How important is resolution?

[exer]

I've been working on a game using DAZ for a little over a year now, and when I started, 720p was still a fairly common resolution. These days, it seems like I'm seeing more 1080p games.

I'm nearing completion of my initial build, but my renders are 720. Many of the scenes I rendered in 1080 at 7k first, and then scaled them down after editing. So I could use the higher renders, but they wouldn't be quite as high quality. And then I'd have to re-render the ones that I don't have at 1080 again. My computer isn't great, so most high quality renders take about a day. So it would be a month or two worth of work to redo. And I'm just not sure it's worth it.

So I was wondering, how important is it that a game be 1080 instead of 720? Do people really care that much, and is it worth being set back a month or two to redo everything?

 

[Loqic]

I rarely see people complaining about it. There are a lot of people playing these games with older pc's, laptops and tablets that will not notice the difference that much with sub 24" screens. Maybe it becomes a different story with larger screens.
As far as I've seen is that a smaller file size is more preferred then a high resolution game.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I too work with 720, if not to accommodate the lower end users, it is atleast a style choice. I say style because the art goal of my game is meant to work with 720 resolution because I want to make a game that seems a bit more retro. many of teh games I play aren't even 720 but more like 640 if you count the RPGmaker games.

 

[exer]

Okay, it doesn't seem like much of an issue then. I wont worry about it. Thanks!

 

[polywog]

 

[Synx]

I wouldn't redo anything you have already made. That would be a waste of time honestly.

You can just switch to 1080p rendering for the next update if you think it will really matter. It's not uncommen for games to have improved renders with a new update. When (or if) you get a better PC, you can always chose to rerender your first scenes in one of the updates.

 

[Marshall 77]

What about in phone does it matter 720 or 1080?

 

[MissFortune]

What about in phone does it matter 720 or 1080?

Holy necro.

But short answer is that it depends on the phone. A top smartphone like a Note 24 might prefer 1080 as you're starting to push the PPI of a phone at 720. But if you're on anything a couple years old, 720 should be fine.

 

[Marshall 77]

T

Holy necro.

But short answer is that it depends on the phone. A top smartphone like a Note 24 might prefer 1080 as you're starting to push the PPI of a phone at 720. But if you're on anything a couple years old, 720 should be fine.

Thanks for your reply

 

[GNVE]

Though I would advocate that nowadays it is best to start a project an 1080 if at all possible. Seeing as development may take years and more and more people are starting to switch over to higher resolution displays.

 

[Turning Tricks]

Renpy automatically resizes images so you should work in the highest resolution you expect to use. AFAIK, 1080p still edges out 4K as the most common resolution (at least on PC's) .

On mobile devices, you probably never need to go higher then working in 1080p. You have to remember, they use screens with a very high dpi so even lower resolutions look nice to the user. But if you take a 1080p game and put it up on a monster 75" TV, you'll notice the difference big time.

Personally, I try to do all my raw images in 4K and then downsize them to 1080 for my game build. Unless I am working in a hurry and then I'll render directly in 1080p for time-saving. I learned an adage a long time ago, when I did some design courses in college, that it's best to "Work Large, Save Small". Going from high-res to lower res maintains quality. You can't go the other way without losing quality, even with devices that "up-convert".

 

[osanaiko]

Renpy automatically resizes images so you should work in the highest resolution you expect to use.

That's true, but when specifically talking about phone versions of renpy games, you need to consider the total size of all the images. 1280x720 -> 3840x2160 is more than 8 times the raw data. Android app data size caps out at 2GB of data. Not worth it for the marginal (or zero depending on screen size/PPI) benefit on that platform.

Now if you are making PC and phone versions, and you can build yourself an asset pipeline that creates both resolutions of image and packages them correctly depending on target, then sure, swing for the fences with the initial renders.

 

[GNVE]

That's true, but when specifically talking about phone versions of renpy games, you need to consider the total size of all the images. 1280x720 -> 3840x2160 is more than 8 times the raw data. Android app data size caps out at 2GB of data. Not worth it for the marginal (or zero depending on screen size/PPI) benefit on that platform.

Now if you are making PC and phone versions, and you can build yourself an asset pipeline that creates both resolutions of image and packages them correctly depending on target, then sure, swing for the fences with the initial renders.

More important then resolution is compression. A 1080p .png is larger then a 4k jpeg. And a highly compressed 4K jpeg could be a similar or smaller size then a 1080p jpeg that is hardly compressed. For me a service like tinypng (also for webp, jpeg and others) works great to reduce file size by something like 1/3 that as far as I can see is lossless.

 

[osanaiko]

well, yes, of course it is a base assumption that compression will be used. There's at least a 10x reduction in size from full size raw images. but even then, 1000s of images at ~200kb each will soon reach the mobile app size limit.

 

[GNVE]

well, yes, of course it is a base assumption that compression will be used. There's at least a 10x reduction in size from full size raw images. but even then, 1000s of images at ~200kb each will soon reach the mobile app size limit.

Yes true but it is often overlooked. Those files might be more like 2-3 MB often. That means you can pack 10x less story in an android version.