Best Screen Resolution

[terrorchan]

What do you guys think the ideal screen resolution be? Default? Something bigger like most other games? Is it worth having to deal with incapability with certain plugins? Do you find games with the default resolution to be 'n00bish'?

 

[Kes]

You don't specifically state which engine, and the default size varies between them.

For me, it is not a question of a default size being noobish, I simply find the default size of VI have VXAce to be too small.  I have no problems with the default size of MV.

The drawback of using much larger sizes is that with an unskilled mapper there is even more empty space to be filled, and this is either left as boring blanks or filled with inappropriate, badly thought through junk.

 

[Archeia]

Personally I think the game's resolution just have to be 16:9 just so people can full screen without much destruction. Basically: 960x540, 1024×576, 1152×648, 1280×720, 1366×768.

I would honestly not go beyond that as a developer because the current RM graphics looks horrible at 1920x1080 and it's not like RM has autoscaling in window mode. Imagine a 1366 user loading a 1920x1080 window. I mean it probably could but that sounds more trouble than it's worth for something visually inferior. And I always liked the smaller resolutions since you can have tight maps and more control on what the player can see. But this is just probably me :'D

 

[terrorchan]

I guess it wasn't really engine specific :0 kinda just wanted the consensus on expanding upon the defualt screen size, but I suppose I'm most curious about MV

 

[Yanfly]

Personally I think the game's resolution just have to be 16:9 just so people can full screen without much destruction. Basically: 960x544, 1024×576, 1152×648, 1280×720, 1366×768.

I would honestly not go beyond that as a developer because the current RM graphics looks horrible at 1920x1080 and it's not like RM has autoscaling in window mode. Imagine a 1366 user loading a 1920x1080 window. I mean it probably could but that sounds more trouble than it's worth for something visually inferior. And I always liked the smaller resolutions since you can have tight maps and more control on what the player can see. But this is just probably me :'D

Following along with what Archeia said, it's better to scale upwards from a smaller resolution than scaling downward from a larger resolution. This is due to a number of reasons:

• RPG Maker MV "lags" when there's a lot of animated tiles on the screen. When more tiles have to be animated, you can probably imagine the consequences.
• Less video memory used to upscale than to downscale. This is particularly important when playing on mobile devices with less memory. You don't want to overwhelm your players' devices.
• WebGL can handle larger resolutions. However, more rendering is required at higher resolutions when using special visual effects. This means more calculations involved, thus, more processing power used. 

My personal "sweet spot" for resolutions is 1104x624. I choose this because it maintains the default height MV comes with while remaining close to 16:9 and still divisible by 48 (the tileset size).

As far as plugins are concerned, most of my plugins are made to accomodate 16:9 resolutions as they're pretty much the commercial standard now. They can work with 4:3 resolutions, but work best at 16:9.

 

[Ramiro]

I persoanlly use 1152 x 648 (24 x 13 tiles) at 16:9 for desktop and 960 x 640 (20 x 13 tiles) at 4:3 for mobile versions.

Both are really similar in terms of size, and one upscale/downscale well on each device.

The desktop version is bigger than usual, but the mobile version is more or less than an average mobile phone supports and at worst, they support 480x320 wich is half the size of that (and those are really old two years old one second old recent phones, phones are so different at every second...)

 

[Witchcat]

Hi! What about resolution when I'm going to create assets (like overalys, customized hud etc)? 75 pixel/inch is correct?

 

[Whip]

16:9 for sure. This has been a standard for so many years now and I'm quite confused at the default 816x624... it seems very antiquated. As a new user I'm still trying to solve several issues that I'm having as a result of trying to make my game fit a standard 16:9 PC screen (filling in the black area, using a title screen image that fits 16:9, & broken background images in the battle screen). The default resolution doesn't seem to really fit anything perfectly, not HD at 16:9, not SD at 4:3, none of the cinema, not a perfect square, and not a vertical standard either. Seriously confused at the default value.

It would be nice if I could pick from a list of commonly used resolutions at the start of a new project and then be able to have RPG Maker accept that same size for the title image and ensure that the battle screen fits in the center of those dimensions too.

 

[Frogboy]

I usually use 1110x624 because it's the default height stretched out to 16x9. I'm going to have to try Yanfly's, only a few pixels different, recommendation for the reason he specified.

 

[Whip]

I usually use 1110x624 because it's the default height stretched out to 16x9. I'm going to have to try Yanfly's, only a few pixels different, recommendation for the reason he specified.

I see your point and played around with the resolutions and I do think I prefer your setting to prevent too much image shrink (I had previously settled on 1278x720) but I think I will go with 1104x624 for the reasons stated above by Yanfly as I had not considered keeping the view divisible by 48. I also noticed that this will fit the full width of a 16:9 screen with a room size of 23x13 for those times when I don't want a room that scrolls yet still fill the screen.

 

[SOC]

I really like 1280x720. There are lots of other great suggestions in this thread but I find this resolution to be pretty quick, simple, non-nonsense and easy to work with while providing plenty of great view space in games without too much resource hogging or lag.

 

[mauro16b]

Try 1104x624, you'll love this resolution (it's wide and divisible by 48)! Use the correct fullscreen plugin to properly load the correct resolution at every game start.

