is based on the size of the font, and the size of the game window (and thus resolution).
Allowing people to change fonts or screen size requires a scrolling dungeon. Now, if I wanted to instead make a static dungeon, the most obvious approach would be to just use a set font size (which is fine) and a set resolution.
What resolution would be "acceptable"? I am aiming for desktop machines, not handhelds, but OS should be irrelevant. I'm thinking 1024x768 is a standard monitor size now, but when I was in a computer store the other day I could not find a non-widescreen monitor. Is everything widescreen now?
So, does anyone have some ideas on an acceptable resolution?
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There's a topic over on Tigsource about the very same topic, might help you out.
Also note the Links to other Surveys a bit further down.
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=13389.0
Can't you just make a set internal resolution and just scale it up proportionally to a user's choice of resolution? I generally skip games with fixed resolution because they either force fullscreen on me, which does atrocious things to my monitor or they leave it windowed, which turns the game into a stamp.
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Huh, imagine that. Well that article addresses my question quite nicely, and the links from there are useful too. Thanks for pointing that one out!
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Huh?
http://code.google.com/p/rlprospector/
Has adjustable font sizes, and doesn't scroll (Ok, it scrolls in space, but that just proves that both things are possible)
Winx=fontwidth*notiles
Winy=Fontheight*notiles
Of course you cant offer different font sizes without changing window size without scrolling, but isn't offering different window sizes the point?
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Actually, my concern was how to make sure (no matter what screen resolution or font size used) a fixed numbers of tiles in X and Y were available. The problem ended up being a bit more trivial than I expected, but it's good to know others already looked into and discussed this issue.
I also wanted to make sure that if I used some specific window size, all my players could actually see the entire screen. I run into that issue with windowed applications (even non-roguelikes) a lot, and wanted to avoid it.
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I generally skip games with fixed resolution because they either force fullscreen on me, which does atrocious things to my monitor or they leave it windowed, which turns the game into a stamp.
What's wrong with small stamp window, if you can see what's happening in the game? Lot of programs are smaller than the resolution size.
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I think it's bad and sheer laziness to limit your game to a fixed resolution. People have netbooks with 1024x576, big televisions in living rooms with 1920x1080 and 30" monitors with 2560x1200.
Make the game playable in a window or fullscreen and add a possibility to adjust the game window dimensions. I also like if the interface and text size can be zoomed.
I just recently rewrote the display part of an old project:
Smallest view for netbooks:
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/jhirvonen/roguelike/mini.jpg
Fullscreen:
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/jhirvonen/roguelike/full.jpg
Fullscreen, zoomed interface with 2x tilesize:
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/jhirvonen/roguelike/zoomed.jpg
Settings can be changed on-the-fly.
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That looks pretty spiffy Joonas! 8)
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What's wrong with small stamp window, if you can see what's happening in the game? Lot of programs are smaller than the resolution size.
Ye, if you can see what's happening in the game is the keyphrase here. There's no chance with a native screen resolution of 1920x1080. Games with small resolutions aren't bigger than a thumb in length. That's far too small to see what's going on, let alone read text.
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Different monitors in my house are 1920x1080 (living room TV, which functions as a computer monitor when we set it to 'video 3'), 800x600 (specialized 'camping trip' laptop with 9-hour battery life and 3 days worth of backup batteries), 1280x1024 (regular laptop for use in more civilized areas where power is easier to find), and 2560x1600 (Main desktop machine, WXGA rotated 90 degrees for portrait aspect ratio rather than landscape).
I cannot imagine any single resolution and font size that would be appropriate on all these monitors.
It sounds like you're already committed to a much more graphical approach, but seriously, what's wrong with a plain-old-curses interface? The advantages are that the font will have already been set to a usable/visible size for that monitor (and can readily be reset by the user), you don't have to worry about scaling blurs, and your game is more portable.
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@Bear, welcome to the temple... introduce yourself!
