   2d games and modern resolutions
  I was playing the demo of an indie game called Eschalon, and as far as I could tell it only ran at 800 by 600 which on my monitor took up a space about the size of my palm. (I couldn't find an option to increase it anyway although to be honest I didn't look very hard). But, anyway the point is I was struck by the difficulty modern 2d developers must have with resolutions, particularly with monitors that don't run below their native resolution gracefully.So I imagine the best solution is to pick one resolution to target, and then when people run in a different resolution you have the option of either:a) scaling your quads, probably easy to do with OpenGL, looks rubbish scaling up, not sure about scaling downb) change the size of the viewable area, may have undesirable gameplay impactc) pad with dark borders, a bit pointless since they can probably just run at a lower resolution and have the monitor do this for them.And I suppose you wouldn't necessarily do the same thing for your GUI and your scene. Does anyone have experience of this? And is there any data on the best resolution to target these days? Are lots of people still using 1024 by 768?   
  Dealing with resolutions is one of those few areas where it's actually harder in 2d than 3d. I was dealing with this recently as well. And it gets even more awkward when you try and cope with different aspect ratios.The Steam hardware stats would be worth checking out - from what I've gathered 1024x768 is the minimum resolution these days, which is why 800x600 is an appealing resolution as it'll work both fullscreen and windowed at the lowest end, but still provides you with quite a lot of pixel real estate.For aspect ratios, ones I've seen out in the wild are 4:3, 5:4, 16:9 and 16:10. 4:3 is obviously the most common, and of the two widescreen formats 16:10 seems to be slightly more popular than 16:9.I went with 'a', since if you've got decent resolution art it looks better than you'd expect and doesn't have any nasty gameplay side effects. The other option is 'd' where you make your source artwork in vector form (flash or inkscape) and scale those at runtime to make your game resolution-independent, but I suspect that's a lot of effort for minimum gain.   ;  Interesting blog thanks. I'll definitely look into the rendering to a texture and scale approach. I don't think my game idea would suffer much with variable playing area, as long as there is a minimum size. Perhaps I could use downscale for res lower than the target, and increase area for higher res.I had a google for the steam stats: 800 x 600 (-0.07%)  0.63%1024 x 768 (-1.43%)  19.26%1152 x 864 (-0.15%)  3.45%1280 x 720 (+0.05%)  0.68%1280 x 768 (-0.01%)  0.91%1280 x 800 (-0.41%)  7.75%1280 x 960 (+0.03%)  2.14%1280 x 1024 (-0.49%)  22.95%1360 x 768 (+0.05%)  0.70%1366 x 768 (+0.04%)  0.82%1440 x 900 (+0.37%)  11.53%1600 x 1200 (+0.12%)  1.26%1680 x 1050 (+0.95%)  18.21%1920 x 1080 (+0.46%)  2.12%1920 x 1200 (+0.39%)  5.07%Other (+0.08%)  2.52% Surpisingly big showing for 1024x768 and 4:3 monitors in general. Most popular widescreens are both 16:10.   ;  Keep in mind that the Next Big Thing is not huge desktop monitors or big screen TVs owned by ubergeeks-with-money but things like smartbooks and smartphones.  Not bigger screens, but smaller screens.  I've gone one device, close to release, that sports 1024x564 RGB565.If you want to get a seat on the next big bus, make NO assumptions about video resolutions.   ;  The future of 2D graphics outside of "retro" games is probably vector graphics, with assets given in formats like SVG. As Bregma said, there is a trand towards small screens, and also screens with retardedly high resolutions like 1920x1080 on a 17" diagonal. Those are very hard to deal with when using raster graphics.   ;  Not an option for me anytime soon, I know nothing whatever about vector graphics. But on the face of it if your giving up the simplicity of 2D raster graphics why would you not just go the whole hog and make a 3D game? (After all polygon meshes are vector graphics in a sense, depending on your definitions, but with the added benefit of existing in actual physical space.)   ;Quote:But on the face of it if your giving up the simplicity of 2D raster graphics why would you not just go the whole hog and make a 3D game?Well, there are plenty of reasons to make a 2-d game rather than a 3-d game that have nothing to do with simplification. But even if simplification is your primary concern, keep in mind that other areas not related to graphics (such as collision detection and AI) can also be simplified considerably when the simulation is restricted to two dimensions.I'm actually using scalable vector graphics for the project I'm working on now. The only real problem I've run into thus far is that the graphics have to be rebuilt whenever the resolution changes, which causes a delay of a couple of seconds when changing video modes (still trying to find a way around this problem). As others have said though, vector graphics offer some significant advantages, especially considering the wide variety of video devices currently in use.   ;Original post by jykQuote:But even if simplification is your primary concern, keep in mind that other areas not related to graphics (such as collision detection and AI) can also be simplified considerably when the simulation is restricted to two dimensions.Sorry I don't really follow that, using 3D graphics doesn't mean your game logic can't be 2D, lots of games have 3D objects restricted to a surface, particularly strategy games. Consider a game like Street Fighter 4 for example. Same game logic as always, but with benefit of things like dynamic lighting and bone animation which 2d vectors can't give you, or at least I don't see how they could.As I said I don't know much about them, so I don't know how the content creation process compares in terms of time and complexity with 3d. (Particularly for an isometric/top down like game.) Are there standard tools, file formats, rendering libraries available?;Quote:Sorry I don't really follow that, using 3D graphics doesn't mean your game logic can't be 2D, lots of games have 3D objects restricted to a surface, particularly strategy games.Sorry, I interpreted this:Quote:...why would you not just go the whole hog and make a 3D game?As meaning a 'fully 3-d' game, not a 2-d game with 3-d graphics.Quote:As I said I don't know much about them, so I don't know how the content creation process compares in terms of time and complexity with 3d. (Particularly for an isometric/top down like game.) Are there standard tools, file formats, rendering libraries available?I think SVG is fairly standard as far as formats go. For content creation, there's Inkscape (free) and Adobe Illustrator (not free), and probably others as well. The rendering libraries I'm most familiar with are Cairo (free, I think) and Anti-Grain (earlier versions are free, current version requires a license). There are also various commercial libraries available.I'm not an expert on the subject, but my impression is that, as things are now, it's not as straightforward to build a game around vector graphics as it is to use raster graphics (for 2-d) or textured models (for 3-d). My guess though is that the tools available will become better and more user-friendly over time as scalable vector graphics become more widely used.   ;Cairo is LGPL and MPL (you choose which one you'd like to have). If everything else fails you could just pre-render your assets to raster graphics after the resolution has been set, which would handle arbitrary screen resolutions to a certain degree, while maintaining the simplicity of raster graphics assets.   