Standard screen resolution for PC/Mac game?

What screen resolution should I set for a PC/Mac game? and how do you set that up within Unity?

 

You don't set resolutions; that's up to the user. Make sure your game works properly with any resolution and aspect ratio.

--Eric

 

But what about when you're designing your graphics you have to have a resolution in mind, so I wondered what the standard would be for a PC/Mac game. I should also add it's for a 2D game.

 

If you choose a fixed resolution, you will certainly make it impossible for some portion of the market to play the game, or otherwise their screen will open stretched or in some other resolution or as a box in the corner or not at all. e.g. if you went for 1280x800, you've now made a problem for 1280x720 users. You need to do research on how many people have a given resolution and how you might degrade if they don't.

 

You wouldn't normally design with any particular resolution in mind. Unity is a 3D engine (even with "2D" graphics) and everything gets scaled. If you're going for an old-school pixel art game, then use point filtering for the textures; everything will still get scaled to the selected resolution. (Example, where selecting full-screen switches to whatever resolution the user's desktop is running at.) 1920x1080 is a fairly common resolution, but your game should work on anything, including 4K, ultra-wide 2:1, and the old 4:3. If different aspect ratios would significantly change the gameplay, then you can use this.

--Eric

 

Only 12% of windows users have 1920x1080 resolution. http://stats.unity3d.com/web/display-win.html

Shooting for 768 as the height (e.g. mapping your coordinate system to that) might not be a bad idea, for development.

Pixel filtering is kind of nasty as an upscaling/downscaling method, though.. it will completely chop out certain pixels or double some and not others, and you especially can't do realtime zoom or rotate without shimmering and flickering artefacts. Bilinear works smoother if you don't mind the lack of crispiness.

You can shoot for a specific resolution with a specific set of graphics designed to look perfect at that resolution, but you're going to then need another set (or more) for other common resolutions. Which turns into a lot of work.

 

You mean, only 12% of Windows users running web players. For standalones, which is what this topic is presumably targeting, it's double that and is the most common resolution (and is becoming increasingly more common). I didn't pick it for no reason.

--Eric

 

This will be a standalone game for PC and Mac. I found this which has useful info on pixel art games. I don't mind artifacts on sprites when they are rotating/zooming but the background is just going to scroll horizontally left/right.

I'm coming from a iOS background, and with that you pretty much settle on a middle ground resolution and then everything is scaled up or down according to the devices the games on. So I might go for a similar approach.

But do many Unity games detect the resolution they are running on and then load in a different set of graphics accordingly? or they just rely upon scaling?

 

Maybe so, Eric5h5m but you just recommended a resolution that only 25% of users can access. Fine to target that if it can degrade also, but if its the only res to target, surely a lower-res that can upscale will be more widely supported. e.g. 1280x720 may be supported by that same user base, being combined a much bigger audience.

 

You might want to re-read my posts. I'm kind of doing the opposite of saying that a game should only run at 1920x1080.

--Eric

 

I haven't had to deal with large differences in resolution, but I would imagine keeping sets of graphics for Retina and non-Retina is the primary way to go with everything else being scaled for. At the very least for those resources that degrade poorly when scaled.

Other platforms may eventually have a similar situation when 4K/5K monitors become easily affordable.

 

One source for statistics on gamer hardware and software, including screen resolutions, which is very interesting for developers of stand-alone PC games, is this one:
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

For instance, the stats from December 2014 show that 32.94% of (edit: a subset of) Steam users use a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080, while 26.88% use 1366 x 768, and no other screen resolution (for single monitor desktop setups) even makes it into the double digits.

Edit: I have to correct myself. These stats are not of ALL Steam users, but of random Steam users who have been selected and prompted to (voluntarily) submit hardware & software data to the survey.

 

I prefer to go with just resolution and put up with whatever scaling issues appear, so it would be better to set the source graphics to 1920x1080 and then on smaller rex monitors scaling down would be better? rather than doing it the other way around?

 

You will mind the artifacts when multiple reviewers or players comment negatively about that being a big issue for them.

Agree with @superpig and @Eric5h5 It's bests practice to develop graphic assets for the largest aspect ratio you are targeting and then - if needed - beyond what Unity provides - scale down accordingly.

Though I've heard some talk about developing at a smaller resolution when developing 2D pixel art games. I can't remember which game it was. Maybe Bro-Force?

 

Broforce looks great. I'm also curious how they did those graphics, whether they did them at a small resolution and scaled them up and then imported them at the larger scale or if they let Unity do the scaling up.

 

If you want to make a 2D pixel art game that is 100% pixel perfect then you really have to go for a fixed resolution. I'm doing that for my game and all is fine

 

What do you mean by fixed resolution? I thought that wasn't really possible with Unity? it just does it's own thing and scales up or down according to what it's being shown on?

 

Well I'm making a game for Android and I can just say Screen.SetResolution(width, height) with whatever values I want (doesn't need to be a common resolution) and Android will stretch that resolution to fit the screen (I do some additional calculations to keep the aspect ratio correct). This is what my game looks like btw:

 

Ah I see what you mean. Nice looking game

What method are you using to place the tiles? a tile editor?

 

Yeah, that's true On PC I do integer scaling. The native resolution of my game is 320x180 (can be scaled to 640x360, 960x540, 1280x720, 1600x900 and 1920x1080) When it's a different resolution I just set the camera size to the closest integer scaling and adjust the camera rect. I could design some kind of graphical border to show instead of the black. I'm just doing this to keep the retro feel of old games, for other (more modern) 2D games, all this isn't necessary of course

 

Hello, I am still newbie for pixel art resolution. If I have a plan make 2d game platformer with pixel art. How I can setup a map size for level 1 so can be scaled to 4:3, 16:9, and 16:10?