Handling different display sizes

[lucazd]

Hello,
I wonder how my game can handle different display sizes.

In desktop game, we can set fullscreen to a standard resolution (800x600).

Mobiles have an standard resolution?
Which is the best way to handle this?

[OverKill]

Q: Mobiles have an standard resolution?
A: Nope! Actually you can bet your bum each one will have a different size.

Q: Which is the best way to handle this?
A: Hehe that knowlage is the difference between a junior and a senior dev.
In case of a hud, you will want to ancor the images to the border.
f.i. an image that will sit at the bottom/right should be placed at width/height and bottom|right
In case of 'world' graphics, centre it all on the screen centre.

Generally, code your game in such a style that you have little to no 'magic numbers'.
Don't hardcode image or screen widths.
Don't hardcode relative positions.

hth

[Juriy]

IMHO the best way to handle different screen sizes is to develop separate versions of MIDlet for different devices. And use different resources also.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[kawaiimomo]

Hi all,

of course the best way is to have diferent versions for both, sources and resources like images, but I would stick to 3 images sizes (small, medium, big screen). Creating the resources for each screen size is insane, lot of work to do.

Totally agree with Overkill, don't use 'magic numbers', have all numerical values depending on the value of others.

Alsoo, I've played to a game called Atomic Skater which seems to implement a image scaling engine. It seems they (Plutonium software) use the same images for all screen sizes and scale them down or up. Of course, when you scale the images to a bigger resolurion they loss definition, but in this game there're no pixelation, just some kind of linear interpolation and the edges are soft. The result is a game filling all the screen but it takes like 2-3 minutes to load the game (At least in my slow v3 razr)...