[OT] Minimum resolution

SDL Development
1

Hello there,

It’s more a conceptual and design question than a pure SDL question.
But I think you may be a source of good expertise on this one.

We are currently working on a game, and we are designing the
interface. Our designer came to me with a project (very nice), but it
will require to use at least 1024x768 resolution.

So, is it ok to put 1024x768 as a minimum requirement these days? I
mean, in your experience, do you often deal with old 800x600 or
640x480? I already worked very hard to give a very efficient “level
of details” option. Even if the full game engine require an ati 9200
with 512mb vram, it can run on an old ati with 8mb ram. (ok, to go
under 32mb ram, you have to disable textures… But it works!)

But the interface is one of the keys of a game. So, we need it to be
good. First design my designer gave me was for 1280x1024, but I
thought it was a bit exagerated. (he said, but that’s small on my
1920*1200 screen!)

Best regards and wishes for new year and xMas. (I use little endian,
I swap the things around)–
Kuon
CEO - Goyman.com SA
http://www.goyman.com/

“Computers should not stop working when the users’ brain does.”

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2

Hello Nicolas,

Tuesday, December 19, 2006, 7:03:04 AM, you wrote:

Hello there,

It’s more a conceptual and design question than a pure SDL question.
But I think you may be a source of good expertise on this one.

We are currently working on a game, and we are designing the
interface. Our designer came to me with a project (very nice), but it
will require to use at least 1024x768 resolution.

So, is it ok to put 1024x768 as a minimum requirement these days? I
mean, in your experience, do you often deal with old 800x600 or
640x480? I already worked very hard to give a very efficient “level
of details” option. Even if the full game engine require an ati 9200
with 512mb vram, it can run on an old ati with 8mb ram. (ok, to go
under 32mb ram, you have to disable textures… But it works!)

But the interface is one of the keys of a game. So, we need it to be
good. First design my designer gave me was for 1280x1024, but I
thought it was a bit exagerated. (he said, but that’s small on my
1920*1200 screen!)

Best regards and wishes for new year and xMas. (I use little endian,
I swap the things around)

The only thing that I think this might affect, is people who play on
laptops. 1024x768 would be fine on pretty much any desktop.

Perhaps you can have two user interface designs - one for 800x600 and
one for 1024x768 and larger. The 800x600 one would obviously have to
cut some things away or shrink some buttons etc… but it would work.

This used to be a fairly standard thing to do on old DOS games - there
would be a UI for 640x480 and one for 800x600.–
Best regards,
Peter mailto:@Peter_Mulholland

3

Nicolas Goy - kuon - ??? wrote:

So, is it ok to put 1024x768 as a minimum requirement these days? I
mean, in your experience, do you often deal with old 800x600 or
640x480? I already worked very hard to give a very efficient “level of
details” option. Even if the full game engine require an ati 9200 with
512mb vram, it can run on an old ati with 8mb ram. (ok, to go under
32mb ram, you have to disable textures… But it works!)
I think that TODAY is more important to be able to provide a 16:9
interface (so 1280 x 768 or similar) than take care of 640 x 480
resolution!

Anyway if your game is 3d (as I seem to understand by your sentence
about textures and LoD) and the interface is “texturized” I see no
problem to scale it to 800x600 or 1280 x 768, isn’t it?

Bye,
Gabry

4

I think that TODAY is more important to be able to provide a 16:9
interface (so 1280 x 768 or similar) than take care of 640 x 480
resolution!

Anyway if your game is 3d (as I seem to understand by your sentence
about textures and LoD) and the interface is “texturized” I see no
problem to scale it to 800x600 or 1280 x 768, isn’t it?

We want to provide the best quality interface possible.

We can technicaly create an interface for any resolution. But in
lower resolution, we can’t scale texts too much, so we have to render
them in a bit a different way. The question is: Do we want to invest
time in support for lower resolutions?

We will provide support for 16/10 resolutions (1920x1200, 1280x800,
1440x900…).

So, is it politicaly correct to have a minimum of 1024x768?

Best regardsOn 19 Dec 2006, at 12:13, Gabriele Greco wrote:

–
Kuon
CEO - Goyman.com SA
http://www.goyman.com/

“Computers should not stop working when the users’ brain does.”

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5

So, is it politicaly correct to have a minimum of 1024x768?

No. You probably want to do what I’ve chosen to do…

Let assume you measure things in physical sizes (you don’t normally, but when
using scaling UI elements, you need to). Lets say this one widget is always
the same size no matter the resolution… 1024x768 being the smallest that
this widget still stays useful at that physical size.

