Hi, Could you give me some good and bad things about having a higher screen resolution in my game? I had it at 640x480, but I moved it up to 1024x768 (my screen's resolution) and it looks much better except things are smaller, which I expected. Thanks.

Ok...

But other than that it is fine?

Ok thanks for the help. One more things. What if someone has a lower screen resolution? What would happen? Would it crash?

Only if their monitor is able to show that resoloution. And if it does I don't see any reason why things should be larger.

In today's age of LCD monitors, the best looking program will always run at the native resolution of the user's monitor.

However, this can be as high as 1920x1200 now... which is also a widescreen resolution.

When working with non-accelerated graphics and Allegro, you have two options when making a game. You can opt to build your game around a specific resolution, or you can allow the user to choose their resolution and arrange your graphics dynamically to the resolution selected.

If you limit your game to a specific resolution it's extremely important that you choose common resolutions, such as 640x480 and 800x600. I don't know a single system once the Pentium processor was invented that couldn't handle those. Going lower than 640x480 is generally a bad idea anymore unless you run in a window. Most machines can handle 1024x768 too.

If you allow the user to select a resolution, you have to remember that everything looks smaller when the resolution is higher, unless the graphics are scaled. Without hardware acceleration though, scaling can look really ugly or will otherwise be fairly slow.

Or, you can opt for hardware acceleration, at which point the boundaries of the screen become arbitrary values and you can thus do all sorts of things and still have the game look correct at any resolution.

The only convention with resolution that's remained constant is that the higher the resolution you run, the lower your maximum framerate will be, and that's about it.

I need to start remembering that. I've got to get the idea of full screen as a default out of my head.

Oh, I like full screen mode. I just hate small resolutions resizing/rearranging/etc my other windows. I prefer to be able to select full screen and my native resolution at the same time, and having everything be good.

I bought my current computer two months ago along with a 1330 x 768 flatscreen monitor. Windows safe mode and Linux without the Nvidia binary blob driver show the GUI desktop as "stretched" out of shape. Due to paranoia from working with mode 19 in DOS caused me to be careful about aspect ratios, but I still come across errors in my old programs now, such as this non-centered Mandelbrot set. (I was surprised the window adopted the aspect ratio though)

{"name":"598562.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/a\/3acec48ffc9a61d3c7483c003c80c3a4.jpg","w":410,"h":233,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/a\/3acec48ffc9a61d3c7483c003c80c3a4"}

Moral: ALWAYS try to test on all hardware you can get your hands on. I'll try it again in safe mode (stretched) soon as my roomie loads this winduhs up with spyware as fast as he can find "social networks".

Yes, but that will only look OK on CRT screens or LCDs with a native resolution of 1600 x 1200 (or 2400 x 1800, or 3200 x 2400, etc.). Or on an 800 x 600 netbook screen.

How do you feel about programs that start windowed, and play music or sounds?

Actually, if the native resolution of an LCD monitor is high enough, and the resolution you run your software at is low enough, the blurring between pixels as the image is rendered isn't too bad. So long as the native resolution is high enough, and the assigned resolution is small enough that at least 1 pixel in each direction is a solid colour instead of blurred, then there's not too much to worry about. (IE: With 1680x1050 monitors, the horizontal must be 1120, 840 or less, and the vertical must be 700, 525 or less.)

My current project forces 640x480 but I have seen it running on both 1680x1050 and 1920x1200 monitors. Thanks to the way my game is designed graphically, it actually looks OK scaled up to these resolutions by driver, especially at 1920x1200 which is exactly 3 times the horizontal and 2.5 times the vertical. And it can always run windowed. It also has a 2x windowed mode, running 1280x960, for people with massive desktops who don't want to run full-screen.

BTW: BAF, Allegro closes full-screen video modes below desktop res fairly well. I rarely run into the issue of stuff being mispositioned afterwards. There are some exceptions, generally programs which greatly customize their windows, such as instant messaging programs, so I just close such programs before running a full-screen app. I make it a point to allow screen modes to be adjusted with the push of a button in my apps. I'll probably also add ALT-ENTER shortcut support from now on too.

If it is a game? Fine. If it is an office app? No way.

Windows 7 seems to be better in this regard, but it is still unacceptable. It messes up desktop icons too (again, Windows 7 seems to handle it better, but I'ev only tested it once).

The bottom line is it screws up my workflow. I'm not going to close out stuff just to run your game, so if it isn't implemented in a way I think intelligent, I just won't play it.

Well, I said if the game was good I'd play it again if it had an option to fix the video mode, so your games would be safe.