Adobe AIR Development

[PlayDev]

Like other pixel game developers, my apps are coded to a fixed 1024x600 resolution. So what will happen if the Playbook 2 has a higher screen resolution? Will the game automatically scale up, will it run center screen with no scaling, etc, etc. ?

[Andrew99]

It depends on the settings you used when compiling, and on any stage alignment properties you set in your code.

If you used the standard

SWF(height="600", width="1024" ...)] directive in your code, than I believe it will default to centered. If you called, eg. stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT; then you would be aligned with the top left, etc.

[CoCopia]

You want to develop resolution independant apps, if your developing a flex application, this is not something you need to worry about, but if your developing a game, this is important (AS3). You will need to get the resolution of the device your on, and set the game mechanics to work with these dimensions.

[PlayDev]

"You want to develop resolution independant apps.."

For prod apps, sure, no problem. But for a game, I don't see this being possible. Especially when using bitmapped media.

It might be possible to scale the game window to the physical size of the device, assuming all Playbooks keep the same screen aspect ratio, but that would probably be very slow....I'm assuming.  ?

[CoCopia]

No it is very possible, I did it for the iPhone 3G, 3GS, 4 and iPad, dont get me wrong, it gave me a month long migraine, but it is possible even more so now with FlashBuilder 4.5. Basically the iphone 4 has twice the resolution of the 3G and 3GS, so complete different assests where needed for the higher resolution, but these HD graphics could then also be used for the ipad.

If your going to be releasing for Android you have no choice but to take this into consideration, there is a vast array of screens sizes and dpi devices within that channel.

Doubling the size doesn't slow it down, it's done withing the hardware and Flixel uses this to great effect, it's how they get the retro look to their games. 

[PlayDev]

Assuming there will be hardware support for scaling up the frame size, this may not be an issue. As far as "doubling up the res of the assets for hd" that's all good and well as long as the hardware can keep up. And I've seen plenty of ipad "hd" apps appear very laggy.

btw...how would we read the device's resolution? Sounds so easy, but I couldn't figure it out. lol.. Thx. 

[RottenOgre]

flash.system.Capabilities.screenResolutionX and flash.system.Capabilities.screenResolutionY should get you the right information.

Certain apps lend themselves to being resolution independant. Other apps will only be able to scale and keep their aspect ratio. For different aspect ratios you will end up with letterboxing.

[Ebscer]

Personally I am a fan of having seperate builds for different screen resolutions. I know that many people disagree with me, but I have found it to be the most hassel free solution for myself...