Resolution question

Its me again, been busy since my last time posting here.
I have a couple of questions regarding resolution. Ive looked on the forums but perhaps Ive missed this one?

Ideally I would like my backdrops to be 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 as to be in HD (from what Ive read 1920x1200 is the way to go).
Now if I go for 1920x1200, and someone has a different aspect ratio will Visionaire crop the sides and leave the rest as is full screen? Or will there be black bands at the top and bottom?
It would be really nice if there was an option to crop the sides to get the ratio in place, this way it would be always full screen. So basically any hotspots and doors or items could not be for about 150 pixels of width at both sides measured from the end of screen, just in case if the screen would be cropped.

Still haven't gotten to purchasing Visonaire yet, but as I am advancing more and more into developing backgrounds now, I am considering it more and more.

Thanks for the time to read this post and for the reply.
All the best!

Visionaire automatically scales the game in proportion to the players screen resolution. I don't think playing a 1080p game at full resolution on a 15" laptop would be right good to be honest, plus the higher the resolution on the screen, the more vram etc is required.

I believe David is working on something for the next update which allows you to force resolutions as well as scaling & swapping between window & fullscreen mode.

I recommend making your game in the standard full hd setting, which is 1920x1080. Most people have 1080p monitors or smaller (laptops).

640x480 (sd)
1280x720 (720p hd)
1920x1080 (1080p full hd)

I think the 27" iMac's have a resolution of around 2.5k+ by 1.5k pixels, but that's iMac & retina for you.

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Visionaire automatically scales the game in proportion to the players screen resolution. I don't think playing a 1080p game at full resolution on a 15" laptop would be right good to be honest, plus the higher the resolution on the screen, the more vram etc is required.

I believe David is working on something for the next update which allows you to force resolutions as well as scaling & swapping between window & fullscreen mode.

I recommend making your game in the standard full hd setting, which is 1920x1080. Most people have 1080p monitors or smaller (laptops).

640x480 (sd)
1280x720 (720p hd)
1920x1080 (1080p full hd)

I think the 27" iMac's have a resolution of around 2.5k+ by 1.5k pixels, but that's iMac & retina for you.

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Hi AFRLme, its great that you are really active on the forums and help out, I had my bets that it would be you to answer first Very much appreciated.

Yes of course, scaling down to adapt to a certain resolution is reasonable.
What I had in mind, is as you say going 1920 x 1080 is the way to go, and if I would make 1920 x 1200, that the remaining pixels from the 1200 on a 1080 resolution in height would be automatically cropped off, (1200 - 1080 = 120) so by 60 pixels from top and bottom, and still be in full screen and full optimal resolution mode.

My main issue is that it is easier to plan ahead and crop off an image later, than to return and change all the backgrounds and add lets say the 60 pixels to the top and bottom.

Thus I have a dilemma what to do. I think it would be a good habit to make the images wider and crop them all later in the end, but to make sure not to add any triggers or hotspots in those areas (especially when it comes to cropping the sides).

But then again when having in mind a resolution of 1600 x 1200, and when my initial resolution that I would be aiming at would be 1920 x 1200, the remaining width would be cropped off here (1920 - 1600 = 320), so 160 pixels from the left and 160 pixels from the right would be a cushion and again could not have any triggers or hotspots.

Now I might be over-thinking this, but again as I would like to save time on any revisions that might be omitted in careful planning, such is the reason I am rethinking this over and over, which has stopped me in my tracks in further fleshing out of my rough scene sketches.

Making the backgrounds wider/higher makes the screen scrollable. But by default the game will still scale in proportion unless told otherwise (next update). Black bands will either be added to the top/bottom, the sides or both depending on the game resolution & the players desktop resolution.

If you want a screen to be scrollable then make the background image resolution larger then the default game resolution. If not then make the background image the same size as the default game resolution. You can of course create the artwork at double or triple the actual game resolution & then scale down before exporting it from your art program. The backgrounds have to be a minimum of your default game resolution size.

