Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hi

As the title suggests really guys!

I purchased the games today and was just wondering if you can play them @ 1200 x 768?

This is all new to me, I have searched the forum but there does not seem to be a answer.

Thanks in advance.

Lea

No. You can't even change their resolution.

2D games can only be displayed at whatever resolution they were drawn at... That's why most 2D games (Starcraft) or 3D and 2D hybrids (Grim Fandango) are usually stuck at one resolution only (usually 640x480, sometimes 800x600).

Age of Empires 1 and 2 was one of the few 2D games that were drawn in multiple resolutions, and could be changed in the options menu.


The only games that you can change resolution are games that are mostly 3D games, since these are not pre-drawn but rendered in real-time by your computer.

Fixed resolutions have nothing to do with whether they are 2D or 3D. All it has to do with is whether support for multiple resolutions was programmed or not. The reason Fallout, Starcraft, and Grim Fandango are fixed at 640x480 is because they are hard-coded to it, not because they involve 2D graphics.

Fixed resolutions have nothing to do with whether they are 2D or 3D. All it has to do with is whether support for multiple resolutions was programmed or not. The reason Fallout, Starcraft, and Grim Fandango are fixed at 640x480 is because they are hard-coded to it, not because they involve 2D graphics.

No... the reason games like Starcraft are 640x480 is because that is the resolution the game was drawn at. Blizzard could no go back and make Starcraft run in higher resolutions if they wanted to... you can't do anything to it other than stretch it (and apply filters).

The only way to have those games run in higher resolution is to actually go back and repackage the game with higher resolution art assets. (which is what was recently done with Dragon's Lair HD).

A game's resolution has everything to do with whether or not it's 2D or 3D. Trust me I know, I'm a game designer. A 3D game can be rendered in any resolution you tell it (though the textures and other 2D assets will only be as high as the source resolution), but a 2D cannot go higher than the resolution of the source art. Like I said, the only thing you can do to a 2D game (or any 2D image) is stretch it apply filters...

Think about the difference between a game like Half-Life 2 and a movie like Toy Story. They are both computer-rendered 3D. Yet if you buy Half-Life 2 and install it you can play it at any resolution you want... if you buy the DVD of Toy Story you can only view it at 720x480... Sure maybe you have a fancy DVD player that will stretch it to 1920x1080 and apply some effects and filtering, but it's not true 1920x1080. The difference between Toy Story and Half-Life 2 is that Toy Story was already rendered somewhere, while Half-Life 2 is rendered on the fly by your computer. If you use Fraps and a take a video of Half-Life 2, you are forever stuck with whatever resolution the video was encoded at. This is basically the same thing with 2D games... Starcraft is never going to be high resolution because the art on the disc is not high resolution...

>>Blizzard could no go back and make Starcraft run in higher resolutions if they wanted to... you can't do anything to it other than stretch it (and apply filters).
Of course they could. They couldn't magically make the backgrounds and units have higher resolutions, but you could draw MORE of them on the screen at once. And even if it where a game like Grim Fandango, where there's nothing else but the original picture to draw on the screen, you could still stretch it and apply filters. The only difference is that in Grim Fandango, only 4:3 resolutions would work, while in Starcraft, any resolution could work.

>>A game's resolution has everything to do with whether or not it's 2D or 3D. Trust me I know, I'm a game designer.
Apparantly you haven't designed Civilization III, or Total Annihilation, or Worms Armageddon, or C&C Tiberian Sun, or Another World High Res CE, or Red Alert 2. Those are all 2D games with good widescreen support. And if you really are a game designer, or any other kind of software designer, I encourage you to NEVER assume something is impossible just because you can't think of how to do it at first. Think outside the box a little, or you'll find yourself imposing arbitrary limitations on yourself, which is especially bad in a field that is begging for some innovation.

I've played those games. Total Annihilation is of my favorite games... and I'm not saying that it can't be done, it just can't be done in certain games.

TA uses a 3D game engine with a lot of 2D elements, but the way the engine works is still 3D-oriented so you can do the different resolutions correctly.

As for games like Starcraft, I know they can zoom out and show more, but that's not a correct solution. I was speaking of a perfect solution... Increasing area isn't a perfect solution to Starcaft. Also, that would work for the game area, but the GUI would still be stretched, and look ugly at non 4:3 resolutions. Look at what happens in Warcraft III as you increase resolution. Do you get to see more at 1600x1200 than at 640x480? No, what you see on the screen is the same, only at 1600x1200 the image is higher resolution. And you can't do THAT in 2D games without personally recreating the game at each resolution.