At 2048x1536, this widget would use four times as many pixels (2x width, 2x
height), but still be the same physical size. But for 800x600, it drops below
the useful size limit… simply enlarge the physical size.

Now, of course, this leads to the problem that enlarging the physical size
gives you less physical room in your layout… and this is completely true.
At 800x600, your object should be 20% larger than normal, at 640x480, it
should be 60% larger.

Additionally, those rules do not apply to text (as text, even on 640x480) can
get very small and still be readable, and they do not apply to simple UI
widgets (such as window controls, or scroll bars, or radio buttons or
checkboxes, or mouse cursors, or anything like that) because they can get
extremely small and still be totally useful

Remember, you want to target portable platforms when possible, leaving 800x480
as the minimum resolution you want to support. (Upcoming mini-tablets are
surprisingly powerful, and I wouldn’t count them out yet).On Tuesday 19 December 2006 08:01, Nicolas Goy - kuon - ??? wrote:

Best regards

–
Patrick McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
"Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids,
we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and
listening to repetitive electronic music." – Kristian Wilson, Nintendo,
Inc, 1989

6

So, is it politicaly correct to have a minimum of 1024x768?

I believe it is. People need to start updating their graphics. Even the
computers at the highschool I attend can do 1280 x 768(I’m using them right
now actually :-)). People with 800 x 600 resolution are like the little
childeren who stay up to late and prevent boobs from being show on TV.

7

Peter Mulholland wrote:

Hello Nicolas,

Tuesday, December 19, 2006, 7:03:04 AM, you wrote:

Hello there,

It’s more a conceptual and design question than a pure SDL question.
But I think you may be a source of good expertise on this one.

We are currently working on a game, and we are designing the
interface. Our designer came to me with a project (very nice), but it
will require to use at least 1024x768 resolution.

So, is it ok to put 1024x768 as a minimum requirement these days? I
mean, in your experience, do you often deal with old 800x600 or
640x480? I already worked very hard to give a very efficient “level
of details” option. Even if the full game engine require an ati 9200
with 512mb vram, it can run on an old ati with 8mb ram. (ok, to go
under 32mb ram, you have to disable textures… But it works!)

But the interface is one of the keys of a game. So, we need it to be
good. First design my designer gave me was for 1280x1024, but I
thought it was a bit exagerated. (he said, but that’s small on my
1920*1200 screen!)

Best regards and wishes for new year and xMas. (I use little endian,
I swap the things around)

The only thing that I think this might affect, is people who play on
laptops. 1024x768 would be fine on pretty much any desktop.

Perhaps you can have two user interface designs - one for 800x600 and
one for 1024x768 and larger. The 800x600 one would obviously have to
cut some things away or shrink some buttons etc… but it would work.

I’d be amazed to find a laptop made in the past several years that
couldn’t do 1024x768 fullscreen.

I also don’t know any big-resolution displays (like those 30" LCDs from
Apple/Dell) that can’t do 1024x768…so if you’re willing to play
fullscreen, the graphics shouldn’t be “too small” there, although maybe
they’ll be a little fuzzy. In practice, I consider this free
anti-aliasing, though. :slight_smile:

We’re probably at the point where a PC that can’t do 1024x768 should be
considered below minimum requirements.

That being said, if you’re using OpenGL, consider making something that
scales to whatever resolution, so it’s (mostly) not a problem if the
user wants 800x600 or 1920x1200. If you’re not using OpenGL, consider
using OpenGL. :slight_smile:

–ryan.

8

Additionally, those rules do not apply to text (as text, even on 640x480) can
get very small and still be readable, and they do not apply to simple UI
widgets (such as window controls, or scroll bars, or radio buttons or
checkboxes, or mouse cursors, or anything like that) because they can get
extremely small and still be totally useful

I’ve found text doesn’t scale UP well. You might find it best to use
something like FreeType to render the text as a series of polygons so
they look crisp at any resolution…if you do them as textured quads,
they start looking bad very quickly (try Quake 3 at 1920x1200 and look
at the text at the start of a round, for example).

–ryan.

9

Additionally, those rules do not apply to text (as text, even on 640x480)
can get very small and still be readable, and they do not apply to simple
UI widgets (such as window controls, or scroll bars, or radio buttons or
checkboxes, or mouse cursors, or anything like that) because they can get
extremely small and still be totally useful

I’ve found text doesn’t scale UP well. You might find it best to use
something like FreeType to render the text as a series of polygons so
they look crisp at any resolution…if you do them as textured quads,
they start looking bad very quickly (try Quake 3 at 1920x1200 and look
at the text at the start of a round, for example).

