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pyglet: changing resolution

Unity
Started by Kipple Apr 19, 2008 at 2:59 PM 7 replies 2.5k views
Original Post
Kipple
Kipple
I brought up per-pixel alpha performance in this thread. Kylotan suggested to use pyglet. I looked into it and it looks pretty cool. However, aside from the work involving switching engines, it appears that you cannot change full screen resolution in pyglet. From this page : "Many commercial games offer the opportunity to run at a lower resolution than the user\46#39;s desktop setting." I have a hard time thinking of a commercial game that does not either force you to run at a lower resolution or offer that option. This is superficial, but since we're planning to make our game a commercial product, I am concerned about two things: 1. The way this limitation will affect the player's perception of our game 2. The look of the game running at some random desktop resolution (e.g. 1440x900) It seems to amount to a pretty significant drawback. I have to make the decision to invest the time in changing the code, so I was wondering if anyone had opinions on this particular issue.
Zanthos
Zanthos
Well it's not necessarily a bad thing.. I was always under the impression that games ran in full-screen because they *had* to. What with cheap TFT comings out at much higher resolutions that a few years ago, dual monitor setups are becoming more common, and hardware now can give you the speed you need without it requiring full screen mode.

Why they didn't include it is beyond me, but it's hardly the end of the world :)
Oluseyi
Oluseyi
Quote:
Original post by Kipple
From this page :

"Many commercial games offer the opportunity to run at a lower resolution than the user\46#39;s desktop setting."

From the same page:
Quote:
You could also write the functionality directly into your application -- all the relevant system calls can be made via ctypes in the same way that pyglet currently creates windows.


On to your concerns:
Quote:
1. The way this limitation will affect the player's perception of our game

Most users have their desktops at optimal resolution, which is a sensible default for any game. The reason players sometimes select lower resolutions is because the application is fill-limited at their resolution, however that is unlikely to be the case with a Pyglet-based game.

Quote:
2. The look of the game running at some random desktop resolution (e.g. 1440x900)

Given that your game must possess adequate logic to handle arbitrary monitor dimensions, with the growing prevalence of widescreen, this should be a client-side issue. You should design your game up-front for widescreen and standard formats, and employ a normalized coordinate system internally to insulate you from specific resolutions. Finally, you should provide assets with bitmap text on them in multiple sizes to accomodate ranges of resolutions.

These are real challenges, but they are not insurmountable. And, ultimately...
Quote:
You could also write the functionality directly into your application -- all the relevant system calls can be made via ctypes in the same way that pyglet currently creates windows.
Kipple
Kipple
Oluseyi, those are good points. I am not sure what fill-limited means though.

Thanks for sharing your opinions, guys!
Oluseyi
Oluseyi
Quote:
Original post by Kipple
Oluseyi, those are good points. I am not sure what fill-limited means though.

Limited by how many final pixels the GPU can push, which is obviously affected by how many pixels there are. In other words, lowering resolution doesn't make that much of a difference on modern cards, so unless you're specifically looking to support older rigs...
Kipple
Kipple
Our game is 2D, so I imagine people with older rigs will expect to be supported. :D
Oluseyi
Oluseyi
Quote:
Original post by Kipple
Our game is 2D, so I imagine people with older rigs will expect to be supported. :D

People with older rigs should do just fine running a 2D game at their native/working resolution, though, so it's not a major concern. I've never played a modern 2D game that changes the game resolution - and my girlfriend plays a lot of them, while I watch over her shoulder. They're often full-screen, but they never change the resolution.
Kipple
Kipple
Quote:
Original post by Oluseyi
People with older rigs should do just fine running a 2D game at their native/working resolution, though, so it's not a major concern. I've never played a modern 2D game that changes the game resolution - and my girlfriend plays a lot of them, while I watch over her shoulder. They're often full-screen, but they never change the resolution.


That's true, but I think the games you are referring to have a specific resolution in which they run. Our game will have run in any number of resolutions that players might use, since pyglet scales to desktop resolution and stays there.

However, this just means we have to invest the time towards the end of the project implementing resolution changing in pyglet - if they haven't done it themselves by then.

And again, I'm not saying this is the end of the world, but - if possible - I'd rather not lose a customer because we lack some feature that's common to all mainstream commercial games or because our game looks funky when resized to a strange resolution.
Kylotan
Kylotan
Don't forget that as more and more people start using LCD monitors, graphics at anything but the native resolution look awful. Back in the DirectDraw days, it was ok because games were fill-limited and all monitors were CRT, so changing resolution down to something smaller made sense. Now, there's little point.

If you want to do this, you may find it's just easier to write a wrapper program that saves the current desktop settings, changes the resolution to what you want, launches your pyglet app, and changes things back when it finishes. Or perhaps you can inject that code into your app before pyglet initialises, though I've not checked to see how feasible this would be. Modifying pyglet to do this looks non-trivial, because you'll have to think about how it affects multiple monitors, multiple platforms, etc. Look in the window module of pyglet to see what it's doing.

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