Reduce resolution for a demo

Hi, I was trying to create a kind of demo of my game Catyph. I don't know yet if it will be ever released officially in public, but this demo would have a quite long lifetime (several hours of game) but a lower resolution than the final release (720 instead of 1920). As I said it's just an idea (a test) because if might be stupid to do this, but you never know if you don't try, right?

However I don't know if it is possible to build the game in a lower resolution.
I found the option "change resolution" in the build settings : it works, but the game is then full of bugs and glitches. Impossible to play correctly.

Then I tried to reduce the main resolution in the Game settings, but it fails too: the resolution is lowered but not the game itself, so most of the game is out of the screen.

Do you think there is a solution? If not, it won't be catastrophic
Thanks

Both game default resolution & the export (as far as I'm aware) resolution options only affect the default resolution of the game, they don't automatically scale down the graphics to the new resolution, only the engine scales the graphics / polygons down / up to the available surface area of the players screen - the resolution however is still actually whatever the default resolution you set in the game tab.

The only way you are going to scale down is to replace the graphics with smaller versions, which in turn would require you to adjust the interaction polygons too. Lot of work.

Your other alternative would be to duplicate the master ved & remove all the content you don't want to include in the demo.

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Both game default resolution & the export (as far as I'm aware) resolution options only affect the default resolution of the game, they don't automatically scale down the graphics to the new resolution

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No the graphics are not really scaled down (the pictures inside the game files are still in 1920), but the result is different in both cases. Here's what happens:



Image1 (top): normal game resolution (1920)
Image2: low resolution changed with build settings (720)
Image3: low resolution changed with game settings (720)

What happens in image 2 is exactly what I want. Even if the images are not really scaled down, they appear to be. I think that the whole graphics are stretched to the 720 resolution, and then upscaled to fit the desktop resolution, which gives the downgrade aspect that I was looking for.
Unfortunately there are too many glitches/artefacts in this mode and it cannot be used properly. It is not visible in this picture but there are a lot of strange things on the screen with this option.

In image 3, the game resolution was changed to 720 but the images are not scaled to the screen, which results in a wrong size of the pictures. Everything that is more than 720 pixels wide is automatically cropped and the rest is upscaled to fit the screen.

Anyway that was just to explain what happens, in case other people are curious.

The default game resolution requires the background images to be at least as big as the resolution specified. Anything over will automatically set the scene as scrollable.

I'm sure the export option did the same thing as default resolution... then again it's a long long time ago that I tried it, so maybe it always did that or how it functions has changed since I last tried it.

Is it the interaction polygons & positioning that is messed up when you change the resolution during export? If it is then it's probably due to the engine failing to recalculate the positions of everything correctly, as it would be scaling down to the size you set in export then back up or down to the desktop resolution of the screen you are running it on. I'm sure Simon mentioned something about it being buggy ages ago - I don't really think it's an option many people use.

Yes I think it's a problem of polygons. I don't know. Here 2 examples of bugs:

Is it possible to scale all position, size and distance values in a *.ved file? For example if a game is in 720 px and I remake all my graphics in 1080 px then I have to multiply all my position, size and distance values in the *.ved file with factor 1.5. It should be easy to write a script for that... but some values with -1 should remain -1 because -1 means "off" in some cases

You aren't taking into account your object polygons. I'm surprised VS doesn't automatically update them to suit the new resolution - like it does when you play a game in fullscreen on a monitor that is not the same resolution as the default resolution of your game. Probably a bug or oversight in the export code / method.

What are the object polygons?

The poligons you "draw" for the scene objects

Oh you mean the objects areas (hotspots) then. Thanks.