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I think it's bad and sheer laziness to limit your game to a fixed resolution.
It's a technical issue mainly. With fixed fonts (in engine that doesn't support scaling) and/or tiles it's difficult to scale them without losing quality. You can provide different size fonts/tiles, but with tiles it could mean huge amount of work and all that for pussies who cry when their full hd monitor isn't used in all its glory.
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It sounds like you're already committed to a much more graphical approach, but seriously, what's wrong with a plain-old-curses interface?
It's a limiting option when you try to write a next gen roguelike.
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but with tiles it could mean huge amount of work and all that for pussies who cry when their full hd monitor isn't used in all its glory.
/edit: response edited out, not worth it.
Short note: That was uncalled for. Feeling envious, buddy?
Rest:
Why not scale it up proportionally? 2x, 4x? Black-Bar the leftover pixels. The issue with big screens is that the games that do enforce fullscreen do stretch, instead of proportionally scaling it. This leads to really odd and unplayable results. I've already explained the issue with windowed games running a small resolution.
P.S.:
slashie, sent you some bug report a couple of weeks ago, did you receive it?
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Can't you adjust your monitor's screen resolution before playing? Do wide screens not support─for lack of a technical term─not-wide resolutions? I'm sorry if that was a stupid question; I figure this wouldn't be an issue if it is as simple as I'm thinking, so it obviously isn't somehow.
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Feeling envious, buddy?
I don't know why I should. I think it tells all about these people who are calling smaller than full hd resolution games "stamps". I think they should stick to Xbox games.
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You're trying too hard Krice. Your flamebaiting and intentional misunderstanding is a "bit" obvious. Mind telling me where I hurt your feelings? ;)
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Not all monitors cope well with non wide-screen or smaller resolutions. There's a wide array of methods Monitor Manufacturers use. There's simple stretching, which results in unreadable fonts and severely skewed tiles on lower quality monitors. Then there's a method where they just center it in the middle of the screen and be done with it.
Some more expensive monitors come with pretty decent interpolation and can deal with upsizing lower resolutions, many others can not. As a result, things get worse the lower a resolution is enforced. Colors and shapes start to bleed into each other which means two letters appear as one smear. Some monitors even try to adjust to the lower resolution by constantly shifting and re-focussing. Then fail. Then try again. Constantly. So that's the bane of lower resolutions on newer monitors.
And windowed but small resolutions which I called Stamp, which seemingly inspired Krice to his berserker rage, are fine for old graphics based games with low amounts of text. Roguelikes however can't really be played that well because it's too hard to read anything.
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Hey Slashie.
I'm Ray, a longtime poster on rgrd.
It looks like forums like this one have pretty much killed rgrd dead, so I started looking around to see where the community had gone.
Now, in answer to some questions:
I consider it rude for an application to force itself fullscreen. It's assuming I'm doing nothing else, watching nothing else, or using my computer for nothing else. That's far too presumptuous. Games, especially, are somewhat "social," and I may have a web browser or usenet client for a dedicated game website or game forum, text editor for writing reviews or taking notes, chat client or skype session to talk to other players in realtime, etc. at the same time as the game. These kinds of things are part of the same "play session" to me, and if the game makes it impossible to do them, they become major features missing from the play experience.
So, if I want to maximize an application, I will maximize the application. If I want to change its aspect ratio, I will grab the corner and pull and if it doesn't figure out how to use the new aspect ratio I'll be annoyed. Resigned, because few games "get" that - but still annoyed.
Second, the "game session" is not even usually the only thing going on, on my computers - nor is it the only thing I care about while it's going on. If I'm at work being the compile-farm, render-farm, or server-farm babysitter (which I have to take a turn at once a month) I damn well better have a terminal screen up to catch "WALL" messages from whichever cluster I'm responsible for, and I damn well better act promptly on those messages. Although on a good night nothing happens, the entire purpose of that particular task is to respond promptly if and when something (usually a router or drive failure) does happen. The penalty for as much as a two-minute delay would involve losing my privileges to play games at all during those work shifts. This is one of the reasons I play turn-based games; I can instantly pay attention to something else and come back an hour later when the something else is resolved.
