Resolution Questions: Different Platforms

Tosanu

This is less a tech question and more just desperately trying to get some answers. If we have not be exercising the 2:1 ratio of art drawn to size of actor, how much trouble are we in on Retina screens? The information for this is fairly scanty across the board, mostly referring to IOS Binaries and Resolution independence. But for us, the matter is not having been aware of this, we have been drawing at a 1:1 art to actor scale for a while, and we really need to know if this is trouble before we take another step forward. Thank you in advance to anyone who answers this.

jamie_c

Hi Tosanu. There are a couple things to keep in mind, first when you import your art with resolution independence on Gamesalad will reduce your artwork to 1/2 its pixel dimensions. So if you created a bunch of actors at 100px X 100px, Gamesalad will scale that to 50px X 50px.

Once imported you could manually re-scale your images to 100 x 100, but if you are going to do this you might as well not turn on resolution independence in the first place.

Either way, re-scaling the image back up in size or not using RI, when your game is played on a retina device the graphics will be low resolution so they likely will not look their best. You could probably get an indication of how bad the quality would be by scaling your images up 200% in Photoshop. That probably won't be 100% accurate to how they will look on a retina device but it would give you some idea.

Also I believe Apple requires games to be retina enabled now, so I'm not entirely sure you can turn off RI and publish to the Apple Store anymore.

Tosanu

The thing is, I'm almost certain I have resolution independence on, and yet all the images came into the file exactly the same size. I palced them on actors and they resized them on a 1:1 scale. (i chcked the XML, it says RI is on, so im stumped). Should it be doing that? (unfortunately, were limited on apple testing products for the moment, we wont have those for a bit yet, luckily we have months left on this project)

jamie_c

I believe if you turn on RI after your images are imported, you need to re-import them for GS to 'do it's thing'. I suppose as a test you could start a new project, make sure RI is on at the start and then import an image and see what you get.

Tosanu

As far as I can tell, it is making NO adjustments to size. I just imported a screenshot of the actual game to check, and its still 1024 by 768 in the media. Are you sure this happens automatically and not manually? I checked the object xml and it says Resolution independence is (1), which according to another thread means its on. Note, i made no change, it was already like this, so far as i can tell Ive always had RI on. Is this a mac vs PC difference?

jamie_c

I'm on the Mac version and it happens automatically for me. When I import an image that is 100x100 using RI on, the actor for that same image in GS ends up at 50x50.

Wish I could offer more advice, perhaps someone else will chime in as well.

Tosanu

Thats the thing. I just checked this program on a mac editor, the artist has one. We imported a new image file and as far as we could tell, it was still exactly the same. Thats where my confusion sets in. We can redraw a sufficient amount of the art, and if i need to manually adjust the sizes, thats all fine, but we need to know how to set it up on the program so that it properly scans.

Tosanu

I read a thread that suggested that for Windows it doesnt resize things until Publishing. Does that mean if i want a scene that in non-retina is 1028 x 768, shoudl i build it in the editor at that size or double the size? If i can just confirm this, its all we will need.