Author Topic: minimum resolution these day?  (Read 8363 times)

Brigand

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minimum resolution these day?
« on: August 16, 2016, 03:27:23 PM »
So I have essentially completed a new roguelike engine which has the ability to set to any resolution you want - even something really weird like 2000 tall by 800 wide or some other strange BS - and it will render and respond to mouse click correctly regardless of what you set. And while I don't want to set an upper limit on this resolution (although maybe I should?), I DO want to set a lower limit to avoid things like unreadable fonts/clipped text/etc. This is because I don't want to just stretch sprites and text - if a player has a lot of screen real estate why not let them see more of the map, as long as the game plays the same on every resolution? Higher resolution = more map seen. Offscreen enemies that are in sight range are handled a little like TOME does, with a minimap, and jumping the visiual area to the target area when using a skill.


Right now I have a lower limit of 800x600; 15 years ago people had monitors that were 640x480... but does anyone realistically play on monitors this small anymore?


I'm curious if anyone has an opinion on the minimum supported resolution a roguelike game should support? It will definitely inform some immediate design decision in my engine, and I don't want to exclude a sizable percentage of players because of an arbitrary limit that I picked out of a hat.

getter77

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Re: minimum resolution these day?
« Reply #1 on: August 16, 2016, 07:42:48 PM »
Great to see you back at it again on Roguelike development!  8)

Surely 800x600 can work as a conservative estimate---otherwise, hmm, I guess align it on video content of nowadays which would have 720p as the baseline as not everybody has a 1080p monitor and higher.
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Krice

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Re: minimum resolution these day?
« Reply #2 on: August 16, 2016, 08:35:48 PM »
You should first create a game for some resolution you want and then start to think about supporting other resolutions. That's the right order to do things. Also, platform matters a lot. PCs don't often have smaller resolutions unless we're talking about some kind of mini laptops which by the way suck and I don't recommend them to anyone.