Image resolution suggestions

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

I am developing a flash cards style game for children and looking for some advice. I have been reading about dynamic image resolution and different scaling options and want to make sure I am headed in the right direction.
I have several images that are supposed fill the whole screen on several different devices (iPad, iphone, Android etc) and I want to make sure I do not lose image quality between devices. I know I can create different scaled images for different devices but I also do not want my app to be 20 mb in size trying to match several different screen resolutions. My question is, is it better to have two images one that is 1280x800 for high end Android tablets and then scale down for iPads, Kindle Fire and other tablets and then have a 480x320 for other devices like phones?

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#2

I face this problem as well. I’ve thought about a couple different options:

  1. Build out for iPad and scale down (results in really sharp gfx on smaller screens)

  2. Build 2 sets of assets using code to pick up the @2x (retina) vs regular resolution based on iphone 3gs (320x480)

  3. Build out one set of images that are in between both iphone and ipad and scale up slightly.
    Through a bunch of testing, #3 seems to accomplish what I want. If I have an image that’s in between. Seems to come out nicely.

  4. results in larger assets, so you are using them across the board, which is nice but again larger size.

  5. is worse than 1) as you have 2 sets of assets now

  6. is smaller than 1), better than 2) and if you add 1 and 2 you get 3, so I mean come on 3 is the best choice right? right?
    Hehe. Anyway if you are rocking a 512x384, or something in between a regular iphone and iPad seems to be a great compromise, and you don’t really if at all notice the degradation which results in better performance anyway.

Those are my thoughts on it :slight_smile:

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#3

Nicholasclag thanks for the response.

Just to make sure i fully understand, if I was building for Android tablets with resolutions upwards of 1280x800 would you make this the largest image and then scale down for the iPad as well?

Thanks [import]uid: 73307 topic_id: 19777 reply_id: 76772[/import]

#4

@dbooncha

Yes, you could approach it that way. Depending how you have your config.lua and build.settings, you may or may not have a black bar on the sides depending if you are doing scaling, or zoom even type of stuff. Test it out and and see what works best.

I will add that if you have a ton of stuff going on like I do, that using large images like that and scaling down will affect performance, which is why I use the middle size images (600 ish) and scale up so it’s one asset set. A lot of people use 2 sets, one high res and one low res, however with my game It’s so heavy with physics and everything else that I need every frame increase I can get!
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