Because Quake is fundamentally broken. It doesn’t include very high resolution
glyphs. From my testing, including many levels of mipmaps for glyphs produces
quite decent results, though slightly soft.On Tuesday 19 December 2006 20:27, Ryan C. Gordon wrote:

–ryan.

SDL mailing list
SDL at libsdl.org
http://www.libsdl.org/mailman/listinfo/sdl

–
Patrick McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
"Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids,
we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and
listening to repetitive electronic music." – Kristian Wilson, Nintendo,
Inc, 1989

10

Well let’s not forget that Q3 dates back from the days when
hardware-accelerated 1024x768 was only available on the latest and
greatest video cards…On 12/19/06, Patrick McFarland wrote:

Because Quake is fundamentally broken. It doesn’t include very high resolution
glyphs. From my testing, including many levels of mipmaps for glyphs produces
quite decent results, though slightly soft.

–

  • SR
11

That being said, if you’re using OpenGL, consider making something
that
scales to whatever resolution, so it’s (mostly) not a problem if the
user wants 800x600 or 1920x1200. If you’re not using OpenGL, consider
using OpenGL. :slight_smile:

We use OpenGL, and we have no trouble to scale up and down
everything. It’s just a matter of details. We want to produce a good
interface, no matter the resolution. It’s just we have to work a bit
more for 800x600. And if we can avoid that bit more, by staying
correct to our users, we will. It’s not we are lazy or anything, but
from 1024 to 1920, our interface can keep the same size (pixel wise),
which means the work is nearly done. Adding 800x600 would require a
scaling of the interface, and we can’t just scale in a barbaric way:P
(think about text alignment, text justification…)

So even if adding 800x600 is not really that a big deal, if we can
move forward and avoid it, we would be happy.

Best regardsOn 20 Dec 2006, at 02:25, Ryan C. Gordon wrote:

–
Kuon
CEO - Goyman.com SA
http://www.goyman.com/

“Computers should not stop working when the users’ brain does.”

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12

if like us you’d want to have an option of providing consumer HMDs
support in the future you’d want to support 800x600. but if you want
the best quality interface you’d have to have different interface for
HMDs anyway.On 19/12/06, Nicolas Goy - kuon - ??? wrote:

Hello there,

It’s more a conceptual and design question than a pure SDL question.
But I think you may be a source of good expertise on this one.

We are currently working on a game, and we are designing the
interface. Our designer came to me with a project (very nice), but it
will require to use at least 1024x768 resolution.

So, is it ok to put 1024x768 as a minimum requirement these days? I
mean, in your experience, do you often deal with old 800x600 or
640x480? I already worked very hard to give a very efficient “level
of details” option. Even if the full game engine require an ati 9200
with 512mb vram, it can run on an old ati with 8mb ram. (ok, to go
under 32mb ram, you have to disable textures… But it works!)

But the interface is one of the keys of a game. So, we need it to be
good. First design my designer gave me was for 1280x1024, but I
thought it was a bit exagerated. (he said, but that’s small on my
1920*1200 screen!)

Best regards and wishes for new year and xMas. (I use little endian,
I swap the things around)

–
Kuon
CEO - Goyman.com SA
http://www.goyman.com/

“Computers should not stop working when the users’ brain does.”

SDL mailing list
SDL at libsdl.org
http://www.libsdl.org/mailman/listinfo/sdl

13

It’s not we are lazy or anything, but
from 1024 to 1920, our interface can keep the same size (pixel wise),
which means the work is nearly done. Adding 800x600 would require a
scaling of the interface, and we can’t just scale in a barbaric way:P
(think about text alignment, text justification…)

I must agree with you, I’ve also come to the conclusion that ideally
UI graphics shouldn’t be scaled. After all I think it’s kind of fair
to assume that regardless of the display’s resolution, the pixels are
about the same physical size (resolution is usually correlated to the
size of the display).
And blured and/or badly scaled UI hurts my eyes. But…

So even if adding 800x600 is not really that a big deal, if we can
move forward and avoid it, we would be happy.

Maybe 99% of your users are using a nice resolution where they don’t
need to even think about UI scaling, but 0.5% might want to run in
800x600 (or even 640x480), and would be very happy if they could use,
for instance, a “–halfpixelsize” command-line switch. And the
remaining 0.5% would benefit from a “–doublepixelsize” because they
want to play on a 1600x1200 14" laptop.
It’s all just a matter of altering a projection matrix, and it would
make some users very happy.

