Question on HD Multi-Resolution Desktop Games

Questions
#1

I’ve read a lot about different rendering strategies and the Defold docs.

Since my focus is just desktop at first, game size and memory is not a concern.

I want to support any 16:9 display from 720p up to 4k. My game is a single screen playing field, and i will pad out the tilemap or background for ratios other than 16:9.

So my current plan is:

Use fixed_fit_projection
Use linear filter with no mip mapping
Set game.project display to 3840 x 2160
All sprite and altas assets correctly sized for the 3840 x 2160 resolution

So far it seems to work well when i run on a 1080p monitor. Somewhere in between 1080p and 720p, it seems to get very blurry. I can see the distinct change from sharp to blurry when resizing the window, and it’s not using mipmaps.

Is my setup correct if I want the best visuals at all resolutions? Is 4k to 720 too large a jump to downscale?

1 Like
#3

Could you please share screenshots where this can be seen? Or even better if you can share a basic example project where we can test this ourselves. I’m not sure what’s causing it.

#4

I actually found the blurriness problem (my error). It was a custom sprite material I tried with incorrect settings. Now there is slight sharpness at the low end, as expected since I don’t have mipmaps. It still looks fine and depends on the art asset.

So the simple ‘use highest resolution and it just works’ seems fine visually. The downsides are:

Windowed mode on desktops with extended multi-monitors will try to run the game at game.project resolution (4k) across all monitors.

Windowed mode never actually true 16:9 due to size of the titlebar and/or taskbar.

Gamers probably expect full screen Borderless Window and a finer video settings menu anyways. Just wanted to try as simple an approach as possible.