Flare at higher resolutions

[dorkster]

This topic is for discussing the best way to deal with problems caused by running the game at a higher resolution.

As an example, when I play at 1360x768, I can stand far away from the enemies in the Brother's Sacrafice Room. Far enough that I can attack them with Burn without having them move towards me. Perhaps basing some distance calculations on the game's resolution could remedy this.

[clintbellanger]

Possibilities for the long-term view of the engine.

Scale graphics via presets. We could render all of Flare's art at 2x scale, 1x scale, 0.5x scale, and have those options available for people playing in High Def, Standard Def, or Mobile scale respectively.

The 2x scale art shouldn't slow the game down any (still drawing the same amount of pixel data), but it does require 4x memory. Probably not a big deal, but something to keep in mind.

Put range limiters on most powers. We can add a range check on click-target spells like Burn and Teleport. Most missiles already disappear after a certain distance.

We can modify the way enemies behave at very long distances. Maybe they always enter combat when hurt, no matter the distance.

[pennomi]

Currently, any art scale other than our standard 64x32 tiles will cause strange issues with move speed. I should be able to fix this in the next few days.

[Xovan]

Another way to work it would be to not use higher res tiles but rather apply a scaling filter to the image in general. Think like how OpenTyrian, Dosbox, and Snes9x work to scale the image. They use different scaling filters to stretch the image and anti-alias it to soften the pixelated graphics so they look smoother and more defined. Now this would be an easy way out to avoid needing to re-render everything in higher resolutions. However this would also need to be modified to work the other way if you intend to make this engine more compatible with mobile devices such as tablets, hand held game consoles, and laptops/netbooks.

I would in terms of overall quality vote to make the higher res/lower res graphics for the machines that would support them. However this little idea would be useful if you have a very specific retro style look required but it would be bad if you want it to look professional on every level. I think you are looking for a professional look at every level however so this may not be a good idea.

Personally I would be needlessly lazy and take the cheap shot Blizzard way out and lock the resolutions to a few sizes so extra code would be unnecessary because the image and screen size could be very explicitly controlled and the game would maintain balance. However it probably would just encourage people to patch their games to remove that and put the old rendering method back so they can snipe people from miles off.

At any rate I think you guys already have a good idea of what you want this game to look like so I don't know if this is what you're looking for.