Which is what I mean to say. Yes, I know there are ways to have 2D-centric games in different resolutions, but the only perfect way is to redo the game at each resolution. Or include all art assets on the disc in very high resolution and program the game to be able to scale everything down correctly and adapt to the different resolutions correctly... although that would have to be very carefully done...

So anyway, what I was saying wasn't that you can't have 2D games in multiple resolutions, just that you can't have Starcraft or whatever (games already created in a certain way at a certain resolution) in mutliple resolutions. Of course, if we were creating Starcraft right now with the intent of having the game be available in multiple resolutions, we could do it. (of course, the game would end up taking up more space).

>>TA uses a 3D game engine with a lot of 2D elements, but the way the engine works is still 3D-oriented so you can do the different resolutions correctly.
It's no more of a 3D game than Grim Fandango is. Grim Fandango is 3D models superimposed over a 2D background. TA is exactly the same.

>>As for games like Starcraft, I know they can zoom out and show more, but that's not a correct solution. I was speaking of a perfect solution... Increasing area isn't a perfect solution to Starcaft.
Why not? That's exactly what TA does when you use a widescreen res (or even a non-widescreen res, for that matter). That's exactly what ANY game with good widescreen support does when you use a widescreen res, 2D or 3D.

>>Look at what happens in Warcraft III as you increase resolution. Do you get to see more at 1600x1200 than at 640x480? No, what you see on the screen is the same, only at 1600x1200 the image is higher resolution.
But what about widescreen resolutions? If you use a widescreen res on Warcraft III, the image stretches, and everything looks too wide. If you use a widescreen res on Red Alert 2, you see more stuff to the left and right. This is why Red Alert 2 gets a B for widescreen support, and Warcraft III gets a D-.

Well obviously, the viewing area should be different for different aspect ratios, but I was saying that a game like Warcraft was obviously intended by the developers to have the same viewable area regardless of resolution. Yes, if Warcraft III did support widescreen (which is does not), it would have increased horizontal viewing area... but all 16:10 resolutions would still end up having the same viewing area. That's how the game was intended.

Total Annihilation on the other hand, was not intended to be like that. The game was designed from the ground up to cater to whoever has the best stuff. It's just different design philosophies. And for the differing gameplay between TA and Starcraft/Warcraft, it makes sense.


As for the difference between Total Annihilation and Grim Fandango.. it's not exactly the same... the implementation is the same (the old Resident Evil games work like this too), however the artwork in the games is different. TA is an RTS and Grim Fandango and Resident Evil are adventure type games. Grim Fandango is more like a painting you can move around inside. TA on the other hand uses huge gridded maps... therefore you can easily zoom in and out for different resolutions and the game will still look "correct." It's like comparing a painting to a monopoly board or something. You don't have to see the whole monopoly board at once... you can look around the board. But you dont' want to zoom in on a painting and pan around, you want to see the whole thing.

If Grim Fandango had, say 1600x1200 backgrounds and programmed with scalable 3D characters and objects, yes, it would work for any resolution 1600x1200 and less.

Also, Grim Fandango works differently that TA. Grim Fandango is viewed from the sides... TA is top down. TA is like looking down into a shoebox. Everything is 3D, except the bottom which is crazy 2D-3D terrain...

>>As for the difference between Total Annihilation and Grim Fandango.. it's not exactly the same... the implementation is the same (the old Resident Evil games work like this too), however the artwork in the games is different.
That's aside the point. You said that TA used a 3D game engine, and that's the reason why multiple resolutions is possible. My point is that the engine is primarily a 2D one. If the game were 100% 2D, multiple resolutions would still work exactly the same way. I was never trying to say that Grim Fandango could possibly behave the same way TA does. But I am trying to say that your claim that you can't have multiple resolutions in 2D games is erroneous. And frankly, I think that at the time you said that, the idea of zooming out didn't cross your mind (that's exactly what Age of Empires II does, and I think you just assumed that AOE2 had high res artwork). The TC wasn't asking about a specific arbitrary solution that involves magically making Fallout have higher res artwork than it was ever drawn at.