Is this the best way to scale game screen for hand drawn HD graphics?

[Enchantainment]

I know that scaling your game is best done with the Ultimate Full screen object, but I'm wanting to know if this is the best method for scaling your game, that uses HD graphics.

Basically I'm creating a game at 1920 x 1080 and I want to make sure the game scales down and up to other resolutions correctly. Obviously it'll need to use letter boxing for different aspect ratios, such as 4:3 and 16:10. I heard that Fusion 2.5 prefers to scale graphics up rather than down, but that sounds the opposite from what I've always known and done, as scaling up reduces quality. So before I go too far I want to confirm what approach would be best. Should I design the game at 1920 x 1080 like I'm doing, or design at a different resolution?

Oh another little question. The game has no scrolling in it, the playing field is the size of the screen. This shouldn't have performance issues with sprites designed at that screen size should it? I'm also trying to keep to power of 2 sizes.

Thanks.

[Enchantainment]

No replies? Surely someone else has run into the same issue of how to handle hand drawn graphics, keeping the quality on different screen sizes?

[happygreenfrog]

The big problem with designing at 1920x1080 is that the game will lag a lot at that resolution on some/all computers (depending on the game). Scaling something up, while it may look worse, won't have big/minor performance issues on, say, laptops that aren't uber-expen$ive gaming laptop$.

Oh, there's also the issue of needing to design the game so that everything's large enough that it's visible when scaled down to, say, 1024x768, or other, potentially smaller resolutions, and larger graphics are more important to be close to power of 2s since otherwise they could take up huge amounts more memory than they need to, so there's that as well...

[Enchantainment]

Well, the game won't really have much going on at one time. It's a simple "casual" game with no kind of scrolling. I've been looking over the forums and people are giving out contrasting suggestions. Some say design at 1920 x 1080, others say don't. Is this a case of Fusion 2.5 not being a good engine to use for hand drawn games?

[lh37]

In my opinion, and since you say you won't be having scrolling (which can add a performance hit) -- If your game is designed purely for the computer (not considering porting for mobiles later on), then 1920x1080 (1080p) would give your game a nice crisp, HD feel to the game and I don't see any major problems. Hardware acceleration (Direct3D) is essential too.

As an example, even though Simon's Cat is a hand-drawn animated cartoon on YouTube, there is a remarkable difference in quality between 360p, 480p, 720p and even 1080p in full screen on a 1080p display.

I would disagree doing the opposite and up-scaling from a lower resolution. Once the quality's of the graphics is sub-par, then the overall game loses it's quality too. It may even be noticeable by the user (especially with hand drawings, Simon's Cat is a neat example in how fine/blocky the pixels are - even between 720p and 1080p!) - A tip is to always design your graphics with the highest quality possible, and downscaling with a graphics software as appropriate. Vectors may shine here.

However, when targeting resolutions lower than 1080p, the drawings may become too "fine" to a point the pixels "disappear". It depends how you lower the resolution (I don't use the Ultimate Fullscreen object so I don't know its features). The problem is that Fusion works and stores images as bitmaps (downscaling doesn't work well with bitmaps), so the built-in "Resize display to fill window size" option may not be suitable here.

[happygreenfrog]

Well, for your game, it sounds like it could work, as long as you make sure it looks fine on really small screens (I recommend making sure it looks good at resolutions at around half the size you mentioned), and make sure to design objects at the right sizes, as in a power of 2 (the "design the objects at the right sizes" thing is actually just an issue with graphics cards period, BTW, not Fusion itself, from my understanding). If you do that, then you should be fine. Just to be sure, run some stress-tests at that resolution on lower-end computers. If it runs at acceptable speeds with the number of objects you plan on the game having (preferably purposely and significantly overestimating), then you should be fine. If not, well, try running the stress-test at a much smaller resolution. If it still has problems, then try a max FPS (I believe that's about 1000, BTW) stress-test on your highest-end computer using the same number of objects to give you an idea on how much faster the game would run at a smaller resolution, using a counter instead of the debugger to display the framerate because the debugger causes lag. Also make sure to try a slightly smaller resolution as well, such as 1600x900 or something like that.

[DiggityBam]

Simple answer: Create your work using Vector Graphics, this way you can scale your image any which you want without degrading quality. (Its what they use for giant billboards)

Longer answer: Vector aside, the higher res your work is, the better it will look when scaled down. This is common knowledge amongst many digital artists who set their canvases to 3000 x 3000 and up, only to scale it down afterwards.

[Enchantainment]

Thanks for all the responses and advice. I guess the biggest issue is getting the game to scale properly. I don't suppose there's a way to have the game size down to smaller resolutions (using letter boxing), but stop the game stretching to fit screen sizes that are up and above 1920x1080?