Resolution independence - resize on the fly or ship all sizes?
- by RecursiveCall
My game relies heavily on textures of various sizes with some being full-screen. The game is targeted for multiple resolutions. I found that resizing textures (downsizing) works quite well for this game’s art type (it’s not Pixel Art or anything like that). I asked my artist to ensure that all textures at the edges of the screen to be created in such a way that they can safely “overflow” off screen; this means that aspect ratio is not an issue.
So with no aspect ratio issues, I figured that I would simply ask my artist to create assets in very high resolution, and then resize them down to the appropriate screen resolution. The question is, when and how do I do that?
Do I pre-resize everything to common resolutions in Photoshop and package all assets in the final product (increasing the size download that the user has to deal with) and then select the appropriate asset based on the detected resolution? Or do I ship with the largest set of Textures, detect the resolution on load, set a render target and draw all downsized assets to it and use that? Or for the latter, do I use some sort of a CPU-sided algorithm to resize on game load?