One thing to take into consideration when choosing what resolution to make your game in, is that the higher the resolution, the more memory, processing power & vram etc is required due to the images & file sizes of the images & animations being larger. Also 1080p will not wok so good on mobile platforms. You can scale down the default resolution in the export options for your game for mobile platforms though as well as compress the images to webP to save extra space.

Hi, didn't have the time to read the whole text, just so much: On my iMac I have a native resolution of 2560x1440, full HD looks very fine on it. To find the scaling artifacts, you have to look quite hard.

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Making the backgrounds wider/higher makes the screen scrollable. But by default the game will still scale in proportion unless told otherwise (next update). Black bands will either be added to the top/bottom, the sides or both depending on the game resolution & the players desktop resolution.

If you want a screen to be scrollable then make the background image resolution larger then the default game resolution. If not then make the background image the same size as the default game resolution. You can of course create the artwork at double or triple the actual game resolution & then scale down before exporting it from your art program. The backgrounds have to be a minimum of your default game resolution size.

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Yep I do have a couple of scrollable backdrops, but these much wider and are intended to be scrollable.
Yes, I am of course painting the backgrounds in much larger scale for the details to stand out when scaled down before exporting to a game engine.

So basically what I have stated will only make the backgrounds scrollable instead of cropping which is not what I want.
Unless I can make the background 1200 pixels wide, center it and set it to not scrollable by code? Will that prevent the black bands and show the background once the resolution differs on a different machine? Im guessing the black bands are a black background that has just black colour showing?

Regarding the next update of Visionaire, I'm hoping the option I have described here will be available.

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Hi, didn't have the time to read the whole text, just so much: On my iMac I have a native resolution of 2560x1440, full HD looks very fine on it. To find the scaling artifacts, you have to look quite hard.

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Hi Marian, thanks for the input good to know

The black bands are just the default color of the game window showing through, it's not actually cropping the game at all. The game backgrounds & images are placed above this.

No the additional detail will not be visible on scaled down or up images as it works based on your games default resolution so anything over the default game resolution will make it scrollable. The desktop resolution of the person playing the game is called the target resolution & the game will scale down or up proportionally to fit the available space. Like I said unless the game resolution is forced it will always scale like so.

There is no point in having additional information in a scene, unless you are wanting to make the scene scrollable as it is just a waste of memory & the image sizes will be larger.

2D games can be quite intensive memory wise as the files can be a lot larger than 3D, so it's more about balancing scales, animation frame amount & file sizes to make sure your game can run on low end machines to high end machines.

P.S: I'm not sure if scroll position can be locked with lua script as I've not tried but I reckon it probably could with a loop handler by making sure it always stays at a specific coordinate on each scene. You can also disable character centering with an action part too to prevent the camera from following the active character.

What do you thinking about HD or Full HD.
How many time spend 1280x720 resolution in different to FULL HD?

I think many times.
Graphics with FULL HD need much more exact fine generated details, or is it wrong?

I thought generate HD graphics is 1/4 times faster than FULL HD.
This is like 12 hours for FULL HD in different for 9 hours for HD.

Is it better to scale generated graphics from 1280x720 to 1920x1080, or better let it work at the Visionaire Studio Engine to scale?

What do you think?

I'm working on my game with full-hd (1080p) graphics, animations and cinematics. I'm happy how visionaire handless the graphics. Just with heaviy scenes with many animations it little gets slower. Then I re-optimize the graphics till I have the good performance.

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I'm working on my game with full-hd (1080p) graphics, animations and cinematics. I'm happy how visionaire handless the graphics. Just with heaviy scenes with many animations it little gets slower. Then I re-optimize the graphics till I have the good performance.

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You can always "Pre-load" the heavy animations at the beginning of the game during the Loading phase. This will significantly improve performance.
Also
I found that it is very good after an animation or character is no longer needed to unload that character and animation. This surely gives more memory but at the same time it makes loading of future animations and characters much faster.