Tuesday 6 December 2011

Different resolutions and fullscreen support

This week I've made the game work in fullscreen mode and adapt to various display resolutions. The game figures the player's display resolution on it's own, so there is no need for setting it in the options by yourself.

Do you know that annoying feeling when you have to alt-tab out of a fullscreened game for some reason and then the computer tries to minimize your game and the whole thing freezes/crashes or just doesn't want to minimize, leaving you with a half displayed task bar and a black screen, which doesn't go away even though you are now frantically clicking everywhere and cursing at your computer? Oh, I bet it gives you nightmares at night. I bet it makes you want to buy a machete and single-handedly murder every single living being in the universe. Or maybe that is just me. But there is a new way we do things now, to make this recurring nightmare less recurring. I've first seen this technique used in an MMORPG named Vindictus. What you do is, instead of a fullscreen setting, you use a window, place it into the upper left corner of the screen, stretch it to the size of the display resolution, and hide it's edges and buttons. What you get is a picture that looks fullscreen but is actually a window. And  if you alt-tab it it doesn't minimize. So let's say you just remembered you need to check your mail but your in the middle of a game. Well just pause that puppy and give it an alt-tab, check that mail and get right back to playing. The computer won't even lag for a second.

The game now looks like this on my 1600x900 screen:

Yes I know, it's not the regular fullscreen everyone would expect. But since the game is done with sprites, resizing it causes some problems, so this is the best I can do for now. The game is always 1024x768 big, but in fullscreen mode it adds a nice blackness to isolate it form the view of your desktop. If this bothers you, there is always the windowed mode.

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