Responsive resolution

[CobraA1]

There's been a few resolutiuon changing plugins in the past, however I've got a new twist on the concept. Previous resolution changers have been about selecting different resolutions, and while they have done a decent job, I wanted to go futher. This one is aobut changing the game resolution dynamically, to fill the entire window regardless of size or aspect ratio.


Right now, the title screen and the map screen should adjust on the fly as you change the size of the window. On a mobile device, they should resize when you change the orientation of the device.


Battle screens and in-game menus do not yet rezize on the fly; they will keep their dimensions. This is very much a work in progress and very alpha quality.


The addon an be found here:


https://www.dropbox.com/s/yf4tgoamfkxxc11/Responsive.zip?dl=0


All feedback is welcome .


Detailed info:


I've actually been inspired by the "responsive design" movement in web pages, which emphasizes writing code in such a way as to make web pages flexible enough to run on a wide variety of devices, from high end workstations to smart phones. The ultimate goal of this project won't be merely allowing the screen size to adjust on the fly, but also to adapt somewhat to the size and type of device.


I'd like to create a button that acts as the right-click menu / two finger touch on mobile, as having a visible button would be more discoverable, especially on mobile platforms. Perhaps make the game more aware of DPI: Things are tiny on the iPhone in the portrait orientation. Maybe some layout tweaks and adjustments at smaller screen sizes as well.


Ultimately I want the player to have a good experience, no matter what device is being used.


Resizing the window on the fly is actually harder than one might think: Even though the deep, underlying platform (WebGL, Canvas, PIXI) does support resizing everything arbitrarily and in real time, for some reason or another the devs for RPG Maker decided to use an "initialize to a specific size" approach, and most of the higher level code paths assume that's the case. So it actually takes a bit of work to figure out everywhere where that's being done and find a way around it.

 

[Resonance]

pretty cool

 

[CobraA1]

An update on my progress.


First - I've decided that I'm not going to do the real-time scaling. This is for a couple of reasons: First of all, it's just proving to be a really big pain to debug. I'm getting black bars and missing tiles, and I can't really figure out why it's happening.


If it was just that, though, I'd probably keep at it with the hopes of eventually figuring it out. But it gets worse.


The really big deal breaker is when I started using Yanfly's GabWindow plugin. It didn't work as expected, so I took a look. Turns out, Yanfly does things the same way as RPG maker. Which made me realize that making this plugin do the real-time scaling would break other plugins. I'd need a bunch of compatibility code for lots of third party plugins. Writing compatibility code for everybody else's plugins is pretty much infeasible.


So I've decided to drop that aspect of the plugin. I'll still be able to make RPG Maker fill the entire window - it will just have to be applied manually, probably by using the options menu.


This does mean that I'm going to have to focus a lot on what will really make this plugin stand out from the others: Making the game more friendly on touchscreens and small devices. Otherwise, all I'm really doing is making yet another resolution changing plugin.

 

[CobraA1]

I've pushed an update. A few changes from last time:

• The zip file includes a graphic that's used by the plugin, so it now has to be extracted to the root folder of your project.
  
• Resizing the screen is somewhat optional. It works, but probably not in the best way?
  
• There's a new "Show Menu Widget" option. I'm still working on getting it to be a good size, but it works. This way, there's a visual item players can click or tap to show the menu. Having to tap with two fingers on a mobile device is not intuitive for first time players.
  

 

[ashikai]

This is a great idea! Marking this to test later.

 

[Digital Religion]

This is a brilliant concept as I do responsive web design as well. If you want help with it let me know. Im going to check it out and see how it works I will let you know. Thanks.

 

[Digital Religion]

I just found this as well while researching around.

 

[masterlobo]

I just found this as well while researching around.

Great discovery, but do you happen to know Terms of Use?

 

[Digital Religion]

I'm honestly not sure, but the owner of the scripts website is http://fantranslation.org/
Maybe you could ask him. I found this here on reddit

 

[Darthcourt]

It looks like that is the same code listed on their GitHub. The author seems to go by kmeisthax on Reddit if google is any indication. According to that GitHub:

"Permission is granted to use these plugins in all RPG Maker projects, both commercial and non-commercial."

Check out more of their stuff here:
https://github.com/kmeisthax/SixLoves_Plugins