ELI5: Overscan/Stretch and Universal Apps

metamet

Hey all,

First off, I want to apologize in advance for rehashing this conversation, as I know it has come up in threads in the last month. However, it is a difficult topic for new GS developers to grok, but the GS platform doesn't seem to handle multi-device support super seamlessly. Also it's possible that I am an idiot and I'm the only one who doesn't get it.

**What I want: ** I have a portrait only game who's scenes encapsulate everything that's going on (i.e there is no side scrolling). I want my app to support iPhone 4, 4s, 5 and 5s, 6 and 6+, and all kinds of iPads. I want the app to look good and playable on all devices. I am not going to touch Android yet, but I think I will eventually want to so I want my multi device support to be flexible enough to be able to work on most of those devices.

What I learned from previous forum posts:
* It is best practice for me to create my project with iPad Portrait canvas, and to create my assets at 2x the resolution of an iPad, and then select resolution independence.
* There are two options for scaling down - stretch and overscan. Stretch causes the assets to look bad, but overscan cuts parts of the screen. Both of these are unacceptable solutions, so it is up to us as developers to hack around this: we can unstretch/change screen camera for stretched, or replace the removed areas of the screen. Am I understanding this correctly?

In either case, this has been boggling my mind recently and I haven't been able to do actual game development because I have been researching this issue and I'm stuck. Can someone please explain to me the best practice for universal portrait, single scene apps? Thank you so much in advance.

BBEnk

You might check out my thread below and 2 others lots of info and demo's.

http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/72589/universal-builds-for-ios-and-android-and-anything-else-using-ipad-build-and-stretch-no-distortion#latest

heres phGhost version.

http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/72604/universal-build-flexible-aspect-ratio-stretch-trick-with-video-and-template

and a overscan version by colander

http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/70748/universal-binary-rule-works-in-landscape-and-portrait-for-all-resolutions#latest

metamet

Hi BBEnk - thanks for the reply. I have read your thread and gone through your project, but I'm still confused.

For example, I have downloaded Colanders Overscan method demo (UB 8) and previewed the project.

This is what I see in iPad portrait: http://grab.by/Bm0U

This is what I see in iPhone portrait overscan: http://grab.by/Bm14

Clearly I am not doing something correctly because this isn't the intended behavior, right?

thanks in advance.

BBEnk

@metamet said:
Hi BBEnk - thanks for the reply. I have read your thread and gone through your project, but I'm still confused.

For example, I have downloaded Colanders Overscan method demo (UB 8) and previewed the project.

This is what I see in iPad portrait: http://grab.by/Bm0U

This is what I see in iPhone portrait overscan: http://grab.by/Bm14

Clearly I am not doing something correctly because this isn't the intended behavior, right?

thanks in advance.

after you select device you did hit reset at the top correct because it works fine for me.

maybe @colander‌ can give some advice on his version.