By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Teddy on 07 March 2015
Edit Thread
sc94597 said:
Teddy said:
sc94597 said:

How does it make the programming easier and faster? If I programmed a game and ran it at 480p on one platform and 720p on another, the cost of development doesn't change. In fact, we see this on open-platforms like Android, and IOS all the time. The games run at the resolution native to your screen (in fact you need third party apps to make them run less if you want.)  In fact, in many cases a higher resolution might LOWER development costs, because you don't have to think of ways to make up for low image quality, such as say text-scaling or showing a feature in a game that would otherwise be obscured by the low image quality.  The only thing a higher resolution output would affect is what GPU you need to put into the console to run the visuals you want to run at said resolution. That is a hardware cost, not a software one. The reason why development costs increased is that games became more complex to produce and software technique had to be discovered. This has only so much to do with resolution in as much that resolution was a burden before and limited how complex games could be and now it is large enough that it isn't. 


Because less pixels means design of graphics easier, when you used more pixels it makes design longer and you put in more detail, you woild know this if you have designed and programed a game, if you did then the 720p would just be a scale up by the hardware and therefore be blurry and blocky. Scale up an 8 bit game 320x200 pixel graphics to 1080p and see what I mean. Like if you make a standard television SD and display it on HD 1080p scaled up looks like rubbish. Anyway you would know this if you programmed games and graphics so I am calling BS on you. 8 bit games on Commodore 64 were often made by one person, today you need a team of people as big as any film and often a lot longer in developement. Design of graphics is a lot more and a team is needed of artists, it is not a case of doing an 8bit graphics and just allowing the hardware to somehow magically transform that 8bit pixel block into a fully rendered quality to be displayed in 1080p. I know this is an extreme example but that's how you will understand how wrong you are.

I don't develop games, but I do program a lot (computational physics) and understand how it works. I call bullshit on you. Unless the texture resolution is very low, you  don't have to touch the original game, and all you have to do is put a line of code that increases the render resolution, if your engine doesn't already have that setting, not upscale it. Otherwise you would have to develop the same game for different resoution displays, if what you say were true. Or things like emulators that render games at higher resolutions would not exist. The only thing a higher resolution (by itself) makes harder is optimization, because more pixels <=> more hardware power. It isn't the pixel count that has made dev teams explode in size. It is the plethora of other advancements that come with a less limiting resolution. The higher the resolution, the more likely a developer needs better textures, more geometry, more assets to fill up the screen, etc to compete. On a handheld this isn't an issue, because games are expected to have low-medium budgets. 

You have no idea, you can scale down a game and it will look good if you designed it at high resolution but the other way around it will look rubbish, like if  you played a old game for an old console through virtual console. If you designed game at 420p it is not going to magically look good at 1080p. I am experience programmer since Commodore Vic20 and 64 days and PCs .You also masively contradicted youself on this post compared to your last lime you have no idea what you are talking about and even echoed some of my opinions about that in your own way while still maintaining your original premise. Games now take longer to develope and costs are higher costs. Your computational physics experience will not help you understand it thats why I called BS on your programming skills,   you'll have to accept that I and others you were arguing with are right with this. I doubt any of this will get through to you and be like talking to the brick wall so I'll call it quits believe what  you want. The only way I can explain this if you have a low resolution image of say the night sky with stars etc you are going to be able to put more detail in there beyond the pixel image ,you can use filters and algorithms etc to help but it is not going to put in more detailed resolution to your low res image sure the resolution of the image goes up as scaled but there is not any more detail, you can smooth with aa and stuff but no more detail.