Resolution

[ShinseiTom]

Alright, so I read through all the threads right now in the forum, and I'm even more excited for the game.  So many ideas that are great.

I bought AI War mainly for the hell of it on a whim when it showed up on Steam, and I haven't gotten to play too much of it (19 hours is all).  I liked what I played a lot though!
I bought the expansions and Tidalis just because I wanted to support Arcen, even though I haven't been able to play the expansions and really didn't have much of an interest in Tidalis itself.  It's not really terribly interesting to me, sorry.
I really want to play AI war with my friends, but they tend to not like long multiplayer games, even though they'll play tens of hours in FPSs (and Minecraft) and the like in a sitting 


Anyway, blatant flattering aside, I was wondering how you were thinking you were going to implement the resolution in the game?  Is zooming or scaling going to be used?  Vert- or Horizontal+ for widescreen (or if widescreen is the target, Vert+ or Horizontal- for standard)?  And any support for super widescreen, like Eyefinity or 3DSurround?

[x4000]

Glad you're enjoying the games!

Well, the model used here is basically similar to that of AI War, rather than Tidalis -- there is a viewport, and if you use a larger resolution then the HUD is smaller and the viewport reveals more of the world.  There will probably need to be some sort of zooming ability so that players with small resolutions or similar could adjust upwards, but that hasn't been fully thought through yet, honestly.  At the moment the goal is to support 800x600 and up, and any combinations of widescreen, etc, will work. 

In terms of the super widescreen like EyeFinity, if it works for AI War, it works here.  But I think that will only work in windowed mode, based on how Unity handles things.  We can't add support for anything of that nature that unity (the engine we use) doesn't support, unfortunately.

In terms of general scaling of things like the HUD, etc: as with Tidalis, our message is basically that you should use a smaller screen resolution if you want it scaled.  No running at a massive resolution just for the heck of it, only use that if you want to see that much of the playing field at once.  If it makes the text too tiny, then the characters and such are probably also too tiny (as with AI War).  The GPU is much better at scaling the entire resolution than it is at scaling every element individually to achieve the same effect, and using smaller resolutions will lead to improved performance in general, as with most games (and AI War).  The effect of that will likely be more pronounced with this game than with AI War.

That said, we're shooting for 60fps, but will support different framerates, and in most cases so far my desktop 8800GTS is running 1280x1024 and getting about 200fps at minimum, even with a ton of grass, etc, onscreen at once.  That will drop some as more elements are added to the game, but probably it won't even get down to 60fps in most cases.  Sometimes it's closer to 600fps at the moment.  On my Mac laptop, 200fps is about the best I get, and it drops to 80 or even 50fps at times, depending on what is going on.  That's at 1280x720.

I should also note that some of the interior areas will wind up being smaller than the viewport, depending on how big your screen is.  If you step into a small shack, then you'll see just a tiny amount of the screen used to draw the inside of the shack, and then blackness around it for the rest.  For all exterior areas, caves, and so on, that wouldn't be something that would come up, as those areas are pretty huge!

[Nalgas]

In terms of general scaling of things like the HUD, etc: as with Tidalis, our message is basically that you should use a smaller screen resolution if you want it scaled.  No running at a massive resolution just for the heck of it, only use that if you want to see that much of the playing field at once.  If it makes the text too tiny, then the characters and such are probably also too tiny (as with AI War).

I don't run at a massive resolution for the heck of it.  I run at a massive resolution because using a non-native resolution on an LCD looks awful.  In some cases, the scaling can make text harder to read than having it a little too small but at least crisp.  Fortunately that's a good thing in AI War, because it's a massive advantage being able to see so much more on the screen at 1920x1200.  When I have to resort to playing it on my laptop in an emergency, I feel kind of crippled by how much of my view is cut off at 1280x800.  I can't even imagine trying to play it on anything smaller.

[ShinseiTom]

Sweet, and just what I was hoping to hear.  Actually, the whole chunk-region-world system seems reminiscent of the planets-galaxy system in AI War, so I was hoping for some kind of zoom, possibly map system.  Actually, that could be kind of neat.  The further out you zoom, the less detail you get (meaning like you mentioned in a different thread monsters would blend even more with the background) which could be a trade-off for the increased view range.  Staying zoomed out wouldn't really be an option if you wanted to stay alive  .

Also, if you included some kind of procedurally-generated chunk/region map that faded in when you zoomed out so far...

Anyway, all prattle considering how little anybody knows about the game and the full story behind the scenes.  Consider my money yours whenever you open for preorders!

[BobTheJanitor]

I don't run at a massive resolution for the heck of it.  I run at a massive resolution because using a non-native resolution on an LCD looks awful. 

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. If I'm not running at 1680x1050 this monitor gets pretty unhappy. Blurry or shaky graphics are no good. I guess if full screen doesn't work out right at certain resolutions, we might be able to run it in a window?

[x4000]

Same as ai war or tidalis, yes. I should note that manually scaling stuff in game tends to lead to an even blurrier result (while eating gpu capacity), though. Assuming that you can see normal text and things in your is at your monitor's default resolution, you should have no problems with any Arcen title. The trouble comes when that is not true, and players up the dpi of the fonts on their os to be able to read it. In that case, the games from us would be as unreadably small as the text in the os originally was.

[ShinseiTom]

Same as ai war or tidalis, yes. I should note that manually scaling stuff in game tends to lead to an even blurrier result (while eating gpu capacity), though. Assuming that you can see normal text and things in your is at your monitor's default resolution, you should have no problems with any Arcen title. The trouble comes when that is not true, and players up the dpi of the fonts on their os to be able to read it. In that case, the games from us would be as unreadably small as the text in the os originally was.

Don't worry, I don't think anybody is worried about being able to read text and things.  I always assume if I can read text in the OS fine, I can read anything a game will throw at me.  I don't think I've played a PC game that's screwed that up yet, and I don't expect you to ever do so.

I just wanted to know if "bigger is more" or "always the same" applied to resolution.

[Nalgas]

I should note that manually scaling stuff in game tends to lead to an even blurrier result (while eating gpu capacity), though.

Depends on what kind of scaler your monitor has (some are ok, and some are terrible) and what you use in the game (most of the good-looking ways to do it are also the most expensive ways, unfortunately, but some of them look awesome for 2D stuff when used properly), but yeah, that can easily be the case.  Plants vs. Zombies had both options available, and the hardware scaling my monitor uses was a bit better than the software one used in-game.  If I'm remembering right, a notable exception is TF2, but they do a bunch of wacky stuff with shaders to draw the UI, which is all kinds of not appropriate for your games and available manpower.  Heh.