 

[cmos]

what is the importance of keeping the resolution divisible by the 48 pixel tile set?

 

[Woland]

I don't think it's really important. Small maps get centered anyway and on bigger it only looks a bit weird if you get too close to that maximum size - if your resolution fits X tiles high, but you go with X-1 map size, you'll get thin lines on top and bottom. And if you go X+1 you will get a slight scroll once you go up and/or down.

I personally use 1920x1080 and it looks fine in general, except for the battle where the characters get super tiny while the background goes full screen - you get the effect of your characters being the size of a patch of grass. But if your game doesn't feature battle or you go with some other, on-map battle system, I don't really see why not go 1920x1080.

 

[Aesica]

1104 x 624

Why? Because:

1. 624 is already the default height, which works pretty well on most people's systems (divisible by 48) (13 tiles down)
   
2. 1104 is also divisible by 48 (23 tiles across)
3. It's extremely close to being a 16:9 aspect ratio (fullscreen on most widescreen displays is almost impossible to distinguish from true 16:9)
4. Since it's basically the widescreen version of the default size, you won't run into problems like everything being too small or otherwise fitting awkwardly, as most plugins seem to be based around using something akin to the default width/height.
5. Widescreen is by far the most common resolution these days, as almost nobody has a standard screen anymore so you really shouldn't be using it unless your engine of choice forces you to. Since MV is flexible, there's no excuse.

 

[VisitorsFromDreams]

It still blows my mind that RPG Maker doesnt have resolution settings within the game export itself. It should be up to the player to decide what resolution suits their set up best.

 

[Aesica]

It still blows my mind that RPG Maker doesnt have resolution settings within the game export itself. It should be up to the player to decide what resolution suits their set up best.

The player can resize the window to any size they want, or even set it to fullscreen. The resolution (number of tiles across and down) as defined by settings in this thread should absolutely be up to the developer and not the player though. It can affect the UI layout, viewable portion of the map, placements of things in battles, etc.

 

[VisitorsFromDreams]

The player can resize the window to any size they want, or even set it to fullscreen. The resolution (number of tiles across and down) as defined by settings in this thread should absolutely be up to the developer and not the player though. It can affect the UI layout, viewable portion of the map, placements of things in battles, etc.

I think using "resolution" as the metric for that is wrong though, if it all comes down to the number of tiles than tile width and height is the unit of measurement the engine should use as opposed to resolution instead, I guess you would refer to that more as an aspect ratio. Resolution should be handled completely seperately by the engine as a user driven option just like any other engine and those tiles/assets should be scaled appropriately. If the engine cant scale UI elements or other assets properly thats a failing on the engines developers side.

Resizing the window with the mouse is or making it full screen is "a" solution (and its one thing the rendering pipeline does horribly since everything gets blurry on higher resolution screens, you can fix that with plugins but that shouldnt have to be the case and it also messes up fonts), but being able to go into your games options menu and select 720p, 1080p or 4k and having the game scale its UI and visuals appropriately and more importantly, CLEANLY is what im talking about.

I hope its something thats featured in the next iteration of the engine because despite how far RPGM has come its still a decade behind most of its competitors in this regard.

 

[bgillisp]

@VisitorsFromDreams : Sorry, but what you ask there is impossible unless you can come up with a new image algorithm, as there is NO algorithm that can do that cleanly for every resolution out there. Blur is created any time you have to resize an image to a bigger image, as all algorithms guess at what the missing pixels are, and the guesses can be wrong. So unless someone creates a better math algorithm that is not possible.

For other engines, they are probably doing something else but the laws of image resizing say that is not possible. No algorithm does exist that can take a native 640 x 480 game and make it fit all resolutions out there, period. And that is true no matter what native resolution you use, I just used 640 x 480 as an example.

All that could be done is make the game for the largest resolution out there, and let it scale down. If you did that, you would discover that even within RPGMaker, you would not get blur, as image algorithms scale down better than they scale up. Those other engines are probably somewhere deep in the code having everything at a size that is much higher than is used, and doing a scale down. But, that also bloats disk and memory space too, which is another factor too.

 

[VisitorsFromDreams]

@VisitorsFromDreams : Sorry, but what you ask there is impossible unless you can come up with a new image algorithm, as there is NO algorithm that can do that cleanly for every resolution out there. Blur is created any time you have to resize an image to a bigger image, as all algorithms guess at what the missing pixels are, and the guesses can be wrong. So unless someone creates a better math algorithm that is not possible.

For other engines, they are probably doing something else but the laws of image resizing say that is not possible. No algorithm does exist that can take a native 640 x 480 game and make it fit all resolutions out there, period.

What most AAA games do is they make the items individually for each and every resolution. You can do that too, make a version for each resolution out there, but even then they will miss a resolution here and there no matter what you do.

Really? But when I play RM23K games on my 4k at full screen they still look super sharp, as do emulated 8 & 16 bit games. Obviously there is a way to do it because the same engine managed to scale cleanly in the past. I thought the blurring was an issue created by the move to Java, especially since it was something I managed to disable with a 3rd party plugin in my own game project.