[GD-General] More screen res love (tile graphics)

[Brian H. <ho...@py...>]

You know, a whole book could be written about dealing with=
 multiple 
screen resolutions...

Handling text seems easy enough if you use something like=
 FreeType.  
Handling 3D stuff is obviously easy enough as well.  The GUI 
components can be handled either by drawing them vector style or=
 by 
having multiple resolutions for your components.

What doesn't scale well, unfortunately, are tile graphics, be=
 they 
isometric or just good old 2D grids.  If your artists makes a set=
 of 
32x16 tiles designed for 640x480, then going to other resolutions=
 is 
going to be problematic.

For our lower end games it's reasonable to just choose a=
 resolution 
and say "Hey, deal with it".  

The problem is that LCDs pretty much blow this to hell.  If you=
 force 
1024x768 on a 1280x1024 LCD, the interpolation artifacts can be 
extremely jarring, bad enough that a game with significant text=
 isn't 
playable (at least, to me).

So what I've thought about is forcing 1024x768, and just=
 centering on 
systems that are running at a higher resolution, and possibly 
allowing an override.

Multi-monitor can really blow this to hell though, because there=
 are 
several distinct versions available and all have different=
 semantics. 
 Doing something naively like simply centering a 1024x768 window=
 is 
very wrong when that window straddles both monitors; but on other=
 
multi-mon configurations it won't straddle both, etc.

Brian