Hi all, Just hoping you guys could help me. I'm pretty new to all this game stuff so I don't know very much. Anyways, I'm creating some in game graphics for a game I'm currently working on. I don't mean like characters, or levels or anything 3D, but more what is overlayed on the screen - 2D elements like menus, power bars, etc. As the game will be played at different resolutions, will I need to make a different set of graphics for all those resolutions or just use one that is scaled up or down depending on what the user's settings are? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

well, i suppose it really depends on the API u are using for the rendering. pure bitmap/raster based rendering usually are unit-dependent. Thus, when resolution changes, u either use a diff set of images OR u perform some brute scaling.

if u're using more common API's such as direct3d or opengl (assuming it is a 3d-accelerated application), then chances are u only need one copy of the images. but to wat resolution u create this is entirely up to your applications 'unit' system.

in a 3d view system, the viewport dimensions and the projection parameters are mutually exclusive. the viewport defines the physical screen dimensions of the render area, and THIS will be resolution dependent (i think). but the projection is mapped within this viewport, and in a viewport of 800x600, u can happily be rendering 10-units from side to side. i mean 10 as in when specifying coordinates, the left edge when defining vertices is 0, and the right being 10.

in such a scenario, the scaling is handled by the API itself. the resolution will be meaningless when they are above 640x480 because the images will be filtered anyway. so the best bet is, make the art based on the resolution that u consider the most ideal. Ideal being the best tradeoff between detail vs size. Also, do note that using images in an accelerated environment will require consideration of hardware limitations. If u create images of high resolution, dont expect ur 1024x768 background texture (for instance) to work on older graphics cards unless u split it up into smaller portions at load time.

er.. i think i'm going off track. i better stop before i stop making anymore sense :P

Thanks, that helped quite a bit.