Messages

>scratch your butt to stimulate thinking abilities

Try switching the screen mode to 16 bit.

>duck and cover
>listen warily

>quickly check the handheld data device for any dirty content and pocket it
>look under the bed
>jump on the bed for a bit

Thanks again TomatoesInTheHead and Tuomas. And Pablo, thanks, mate. ^_^

May I ask, how are these lists useful to you? I mean .. every display supports 800 x 600 and other common resolutions like that. The only useful piece of data, at least that I see, is the native resolution of different computers. Knowing that 848 x 480 is available .. how does that help you?

My screen is 1280 x 800. In full-screen, when possible, I use that. When playing in windowed mode, I prefer 800 x 600 because that fits the screen best vertically. I hate it when games run in 1024 x 768 in windowed mode and no way to change it. It just doesn't fit. But it's very common. And so, for my game (not AGS related) I'm going for 800 x 600, because it seemed okay to have 800 as the minimum height. It should fit most of the laptops .. I'm not worrying about desktops.

edit: Also, with today's widescreens, it's the aspect ratio you should be worried about. If you make an 1024 x 768 (4:3) background image and display it full-screen on an 1280 x 800 (16:10) device then you're going to have troubles.

Sure, I'll gladly explain. I'm not claiming this survey is super vital but there're several ways in which that information can be considerably helpful.
Firstly, you say that every monitor supports common resolutions. Well, let me just admit, I didn't know that. With all laptops and the whole fashion of going widescreen I wasn't at all sure if I can just go and initialize 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 as the screen resolution with no worries. Turns out, every system still supports all these.

Secondly, let's say I make a pixel art game in 320x240. The minority of systems still support that resolution so I can't count on being able use it in fullscreen and no one is gonna squint at it in windowed mode either. So obviously, it's gonna get displayed scaled. Which in case of fullscreen mode means picking up the display resolution and scaled game resolution that are closest to each other so it can get displayed with minimum black space around the game picture. That process would be of course a purely automatic calculation, but still I feel a bit more comfortable programming it knowing what actual values are gonna be there.

As you can see, these two moments can affect the choice of a fixed resolution for a game considerably.

Thirdly, knowing the available resolutions and how widescreen the widescreen things exactly are would help designing not-so-fixed resolution games and guis and so on. I don't know if I'm expressing my point well here, but knowing that some people will have extra space here and there and some won't kinda feels better than just blind approximate guessing.

Fourthly, if I'm not mistaken, the indeed important information about aspect ratio could be salvaged from these values without much risk of an error.

And lastly, the refresh rate. The refresh rate is pretty much the limit of frames per second it'd make sense to render so knowing what that actually would be for many users seems quite useful to me. It seems that in the most cases rendering more than 60 fps wouldn't be necessary because most of people use LCD displays or use their highest available resolution on CRT ones. Until everybody has high-tech LCD ones that support 120 Hz refresh rate that is.

As a bonus as you can see I collected the resolutions people actually use at the moment of running the program which tells something about their preferences and what resolution is the most usable to them. And well, it's just an interesting little experiment even if the point is just to see if there would be any actually unexpected results or not.

So in essence, yeah, I could do without it, but I feel more comfortable with actual numbers lying around so I can peek anytime and see how much sense each approach to using resolutions makes. Thank you for telling me your preferences, by the way!

[Bryde of the Draculator IV]

Well, hey you just can't leave revenge out of it. I mean, seriously.

Bryde of the Draculator IV

The Extra Special Revenge Edition

Haha, that was lovely! Loved the voiceovers, ShiverMeSideways and Hudders were especially great. Also loved the insane adventuregamey puzzles. :')
Music was very pleasing as well. Good job, JackPumkinHead!
So yeah, cheers to everybody who participated, it was an incredibly cute game.

Btw Shivers, that must feel so awkward being stuck in a game listing to your own voice.

Hahaha

By the way under what terms do you release this? Does anybody have the right to use this for whatever or what?

Thank you, guys!

