Let's Talk Resolution

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Pepsi Ranger
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Let's Talk Resolution

Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Even though it's not really at the forefront of public knowledge, the OHR does have this experimental ability to set the game's resolution to sizes other than 320x200, or the blown up version of that, what we might call 640x400, even though it's really just a magnified version of 320x200. These custom sizes can be pretty much anything up to 1280x960, and display the game with as many pixels as it takes to fill those dimensions.

For example, let's look at two screenshots of the same game at the same place, but with two different resolutions:

Image
320x200 resolution (zoom x2)

Image
640x400 resolution (no zoom)

As you can see in the above screenshots, the resolution option drastically affects the way the game can be displayed. Obviously, the higher the resolution, the more can be fit on the screen, including custom windows and menus, without cluttering the central view (a problem I find that the default 320x200 runs into rather quickly). The trade-off is that sprites tend to look smaller on screen, as does text (textboxes remain the same size regardless of resolution, and unlike graphics, cannot be altered natively, and the game instead requires a text slice to display more words at once).

However, setting the resolution isn't just a matter of changing the dimensions of the playing field and affecting how much is shown in the window. How the screen displays that resolution is another factor (and how full screen handles the custom resolution is yet another consideration).

Our choices for setting resolution look like this:

Default to fullscreen: Yes/No
Default window size: ~80% screen width (up to 100%)
Test-Game window size: ~50% screen width (up to 100%)
Display Width: 320 pixels (up to 1280 pixels)
Display Height: 200 pixels (up to 960 pixels)


So, my question for discussion is, what makes the ideal resolution and screen display for your typical OHR game? Do we have to consider the size and shape of the player's monitor when selecting? What about backend? Is there one backend that displays custom screens better than others? What are your experiences with resolution experimentation? How have you gotten the best screen space through use of menus and slices, but without over-cluttering the viewing area?

In a progressive world where indie (or retro) game designers are making the most of their platforms, how can we make an OHR game compete with the market (on Steam, for example) in how it's displayed on screen?

We can use this thread to speculate, to educate, or to extrapolate. Basically, I would like this thread to be an all-purpose discussion on the topic of resolution, for the OHR and in general.

Sound off your thoughts. Make up a topic if you feel this one is too open-ended. What I most want to know is how can we maximize our display range without warping images or inviting too much clutter onto the screen.
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Foxley
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Post by Foxley »

In my opinion, having a low resolution and limited color palette is a two edged sword; it can be bad if you don't like working under limitations, but for others it's great for the creative process.

The only thing holding this engine back in an objectively bad way is the framerate, combined with the fact that everything from player/NPC movement, menu elements, and the battle system is hard coded to look right at 18 (gag!) frames per second. The kindest thing I can say about how an OHRRPGCE game's scrolling looks is "it's an acquired taste." 30 year old NES games had smooth 60fps scrolling, to put things into perspective.

In order for an OHRRPGCE game to look like it could compete in the indie market, it needs to look smooth. A game that's twice the resolution will still look like total garbage to most people if it's still running at 18fps. I'd be totally down with better resolution options, but it's lower priority in my opinion.
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Post by Nathan Karr »

And what if I want to reduce the resolution down to 160x100 instead?
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Post by kylekrack »

Man, this is a great discussion question. Put briefly, my stance on resolution is that each game warrants its own special resolution, depending on what kind of game it is, and how the creator wants it to look. If you want a HUD onscreen at all times, maybe it's best to have a larger resolution. If your game is very text heavy, you can have textboxes take up less of the screen with a larger resolution.

Or, for another example, if any of you played Overgrowth, the Halloween game I posted like a year ago or something, its resolution is teeny tiny.

Image

For Overgrowth, I wanted to restrict the screen, to make the game more suspensful. By making the screen more square, instead of rectangular and wide, it gives the feeling that you (the player) have no peripheral vision. It was supposed to make it more spooky. I'm not claiming that this worked, I'm just throwing out the intention. The smaller resolution I feel made the game feel closer, which can make the player feel more part of the action.

However, if you're not going for a feel like that, maybe a big, wide shot is better for your game. If you were making a simulation game, something like SimCity, a wider shot would make it look better. The sprites are smaller, but that makes it feel more like you're looking down on them from a bird's eye view, a city planner's perspective.

I think it all totally depends, and each time any OHR dev makes a game, they should consider altering the resolution to see if something other than the default would work better. Because frankly, I see a lot of games come out and I think about how the default makes them look, well, default. Tailoring screen resolution is one of our tools as designers. We should take advantage of it more often.


PS.

I think some other good examples are Devs Like Waffles, where the resolution was tall and skinny instead of short and wide.

Image

If they'd left the resolution as default, this game would have looked weird.

Last year, I also put out Sprout, the 'puzzle'-ish game about farming n stuff. For that game, I bumped up the height of the window 20 pixels. The items you get appear along the top of the screen, so I added some space up there, so they didn't interfere as much. Also, each screen was Zelda I-esque (the camera didn't move), so having them be more square looked a little better.