Saying that people with low resolution displays can’t play your game,
because they’re so few, is like saying there’s no reason to support
anything but Windows :)On 12/20/06, Nicolas Goy - kuon - ??? wrote:

–
Rasmus Neckelmann

14

Saying that people with low resolution displays can’t play your game,
because they’re so few, is like saying there’s no reason to support
anything but Windows :slight_smile:

We dev on macosx, and our game compile for windows and linux.

So, I don’t like letting people left. We will encourage users to use
bigger resolutions, but we will support 800x600 I think.

I thanks all of you for your time.

RegardsOn 20 Dec 2006, at 10:28, Rasmus Neckelmann wrote:

–
Kuon
CEO - Goyman.com SA
http://www.goyman.com/

“Computers should not stop working when the users’ brain does.”

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15

That being said, if you’re using OpenGL, consider making something
that
scales to whatever resolution, so it’s (mostly) not a problem if the
user wants 800x600 or 1920x1200. If you’re not using OpenGL, consider
using OpenGL. :slight_smile:

We use OpenGL, and we have no trouble to scale up and down
everything. It’s just a matter of details. We want to produce a good
interface, no matter the resolution. It’s just we have to work a bit
more for 800x600. And if we can avoid that bit more, by staying
correct to our users, we will. It’s not we are lazy or anything, but
from 1024 to 1920, our interface can keep the same size (pixel wise),
which means the work is nearly done. Adding 800x600 would require a
scaling of the interface, and we can’t just scale in a barbaric way:P
(think about text alignment, text justification…)

So even if adding 800x600 is not really that a big deal, if we can
move forward and avoid it, we would be happy.

Lets try looking at this question a different way. Who is going to buy
your game? It sounds like the game already requires a 3D graphics card.
How much of a graphics card does it need? Who has those kinds of
graphics cards? Are you selling to adults, or are you aiming at
children? Are you trying to sell to schools, other institutions, or to
home computer users? My guess is that you are targeting home computer
users who play 3D games.

My guess is that people with the 3D hardware needed to run your game
also have 1024x768 or better screens. To verify that I did a quick
google search on web browser screen statistics. The actual screen size
is very important to web designers. I looked at a couple of sites with
real data and learned that roughly 80% of people browsing the web are
using a screen size of 1024x768, or larger, and the same percentage are
using 32 bit color.

People who play games that require 3D hardware tend to have nice
computers and displays and roughly 80% of people browsing the web are
using displays that are 1024x768 or larger. To me that says that at
least 80% of the potential market for your game will be perfectly happy
with a minimum resolution of 1024x768. My guess is that more than 90% of
people who may want to buy your game have displays capable of 1024x768.

What I haven’t, and can’t, factor in is the 3D performance required by
your game, but since you said it would run on a video card with 32 megs
(less if you turn off textures) and there haven’t been many cards like
that built in the last 4 or 5 years, I suspect you don’t need much in
the way of hardware support. So, it may not be a consideration.

Or, put another way, you may lose 10% to 20% of sales if you do not
support 800x600. Is that worth the cost of building an 800x600
interface?

	Bob Pendleton

P.S.

I normally charge for this kind of analysis, but you got it for free.On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 08:52 +0100, Nicolas Goy - kuon - ??? wrote:

On 20 Dec 2006, at 02:25, Ryan C. Gordon wrote:

Best regards

SDL mailing list
SDL at libsdl.org
http://www.libsdl.org/mailman/listinfo/sdl
–
±-------------------------------------+

16 
  Bob Pendleton

P.S.

I normally charge for this kind of analysis, but you got it for free.

I take it as xMas present.

Regards–
Kuon
CEO - Goyman.com SA
http://www.goyman.com/

“Computers should not stop working when the users’ brain does.”

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17 
  Bob Pendleton

P.S.

I normally charge for this kind of analysis, but you got it for free.

I take it as xMas present.

Actually it was a gift to me that I shared with you. Your question was
very interesting so I found myself researching it because of my own
curiosity.

Thank You,

	Bob PendletonOn Thu, 2006-12-21 at 21:53 +0100, Nicolas Goy - kuon - ???? wrote:

Regards

SDL mailing list
SDL at libsdl.org
http://www.libsdl.org/mailman/listinfo/sdl
–
±-------------------------------------+