Target screen size?

gummbum on 2019/03/24 18:04

In pygame I generally prefer to do a straight-up 1:1 (no scaling). I imagine it helps to require a minimum screen size, so most participants will be able to play it.

Once upon a time 800x600 was pushing CPU/mobo/men limits for some kinds of games. Modern computers can handle more area and 1024x768 is starting to seem tiny.

Is there anybody out there who is still stuck with 1024x768?

For modern laptops it seems the common minimum is 1360x768 or 1366x768.

In any case it seems like we're constricted by the ubiquitous height of 768 for now. Would you concur?

(I know it's a valid choice to require a larger screen, and simply discount under-powered machines. I'm just trying to get a sense of whether a significant number of folks are still nursing their aged tech as their primary computer for this competition.)

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Comments

mauve on 2019/03/24 18:25:

I have 3200x1800 high-dpi natively but because of scaling issues I usually run that at 1600x900 when playing the PyWeek games.

LeopardShark on 2019/03/25 17:38:

My laptop is 1600×900, so it looks like I'm probably safe for the time being. I'm going for 1280×720 this time, because it's 16:9, and gives 48 pixels breathing room for window decorations and other desktop environment stuff.

gummbum on 2019/03/25 18:50:

1280x720, I too prefer this size. And I think most CPUs can handle it even for intensive tasks like realtime scrolling.

illume on 2019/03/27 10:47:

Automagic screen scaling option is in pygame 2, and it works pretty good.

Here's the PR to read about it:

https://github.com/pygame/pygame/pull/832

tldr; render to low resolution, have pygame do the scaling and translation of events to the virtual size. You pretty much just need to pass in an extra flag to <pre>pygame.display.set_mode()</pre>.

mauve on 2019/03/28 01:17:

I've gone the other way in What The Frog?!: assets and coordinates are calculated for high-dpi and I scale down the whole thing for lower-resolution screens. Pretty easy in OpenGL.