I am looking to port an iOS Sprite Kit game to OS X. I'd like to provide the sharpest image quality possible. Since iOS device support only a handful of resolutions and I believe 3 aspect ratios this is done fairly easily by providing different sprite sheets, backgrounds, etc. based on the device.
I'm unable to find what the best practices are for the Window sizes in OS X. I know where and how to set the default and the constraints. I'm just not clear on what I should default the resolution to and as a result, what size images to include.
I am aware that my graphic will scale upon the window resizing, I just want the game's element's to look their best regardless of window size.
I was thinking of just looking up Apple highest resolution monitor and starting there, but wanted to ask first if there was a generally accepted approach to this before going that route.
I'm aware that this is a fairly basic question, but I have yet to find a reasonably articulated approach. Please forgive me in advance if there is something available that I overlooked, it was not for lack of trying.
Thank you.
This question is related to
sprite-kit
You should target the smallest, not the largest, supported pixel resolution by the devices your app can run on.
Say if there's an actual Mac computer that can run OS X 10.9 and has a native screen resolution of only 1280x720 then that's the resolution you should focus on. Any higher and your game won't correctly run on this device and you could as well remove that device from your supported devices list.
You can rely on upscaling to match larger screen sizes, but you can't rely on downscaling to preserve possibly important image details such as text or smaller game objects.
The next most important step is to pick a fitting aspect ratio, be it 4:3 or 16:9 or 16:10, that ideally is the native aspect ratio on most of the supported devices. Make sure your game only scales to fit on devices with a different aspect ratio.
You could scale to fill but then you must ensure that on all devices the cropped areas will not negatively impact gameplay or the use of the app in general (ie text or buttons outside the visible screen area). This will be harder to test as you'd actually have to have one of those devices or create a custom build that crops the view accordingly.
Alternatively you can design multiple versions of your game for specific and very common screen resolutions to provide the best game experience from 13" through 27" displays. Optimized designs for iMac (desktop) and a Macbook (notebook) devices make the most sense, it'll be harder to justify making optimized versions for 13" and 15" plus 21" and 27" screens.
But of course this depends a lot on the game. For example a tile-based world game could simply provide a larger viewing area onto the world on larger screen resolutions rather than scaling the view up. Provided that this does not alter gameplay, like giving the player an unfair advantage (specifically in multiplayer).
You should provide @2x images for the Retina Macbook Pro and future Retina Macs.
Source: Stackoverflow.com