Third, whatever ideas you may have had about screen sizes and aspect ratios, if you're dealing with people who have to read documents a lot, double them. A bunch of us have portrait-oriented monitors, which is a regular monitor turned ninety degrees, because it fits the A4 page size that a lot of the documents we have to read come in. And that's a lot more significant than, say, the difference between 16x9, 16x10, and 4:3 ratios.
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If I want to change its aspect ratio, I will grab the corner and pull and if it doesn't figure out how to use the new aspect ratio I'll be annoyed.
You must be that hard customer, always complaining about something.
A bunch of us have portrait-oriented monitors, which is a regular monitor turned ninety degrees
Then read documents and cry.
Btw, I'm using 1680x1050 and I can read that 6 pixel quote font on this forum.
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Heh. I won't complain about it much. As I said, I'm resigned to most games not getting a new aspect ratio. But I will be annoyed.
I regard console play as a strength rather than a weakness of roguelike games. As a strength, it is something that the next generation of roguelikes should have. I embrace character displays and limited 16-color palettes because characters are small and both the characters and those colors are easily distinguished from one another. Small "tiles" allows more information to display, and ease of distinction is a crucial player advantage in a tactical display. But limiting play to 80x24 or whatever provides no advantage to the player, and doing that, IMO, limits the player's choices by treating console play as a weakness rather than a strength.
It's about a consistent interface as much as it's about anything. I chose to make a console game rather than a graphical game, and that means I choose to have it behave like a console application. A "good" console application uses whatever size and aspect ratio the console currently happens to be, and redraws itself automatically if the console (or font) gets resized during play. Those things do not belong to the console application and it should not change them or attempt to control them. Those things belong to the console it's running on. If the console's normal controls (under view, profiles, etc, or just grabbing the corner with the mouse and pulling) stop working when a particular console application is running, that's a bug in the console being deliberately exploited by code in the application.
Now, I get that if your choices are different, and you think of the main display mainly as a graphical or aesthetic experience rather than a tactical display, you probably don't have a really compelling reason to run in a console or behave like a console application. But I still think it's evil and rude for a single application out of the many currently running to do things like changing the display resolution or blocking other applications from access to the display. Those things don't belong to individual applications; they belong to the operating system. You may feel that you really need to open up a window with a particular aspect ratio and keep it in that aspect ratio, in which case you're not going to work like a console app. But at the very least, do something reasonable like magnifying the view, displaying more tiles, and/or swapping to a higher-res tileset when users want to resize the window, and for Ghod's sake don't be rude and block out parts of the screen just because your game isn't using them at the moment.
Bear
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Those things don't belong to individual applications; they belong to the operating system.
You have a strong idealistic opinion about this. Your life must be difficult, because so many games violate your golden rules.
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Eh. There's nothing "golden" about them - it's just that blocking other apps from using the display creates games where I can't have a full play session with all the extras that other apps provide. In effect, such games have massive missing featuresets.
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it's just that blocking other apps from using the display creates games where I can't have a full play session with all the extras that other apps provide.
If the game is really good I don't mind it using fullscreen and/or taking all resources. But in a way you are right. It's nice to use apps that take least amount of processor time and can be adjusted to different resolutions. It's just always not that easy. Games are demanding for hardware and there is no easy, fast and nice looking (and portable) solution to the scale issue.
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Hey Slashie.
I'm Ray, a longtime poster on rgrd.
Welcome to the Temple!
I lost proper news access some time ago, so I moved here. Some more of the old rgrd regulars are registered, but few are active here. Overall I think that even forums start to become outdated, and many people already moved on, elsewhere.