Hi, I'm making a Side-Scrolling Shooter with MMF2 and I was wondering what would be the best resolution for it (it's a commercial project by the way). I tried 1280x1024 and that is just too slow. I don't want it too small like 640x480, nowadays that isn't too common. I was thinking around 1024x768. How about that?
If it helps, there will be ink effects in the game and lots of sprites coming and going, like explosions, shells bouncing around, grenades being flung around, etc.
If I were you I'd stick with 640x480. I don't think it's that uncommon a resolution nowadays, and it's large enough for most games to be in. IMO, I think it's much more important that your game have a good framerate (e.g. 50 fps) rather than high resolution.
That's what I would do anyway <img src="/center/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
If you create your game at 640 x 480, you can set the games properties to fit the screen while running. While this will lowered the sharpness of the graphics slightly (with them being stretched to fit the screen size), it will give you full screen at a good frame rate.
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Paul is right, that's what I am doing with my side scroller. I just didn't want my game to have 320x240, so I went with 640x480 and it works great.
Hmm, well the only problem I have with that is that I don't want the characters to be too big on the screen but I don't want them to be too blurry. I think I might try out the resolution that is one step above 640x480 (I think it's 1024x768) and if it is still too slow, I'll go with 640x480.
The next step above 640x480 would be 800x600. I find that 800x600 works the best for me, especially since it's the middle ground between 640x480 and 1024x768. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your game doesn't have to fit the classic 4:3 ratio. You could use a custom resolution, such as 700x500. It's always a thought.
Two other big factors are your bit depth and your video mode. Scrolling games benefit substantially from using DirectX or DirectX + VRam; whether the benefit will be worth the hit you take from using ink effects depends on your game.
You can also make a game faster by lowering the bit depth from 16 million colors to 32,000, though again, your mileage on this will vary. (I haven't used MMF2 enough to know how big of a difference it makes now, but in MMF1.5 it made a big difference in some projects and a minor difference in others. I also don't know how it interacts with the new ink effects; it may actually slow them down, depending on how the calculations are done.)
My personal choice of resolution is usually 800x600. If you're using a lot of sprites, I'd think a lower bit depth (32-64k colors) would help a lot, and in my experience it doesn't have a significant impact on the game's look. (Your bit depth determines how much work is necessary to draw a sprite and can actually make a bigger difference than resolution, depending on the graphics engine)
As soon as I had turned off the computer, I realized 'It's 800x600 not 1024x768) Darn!
It seems to be running really smoothly on 800x600 without DirectX+VRAM. I'll probably have alot of ink effects in my game, mostly explosions with the 'add' effect.
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