1280 x 800

[theo]

Due to a huge bunch of silly and fun things coinciding at once in my life I am now considering releasing a special edition of chapter one of the Journey Down - as a cheap/humble commercial title. Apart from trying to fix voice acting, remaking the animations and adding a couple of puzzles + back story, I am for obvious reasons planning on releasing the game at a higher resolution than the original version. This however poses a problem.

In my experience, most players run my game on 16:10 wide screen monitors (not to mention the fact that I'm producing it on one). The only alternatives available in AGS as of now are 320x200 and 640x400 - both far too low if I want the game to have a nice, modern, polished feel. (Which is why I'm considering remaking it in the very first place.)

Adding 1280x800 support would be a nice step in shaking off some of AGS's image in the public eye as being a "retro game maker" and would allow future AGS titles to reach out to a larger audience than just us old "golden days of adventure gaming" nerds who love big pixels, thus opening up a bigger market for games created in AGS.

Is this a realistic request? Is it even feasible?

[dbuske]

Ags goes up to 1024x768
Yes it would be nice to get 1600x900 which my laptop has.

[Matti]

Ags goes up to 1024x768

He meant that there aren't any widescreen resolutions higher than 640x400. But at least there's the option for black borders now. It doesn't work on my laptop though  :'(

[Calin Leafshade]

As far as I can tell, there is no technical reason why AGS can't be resolution independent.

Allegro can initialise to any resolution i think, as can D3D. So the only limitation would be that AGS would have to deal with monitors that didnt support the desired resolution by either stretching or letterboxing/pillarboxing.

Practically, however we'll obviously need to wait for the engine source to help.

Depending on how AGS is structured internally, CJ might be able to add that particular resolution just by adding it to a list but i don't know if thats the case.

[GarageGothic]

In my opinion, simply adding a higher resolution still is only a temporary fix. What I wanted to try to implement when the engine itself goes open source is complete resolution independence. Basically using a virtual resolution for all in-game coordinates and then having the renderer scale the art to whatever screen resolution/aspect ratio the player chooses.

Edit: Ok, Calin said basically the same thing while I was writing

[Pumaman]

Agreed, I think you should be able to just specify any resolution for the game, and then the engine letterboxes/stretches it to fit the screen.

For AGS 3.3 maybe!

[theo]

ah! It's good to know that the gods are listening and are at least considering answering my prayers.

*naively and ecstatically begins work on the HDJD backdrops.* 

[Knox]

Wow, I woud also LOVE to have 1280x800 aswell...so for AGS 3.3, perhaps eh...nice!

[Dualnames]

Agreed, I think you should be able to just specify any resolution for the game, and then the engine letterboxes/stretches it to fit the screen.

For AGS 3.3 maybe!

IF THERE'S NO SARCASM TO THIS POST, from now on, I will call you Santa. 

[xenogia]

I've been waiting for a 1280x800 feature for a very long time

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

monitors that didnt support the desired resolution by either stretching or letterboxing/pillarboxing

Nvidia software (and I'm sure ati as well) has, for awhile, supported video card based stretching of the screen, so for monitors that don't support it it will still work.  I know in my prefs there's two options for screen stretching, monitor and nvidia.  I've tested the nvidia option in numerous games, and at least for anything using directx it works at least as well as my monitor's screen stretch.

The main thing I've been wanting to see is a realtime switch between windowed and fullscreen modes and a resizable window.  Directx natively supports this sort of operation and I've designed programs to work with it so it's just a matter of whether the engine can be adapted without extreme effort.  Both options would greatly improve the utility of the engine and I happen to know from what Dave Gilbert has told me that one of the points of contention for potential buyers of his games is that they cannot switch between fullscreen and windowed mode on the fly.  

[Knox]

I was wondering if getting 1280x800 would/could be close to the top of the list for the next release of AGS? Relative to the other gazillion requests, how complicated would this be to add higher resolutions to AGS? (like what kind of work does it entail)

[Sughly]

Agreed, I think you should be able to just specify any resolution for the game, and then the engine letterboxes/stretches it to fit the screen.

For AGS 3.3 maybe!

Such, such, such good news! To have this in the next version would not be coming at a better time for me, since I've just completed a demo of my game which a potential distributor is interested in on the grounds I can up the res. I was even considering jumping ship to another engine, feeling very reluctant to do so...

To add to that, I would LOVE to buy a hi res copy of the first Journey Down episode. Consider my pennies reserved for it  

[Calin Leafshade]

I think the resolution issue is one of the main reasons that wintermute exists.

The number 1 reason (as far as i can tell) to choose any other engine above AGS for 2D work is resolution, especially with potential commercial products.

If we fixed that and the alpha channel blending (natively) then that would certainly boost the engines popularity amongst the resolution hungry.

[cat]

Wouldn't there have to be an additional option in game setup to have a graphics filter "0.5x" or something for people with netbooks with lower resolution?

[Calin Leafshade]

No, the engine would be resolution independent.

The engine would offer resolutions based on what the card/monitor could support and then stretch the game to that resolution while taking aspect ratio and pixels into account regardless of the original resolution of the game.

[Eggie]

This news makes me happy. I love it when I play a game and it has a special setting for my kind of wide-screen laptop.

Looks soooo goooood.

You know what would a cool option also kind of if it is practical kind of thing... a setting that, instead of adding the letterbox to widescreen games played on a standard definition monitors, it just turned the rooms too large to fit into scrolling rooms.
Useful for games with a top-down perspective and small character sprites, I've used high resolution patches for Fallout and Planerscape that work kind of the same way.

[Knox]

No, the engine would be resolution independent

geeze...now that's very good news!! When can we expect somethin' 

I think the resolution issue is one of the main reasons that wintermute exists

Same here...I actually tried it a few years ago because of the higher res options but found it not as intuitive as AGS (and the forums weren't very helpful, in my opinion).

[Calin Leafshade]

No, the engine would be resolution independent

geeze...now that's very good news!! When can we expect somethin' 

Ha, well bear in mind that this is only my suggestion as to how it would work. CJ is ultimately responsible for deciding if thats the right way to go and how long before it's implemented.

[Wyz]

Something else that would be really swell is allowing the developer to interact with the screen resolution. This way there might not be a need for letter boxes at all. What I posted in the other topic:

Different aspect ratios and resolutions is definitely a pain for developers., but I don't see that changing in the future. Well it will get worse since the net books and smart phones tend to have really irregular resolutions. It is particularly difficult for sprite art, since it does not stretch nicely and only scales nicely at regular intervals.
What we could do is detach the viewport from the background, that way we can sort of scroll the background and we do not need to stretch it (but do need to scale it 2x or 3x). AGS currently supports a few predefined resolutions, it would be nice if we could change it to an arbitrary resolution at even nicer if we could do it at run time. That way we could adjust everything in-game to this new resolution. Well, just thoughts...