Displaysize Madness

First, I’d like to intoduce me to the board, so Hi everone! :slight_smile:
I’ve been reading a while here and its always been very interesting.

Well, currenly I am writing a little j2ME game, it will be kinda like Tetris, with some extra feature like bombs and stuff like that. Right now I’ve done a little bit coding on the project so far, but I’m still working on the overall concept. While I have the gameplay pretty much planned out, I figuered out that the various types of displays seems to be a problem.
I heavely rely on images & sprites, so my first approach was to find out the common displaysizes, then scale the images and the game accordantly, and provide a seperate *.jar-file for each type of display. That way, the game would always fit the current phone and look good.

But doing some research on nokia.com I found they use 128x128, 128x160, 176x208, 208x208, 240x320, 320x240 and 352x416 displays for their cell phones… and thats just the nokia ones. So, to support all Nokia phones, I would have to create 7 different versions of the same application, scaling all images and adjusting the positions. That kinda seems like a lot of work to me, especially if there are even more types of displays out there, so I start to wonder if this really is the right approach.

Is there a better way to handle this? Maybe create the game small, and then just centering it on big screens? But I guess that wouldnt look that good… so what do YOU guys do?

Hi :wink:

The best way is to customise for each handset - write a tool which takes a device-specific script and scales down top quality artwork (say 640x640) to the size of the individual target device. Take a look at Ant (http://ant.apache.org/). It’s what the professionals use…

i used to just ‘tut’ a lot. now i pretend every handset has SVG. but for real projects i use the 3d api, or have everything download precompled to the correct sized graphics (serverside)- as SimonH says. i did look into scaling images down for lots of handsets, but ran into memory problems for lesser powerful devices (also space problems). screenress problems are going to grow as handsets move into HD screens, i feel it will be upto the developer for a long time to sort there scaling, and handsets are moving a lot faster then any other display device at the moment. but hey! welcome to the hassles of mobile development- one of many :slight_smile:

SimonH is 100% correct.
Also automatic scaling might leave you with images that look ugly.

Best thing would be to grab a mid-range phone and develop on that, but keep performance and low memory usage in mind. Really get those images down. I use gimp to get them near optimal and then let png-crush brute-force over them.

Some of the smaller devices have memory limits you will have to work around as well