Native resolution and computers with lower resolution

I was wondering, if I create a game in Visionaire with 1920 x 1080 resolution, can the final build of the game run on computers with lower resolution?

And if yes, how? And what are your experiences with the result?

And if no, is the only solution then to create the game with a lower resolution, or can something else be done?

The engine automatically scales the game to the users desktop resolution when the game is run in fullscreen mode. By default if the game is run in window mode then it will create the window at the games default resolution, but the window can manually be resized if you include the line Resizeable = Yes somewhere in the config.ini file.

The engine keeps the same aspect ratio & proportion when scaling up or down, so depending on the users desktop resolution, black bands (think like widescreen cinema effect) might be created horizontally across the top & bottom or vertically to the left & right hand side of your game.

If I play a 1920x1080p game on my 1366x768 laptop screen it seems to scale down without creating black borders, but if I were to scale down to 1280x720p I would probably end up with black borders at the top & bottom. Now if I were to play a 1024x768 game on my laptop I would end up with black borders on the left & right because the default game resolution is more like the square 4:3 aspect ratio (something like that I think) rather than a widescreen aspect ratio like my 1366x768 screen resolution.

The only way you would be able to make it scale & fill the screen for each resolution is if you created a new ved project for each resolution, but who can be bothered to do that? What some of the more modern 3D engines do is force stretching of the image (telltale seem to do this with their games), but I think it looks horrible because you end up with stretched out images that belong in one of those house of mirrors you see at carnivals.

Anyway, my recommendation is to create your game at: 1920x1080 (1080p) or 1280x720 (720p) or 640x480 (480p) or if you want to create a retro pixel game then use something like 320x240 & enable pixel effect in the game (cog icon) tab & set both minification & magnification filter to "nearest neighbor".

Thanks a lot for the reply!

About the image itself, does it look alright when scaled down?
I mean, all things being equal it must actually have to remove pixels, won't it?

(Then again, I guess in the near future most machines will have high res anyway...)

You will always get some artifacts whenever graphics are scaled up or down. It can't be helped. But no to answer your question 1920x1080p doesn't look that bad on my laptop.

Check out the attachments I've added. One is scaled down to my laptop screen & the other is default game resolution (1920 x 1080) on my hd monitor.

P.S: ignore the black bands at the top & bottom we added them ourselves as a kind of cinematic effect. We slide them in for playable scenes & out for menu scenes.

P.P.S: right click & view image to view them @ actual size as VS forum uses a dynamic lightbox which scales image to fit screen size.

Great, thank you!

Interesting
I've just been pondering resolution..

The only thing you should check: your fonts. Some very thin or small fonts are hard to read after downscaling....

I develop my current game in a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. But my laptop has a resolution of 1280 x 800 only. And I see no problem....