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

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

>I find this odd... I am constantly on the road and on airplanes,=
 so
>I'm forced to do most of my PC gaming on my laptop (and it's=
 faster
>to boot, so it's not all bad!). The laptop runs at a native
>resolution of 1600x1200, but have absolutely no legibility=
 problems
>playing any games at lower resolutions (and I play all of them

Well, consider the pixel density.  You're probably using a 15.1"=
 
laptop screen with a 1600x1200 resolution, so your pixels are=
 going 
to be very small.  A standard 17 or 18" LCD is running at=
 1280x1024, 
so you're going to see much 

Also, scaling up to 1600x1200 gives the interpolation hardware a=
 lot 
more breathing room to work, instead of dealing with just pixel 
fractions.  Scaling an 800x600 -> 1600x1200 won't introduce near=
 the 
artifacts that going from 1024x768 -> 1280x1024 would.

>I assume the best solution is to have multi-resolution artwork

Yes, this is the ideal solution, but it requires a lot more=
 content 
generation and it also requires a lot more storage and download=
 size, 
so it's not practical in every situation.

>targeting the major resolutions (640x480, 800x600, 1024x768,
>1280x1024, etc.). Of course, it would be a pain to hand design=
 this
>artwork. 

Unfortunately there are a lot more major resolutions than that. =
 
1152x864 is common on Macs; 1400x1000 (?) on some laptops;=
 1600x1024; 
1600x1200; 1920x1200; etc.  And while neither of these individual=
 
resolutions is very common, combined they make up a sizable=
 fraction 
of the market (I would guess).

>would be to produce the highest resolution originals and use a
>better-than-bicubic down-sampling filter (which most often=
 muddies
>pixelart).

That's probably the best route, except it does keep content sizes=
 
fairly high.

Brian