[s]screenshot here[/s]

EDIT: Yeesh, sorry that last screenshot is so huge, I'm gonna remove it for now.
Last edited by kylekrack on Thu Jan 05, 2017 9:12 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Pepsi Ranger
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

I keep thinking the average OHR doesn't need much more screen space than we've already got. But just a little more. Your method of raising the screen 20 pixels emphasizes that point. But I also think that the ability to increase resolution inevitably means that sprite sizes and tile sizes also need some custom resizing sooner than later. SimCity clones wouldn't need it much, but higher resolution action-adventure games might. Ugh, so many pieces of the puzzle to figure out.
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Post by Gizmog »

Not to go off on a tangent, but I been thinkin a lot lately about letterboxing. A lot of NES games did it for cutscenes, probably for technical purposes more than cinematic, right off the top of my head Megaman 2, Ninja Gaiden, etc. And other games would cut either the top or the bottom off of the screen to display a gaudy scoreboard. I don't think showing the score was the entire purpose though.. it also intensified the feel of movement.

To cut a long story short, I think it feels different when you move five pixels one way or the other on a 320x200 screen vs. a 320x100. Voluntarily sacrificing some of your screen real estate can make a dramatic difference, no matter how big the screen is to start with. I also think it feels different if you've got a 320x100 field within a 320x200 box. And those are important factors to keep in mind when you're choosing your resolution, custom or not.
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

True. I actually wrote a script some time ago to simulate letterboxing to highlight a cutscene. Tightfloss Maiden does this well. The invention of slices makes it so much easier to accomplish this (I think I used a single layer of dark overhead tiles to simulate it at the time). I took away screen space, but I didn't have to change the resolution. I just manipulated the display.

But I also find that games that require a significant amount of space for displaying selection windows (think any Tycoon or RTS game, for example) can lose a lot of playing field if the native resolution is too small and elements like fonts remain stuck at a consistent size. Figure, at the current dimensions, a box of text 32 lines long with room for only 40 characters per line (less than 1/3 of a Twitter post) will fill the screen. Now, the solution, of course, is don't overwrite your text. But, let's say you want tooltips for your RTS. That one tooltip may cover 1/8th of your entire screen, and if it's covering essential items, or obstructing exits, or whatever, that can become obnoxious real fast. Should the designer plan for that? Of course. But higher resolution means those tooltips take up less room without sacrificing the quality of the tooltip, and the designer can spend a little more time worrying about the game itself instead of how floating windows might cause the player to attack the wrong items.

Your example, Giz, however reminds us that planning what goes onto your screen is just as important as determining what size it should be. It's a bit like editing for presentation. Increase your dimensions to account for your needs, but then scale down to the essentials and place items, windows, etc. on the screen intelligently. Good call. I know that's not what you said outright, but the theme of your message is the same. Plan, layout, plan.
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Post by The Wobbler »

Since my current game uses double-sized walkabouts, things look a little cramped at 320x200. I'd boost the resolution but as far as I know, battles would still display at the smaller size, unless something's changed. Text boxes just take up too much screen real estate when you've got a dialogue-heavy game, unless you keep them very short.
Foxley wrote:The only thing holding this engine back in an objectively bad way is the framerate, combined with the fact that everything from player/NPC movement, menu elements, and the battle system is hard coded to look right at 18 (gag!) frames per second. The kindest thing I can say about how an OHRRPGCE game's scrolling looks is "it's an acquired taste." 30 year old NES games had smooth 60fps scrolling, to put things into perspective.
I agree with this.
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Yeah, the fps thing is really an issue. I have ignored it for so long because I am used to how 18.2 fps looks, but I have recently come to understand that is just me being abnormal, and that it looks really bad when scrolling for almost everybody else.

Hopefully in the future we will have a way of increasing the frame rate without messing up animations
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Post by Foxley »

Honestly, I'm used to it too. But that's because I've been playing OHRRPGCE stuff off and on for about 18 years!

My main concern is that even a lot of high quality work put into art assets and animations will still kind of be bottlenecked in terms of visual quality, due to choppy scrolling and animation frames. It is possible to change the framerate and just forego all of the built in engine stuff and Just Script Everything, including a new battle system, but then that would kind of defeat the purpose of OHRRPGCE being fun and easy to pick up and use.

I do hope it's able to be improved in the not too distant future.
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Post by TMC »

The future was meantto be yesterday, but... see other thread. Animation apeeds will of course be framerate independent. Was particularly hoping to get these things done well before fighto fantasy was to be released, left it rather late. :(
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Post by FyreWulff »

The lack of more than 2 frame animation, the default super-low-res, and the low colors are what's holding it back right now.


At least the resolution problem is mostly solved - we can choose that, and I like that it lets you do weird ones (I tested a super wide game with my brothers once, it didn't work out, but it was neat I could do that)

I hear increased colors are coming or are in testing.

2 frame/18fps is probably the biggest one, though. I know for a fact a lot of people I've tried to introduce this engine to were specifically moving on due to it, and a few that worked on it in the past.

It's kind of a weird engine where you can now have full voice acting, orchestrated music.. but are still limited to what amounts to flipcard animations.
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