These 1 Hz modes indeed look strange, I've got them on my computer too, and there's no doubt they're not real, but I don't know why windows reports them.

Certainly. Using an older machine though at the moment.

That's good. Information about very old/new/unusual systems is valueable.

That sounds good. But the sci-fi-ish sound effect (0:10) sounds a little bit distracting, though it may fit depending on the atmosphere you were going for. Also dissonant melody bit (0:47) doesn't really fit in the whole otherwise very clear melody in my opinion.

Premise sounds a bit cheesy, but the way it looks intrigues the hell out of me.

I'm not affected by any such thing, but I'm sorry to hear that you are.

I suggest you take a look at the Valve Hardware Survey.

Google is your friend.

Thanks for your concern, but I thought making a little independent research would be still interesting even in the light of much bigger surveys having been already done for numerous reasons. Especially because of its small scale where little obscure details can be seen that would be overlooked and lost in larger statistical base. Also it's interesting to survey specifically people here, who are mostly adventure gamers because they are my primary audience.
And lastly, Valve's survey doesn't seem to give me quite the same information as what I'm trying to collect here. What I want is exactly the full list of available resolutions, not just the most popular active resolutions. For example I'm very curious to determine how many systems can still initialize a genuine 640x480 screen resolution. Valve's survey doesn't tell me that.
However, Valve's survey does have some interesting stats, so thanks anyway.

Like this?
http://pastebin.com/AYwtmVKQ

Yup, thanks a lot, Kastchey and everybody else who does this!

I understand you're the "fellow indie developer"? For a second there I thought you're asking for help for a friend and got confused over the  meaning of the whole message.

Yes, yes, I meant myself.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to ask you to help a fellow indie developer to get a better idea of what resolutions are actually available to people out there so I can be prepared to handle them better. You may easily do so by running a simple program I wrote that lists available resolutions which can be downloaded from this link http://lazyandsleepy.org/listres.exe. It outputs the list into a file named listres.txt in the same directory as the program itself. I'd like you to post its contents to something like http://pastebin.com/ and post the link here or send it to my email (in my profile) if you're shy or get it to me in any other way you like. You may also use any other method of gathering all of your available resolutions but I'd be very grateful if it's at least as complete and detailed as my program's output.

Any additional notes that you may provide on how you use your resolutions are very welcome.

Thank you.

Well at least they're not entirely blind and stupid. Any explanation as of why it was rejected before?

Yes, askers gonna ask. :]

Well...

Spoiler

yes, of course. why not?

[close]

Well, ok, fair enough, but that still doesn't address my point about that helping developers themselves is supporting their community?

And I haven't even used the argument of that to make a quality engine you have to put it in active use sometimes so advancing the engine and developing with it may turn out to be most effectively done simultaneously.

But sure, if the point is charity for the sake of charity... as you wish, ladies and gentlemen.

Um.
So AGS community betterment is about everything and anything except indie game devs taking game development seriously and getting rewarded for doing so? That doesn't count as helping the AGS community at all? Are you sure?

(by a forum member who's NO baker) we take the money. That is the kind of awesome you only find in this very forum! Thanks, Nemo, just for saying that.
But we want to be HEROIC BAKERS in leather pants. You never pay the hero.

I kind of am. Definitely affiliated. Definitely would claim my part if the devs would to divide the profit. But yeah, you're welcome.
Wanting to roleplay heroes is a fair enough goal I guess.

and not for personal gain.

I don't think encouraging developers make games and helping them doing so is all that selfish. I of course look positively towards spending resources on any improvements of the AGS experience, which AGS needs badly if you look from some angles, but I most certainly cannot understand the notion of excluding and shunning supporting the developers out of these positive goals.

Let's focus on having the bake sale, then we can throw bucket loads of money at CJ or Peder or whoever, improve the AGS engine (either with new features or a proper port)

Oh, sorry am I too distracting with my meaningless suggestions? Sorry, boss, I thought people who take part in it were allowed to actually discuss what their efforts will yield. My bad.