What screen resolution should I use for iPhone?

[WhatPixelYouOn]

Hi there,

I'd like to develop an iPhone app but am unsure of weather I should go with the iPhone 3G or iPhone 4S resolutions, would using the iPhone 4 resolution not work on the 3G, and viceversa? Also, I'm building a game using pixel art and I'm not sure how best to get it into my project. The art takes up only a fraction of the games resolution, enlarging the graphics isn't a problem but should I be importing the graphics in at 4x the original size or telling MMF2 to "do something" to make the art larger in-app, OR build it at a lower resolution and hope that the iPhone will stretch it out?

Hope somebody can fill me in on this. Thanks for any advice.

[colej_uk]

You can use either. The 3GS will downscale the iphone 4's resolution, or the 4 will up scale the 3GS resolution. I've even used a weird in-between resolution for one of my games (a port of a flash game) and it scales just fine on older & newer devices

[WhatPixelYouOn]

Ahh that's good to know. So when you say it up/downscales does that also add a blurring to the pixels? That looks alright for photos, but with pixel art the blurring looks pretty off-putting. I guess if you build your application to the 3G resolutions, it you *might* also have access to more ram? Or would it not really make any difference?

[Aasland]

Ahh that's good to know. So when you say it up/downscales does that also add a blurring to the pixels? That looks alright for photos, but with pixel art the blurring looks pretty off-putting. I guess if you build your application to the 3G resolutions, it you *might* also have access to more ram? Or would it not really make any difference?

That's up to you, just disable "smooth resizing". (under iOS options in MMF) =)

[DistantJ]

Yeah, upscaling smooths out pixels by default, but you can disable it, so you can have some lovely sharp 480x320 art on the iPhone 4 and still boast about retina display support in your app description. Take a look at Diablohead's game "Genesis" to see this at its absolute best.

Actually, I believe upscaled 480x320 actually uses less RAM than using the retina display resolution because it's using OpenGL stuff and basically displaying lower resolution textures. Either way, scaling doesn't really seem to have any kind of effect on the speed it runs at, unlike old software rendering which caused slowdown when scaling.

In other words, build your game how you like and it should run fine however you do it

[WhatPixelYouOn]

Ah thank you, that's some useful information! So let me be 100% clear on this: Let's say I built my app at half the resolution of the iPhone 3G(480x320), which would mean having my MMF2 application running at 240x160. When I get that app onto the iPhone, it'll have no trouble upscalling to 480x320 automatically, right?

[Diablohead]

correct, it will scale with or without smoothness if you choose.

[WhatPixelYouOn]

Awesome! Thanks a lot for the info!

[DistantJ]

Yep, I have been building MANOS at 240x160, it doubles it up for 3GS, and expands it 4x for iPhone 4:

[WhatPixelYouOn]

That's looking great! And just what I was hoping to know, I'm feeling much more confident about iOS development now!