Which Android resolutions are YOU targeting on 2014?

somezombiegm

There are a lot of threads that talk about how to handle the different android resolutions. Most of them said that if you wan't to target more than one size, start with the smallest one and then double it or multiply it by other number to fit the other screens. For example if you start with 960x540 you have to multiply your images by 1.33 to scale it to 1280x720. Others say to work with one resolution and set gideros scaling to stretch or letterbox (but lets not get into the scaling type).

The ones that recommend to work with only one, said to use 800x480. And on my own search on most popular android resolutions to work with, i found that maybe for the previous year, 800x480 would do fine. But while looking at this years released Android phones and upcoming ones, you can see that on the best ones, the smallest most common is 1280x720, while some still have 960x540, but I guess some more accesible phones will still use 800x480.

I was thinking on targeting maybe 800x480 for the base one and maybe 1280x720 also. But those don't have the same ratio and I don't know if multiply it by 1.6 or 1.5 for scaling up. I also notice that 854x480 is a common one, and has a similar ratio to 1280x720, 1920x1080 and even 960x540. So I was considering using that one instead. But I'm still not sure.

So, my question is: What Android resolutions did YOU used with games released this year and what resolutions are you targeting for your upcoming ones? If you wan't to share that, it would be great cause a lot of us new developers who joined Gideros this year will have like a guideline to work with.

EDIT:

I've decide to work with this ones:
- 480x800
- 720x1280
- 1080x1920

tkhnoman

Well, i always do all of the resolution, while considering 3:4 as the minimum height & width.

ar2rsawseen

Here is our screen sizes excel, if anyone is interested

talis

@ar2rsawseen this is a common issue i guess , at least for me when i am doing my project. Can you give one example from your excel.

What should be my base image resolution? (In your excel as far as i understood it should be Iphone 4 retina 640x960 which has 1,1 coef)

Let's suppose i have one base background image and another button image in my project as below properties.

Bg.png = 640x960 (base image coef 1,1)
button.png = 50x70 (base image coef 1,1)

So what should i have to enter to gideros scales and logical dimensions and scale mode?

I know it can vary according to which project you are doing or which platforms you are focusing, but just want to hear your perspective as i installed your games in lots of different devices with different resolutions and all of them seems good for me

ar2rsawseen

@talis basically it means that you should set logical dimensions as:
640x960
And prepare all assets for 640x960 (and respectively 1280x1920 as @2)
And create background as 720x1138 (and respectively 1440x2275.555556 as @2)
images to cover all possible whitespaces (with guaranteed viewport of 640x960)
And scaling Letter box

keszegh

very useful topic.

what i ended up using, after generating a similar table as ar2rsawseen, is 640xsomething and 1280xsomething (for 2x bitmap sizes) and this is scaled always to fit the width of the screen. the menu items e.g. are put on the screen in consideration of the height, with correct spacing between vertically positioned items.

when designing, one has to be careful that the screen has to fit in 640x854 (1:1.33) but the background needs to be 640x1140 for the most extreme ratio. for hd the game has to fit in 1280x1708 and for the bg we need 1280x2280.

i note that my menu design is such that it has to stretch from the left to the right side of the screen, so that's why i've chosen to fit width and do some ~manual positioning for different heights.

loucsam

And this is why I kind of gave up trying to finish my game lol, it is just too hard to follow all this nonsense!

unlying

We make everything for 1280x720.

somezombiegm

@keszegh I'm sorry, let me see if I got it right. You're saying you use 640xsomething and 1280xsomething. And one option could be to set the project's Logical Dimiensions to 640x854, and double your images for the 1280x1708 resolution, in order to fir ar2rs table's minimun ratio (1.333). The big background is for the table's biggest ratio (1.777). Is that right?

Do your games end up having always the same ratio but with a wider background? meaning that the game is centered and has big spaces left and right? (landscape mode). Or do they stretch horizontally?

keszegh

@somezombiegm,
i use portrait mode, so my explanation is for that, although it could apply to landscape similarly.
first, my game has two main parts, the menu pages and the game itself. the game is computed always for the exact screen size, but for most cases this cannot be done. so i now exmplain how my menu is designed. it has some elements. specifically a top one which stretches from left to right, it is 640xsomething bitmap/sprite, and is always scaled and positioned at the top. below, i put some other objects, their size with a fixed scaling as if 640 was the width. and i position them vertically proportional to the actual screen height. (i note that i do all scalings manually, as i need this for the game itself, yet for the menu gideros's 'fit width' scaling setting would be just ok).

maybe it will be easier to see an example, so i attach two screenshots for the two extreme cases.

summarizing, this way basically you just plan everything for a 640x854 screen, but when giving the vertical coordinates of separate items of the game/menu, all these numbers should be multiplied by the number (actual height of the screen/854), and so they will be spaced evenly always in a nice way, as on my attached images.

somezombiegm

@kezsegh Oh ok, you let the automatic scaling scale your actual game and for the menu you work with the device's actual size, so the element distribution will look good on different resolutions. Gotcha.

somezombiegm

@unlying thanks for the on point answer

@ar2rsawseen the table shows a better view on the subject, specially for the ratios part

somezombiegm

@tkhnoman What do you mean with "all of the resolution"?

keszegh

in fact i don't use any automatic scaling, for the game i also do my own scaling, but that's quite specific to my game, so it's not much use to share it here. although it has a fixed info-bar which is positioned with the same approach as the top bar of the menu (fixed 640x something bar and scaled to fit width).

somezombiegm

@keszegh Yeah, I'm trying to leave this topic on actual resolutions used by developers, but considering automatic scaling.

tkhnoman

@somezombiegm
I used my own scaling, just like @keszegh did.
Since when i tried all of the Gideros's auto scaling for portrait, it fails to give best result for easy positioning.

aditya

480x800 with letterbox.

OZApps

Handle the scaling myself, not 100% satisfied with the automatic scaling (on any framework)

phongtt

At Guava7 we make our own game framework on top of Gideros, and autoscaling is one of our customised feature. Each game has several data folder: common for things that can use in any device (sound, music,...), and data (UI layout, sprites,...) for some "standard" resolutions in each folder: 480x800, 1024x600, 1280x720, etc. The framework will detect screen resolution and use the most nearest resolution data.