A few questions regarding backgrounds

[Copterman]

Hello everyone. Just starting to trudge through understanding how this all is done. Here's my questions:

1) Does resolution (320x200, 640X480, etc.) refer to how many pixels High and Wide an image is?

2) I'm not really sure how many pixels high and wide I need to make my backgrounds. I am worried that I'll spend a lot of time on the images and my character will be too big. Any suggestions.

3) I really like the feel of 5 Days a Stranger with the black border surrounding the image. How was this accomplished?

Thanks for you help. If anyone needs musical assistance, I'm an expert there. I'm a 29 year old with a Master's in music.

[Scummbuddy]

Welcome to our boards.

First, since you suggest that you are a musician, which are very welcome here, I suggest you go over to the "Offer your Services" thread, where you can post about yourself, and how you can help others with music. Also, if you haven't already, ticked the little box in your user options that state that you help with music, plus put a little blurb about what you do there.

The "Offer your services" thread can be found here: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=13335.0
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1) yes, that does refer to the pixels tall and wide.
2) you do want to take into consideration the size of your characters as they relate to your backgrounds, but you can either just study a couple tutorials and judge about how big they make them, or you can make your character, roughly 50 pixels tall, and create your bg's from there.
3)you could either, actually create the black bars by incorporating them into your bg, or you can test the check box "use letterbox (320*240)/ (640*480)resolution" in the misc. section of the game options.

[Davimee]

Hello, and welcome.  :-)  I'm still learning this myself, but I'll try to answer a couple of your questions. 

1.  I believe so, but I'll leave that up to someone else, to be certain.
2.  My backgrounds are 320 x 221.  I'm not sure how I came up with that size, I just made my first room that size and it worked, so I made the rest that size, too.  And make your character fit your room.  If you have any doors in your room, make your character the correct size so he or she will fit through the doors.  Once you have everything loaded you can scale your character larger or smaller, but it's easier to just have him the right size to begin with.  Sometimes when you scale your characters in the game they change just a bit.
3.  I'm not familiar with that game, but if you want a black border around your game it would probably just be easy to create all of your backgrounds with a black border.  I've made my backgrounds in paint, so if I wanted a border I would just leave a half-inch black border around the outside edge of my background.

I hope this helps, and have fun!   

[Copterman]

Wow! Thanks for your help.

[Ubel]

My backgrounds are 320 x 221.

There's no sense in that at all. If you are using 320 x 200 resolution, then you of course draw the backgrounds at 320 x 200. If you make them bigger they will become scrolling bg's.

[Gilbert]

Well he may as well use 320x240 instead as the res., and keep those 19 lines for GUI's or status bars.

[monkey0506]

Just for clarification:

320 = WIDTH
200 = HEIGHT

In case you haven't noticed your monitor is a rectangle, like this:

|---------------|
|                   |
|                   |
|---------------|

(formatting of the text is a bit off, but you get the idea), not like this:

----------
|          |
|          |
|          |
|          |
|          |
----------

So, the larger of the two dimensions will always be the Width, not the Height.

Which also means that by making the room 320X221, that:

a) the background is cut by 21 pixels.
or
b) the background is not in 320X200 resolution, and therefore fits entirely on the screen.

And definitely does not make it a scrolling room.

Just FYI...   Sorry if I came on a little strong, but if you think it through logically, you would realize which dimension is which.

And welcome to the forums...Choppyman.