Hires & hidpi explanation / help

[8bitdna]

Hi Guys,

I'm pretty new to Panda 2 after purchasing a licence recently and have been having a lot of fun so far, awesome engine 

I'm wondering if I can get a little bit of help with the system class attributes 'hires' and 'hidpi'?

Thanks to Tom Vencels fantastic video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiBnUgylJEY&lc=z22bs1azftrhef3ciacdp4320lswfsnhmwgvimzealpw03c010c.1528017727658162 I think I have a basic understanding of whats going on.  Hires essentially allows for assets to be swapped in using higher (or lower) resolution versions that match better for the device being run on based on the 'logical' game size.  A little dig into the Panda 2 source code tells me that it looks for assets based on multiples of 2 and I also see what Hires scale things are running at currently by using the debug panel.  Please correct me if I'm wrong!

Hidpi I'm a little more confused about.  This is to help with displays that have super high pixel densities?  So if the my game is running on one of those displays with it switched off it will try and swap in a higher resolution asset?  Switched on it won't?  Can anyone describe when its good to have this switched off and when its good to be switched on please?

@enpu Having something in the docs would be great to explain some things like this, I didn't realise Panda 2 had builtin support for dynamic resolution asset management until I stumbled on Tom's vids  

Cheers Folks

Pete

[Ninjadoodle]

Hi @8bitdna - Happy you found my vid useful  

I'll try to explain the 'hidpi' setting a little more. Many new monitors have very high resolutions (2k, 4k etc.). There are however, still a lot of 1080p screens floating around.

With high resolution monitors, there will usually be a setting in your OS that will 'zoom in' , otherwise the icons that were designed for 1080p screens will appear very small. The same happens with websites etc.

When 'zoomed in' normally the same number of pixels will be rendered as if zoomed out. If however, you have the 'hidpi' setting enabled, it will use all the pixels available on the monitor, instead of just magnifying the canvas.

I don't really see a reason to have 'hidpi' turned off, apart from maybe some performance gains on heavy games.

As far as 'hires' goes, I think you pretty much have it down!

PS. I agree that it would be very useful to have an official tutorial on this / some more detailed documentation, for any Panda newcomers

Hope this helps!

Tom "Ninjadoodle" Vencel

[enpu]

 

Small addition to what @Ninjadoodle explained.

hidpi setting affects any screen that has pixel ratio more than 1 (mobile, desktop etc)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/devicePixelRatio

So the setting just scales the canvas to match the screens physical pixels. And you are right, there is really no point to have hidpi turned off, so maybe i should change it's default value to true.

I added this subject to my tutorials todo-list

[8bitdna]

Thanks Guys,

Appreciate the explanation/s.  Hope you don't mind the questions.

Getting up to speed with JS as well which is helping.  I come from a web dev background of C# and PHP mainly, never did much frontend work, a bit of jQuery here and there if that counts.

I do love the whole instant nature of Panda 2's workflow, keep finding myself pressing reload from the IDE and watching my monitor and mobile devices refresh for no reason   Xbox support is awesome, will have a play with that soon as well.

Cheers

[Ninjadoodle]

@8bitdna - No problem, and honestly - I think you will pick this up in no time.

Sure, there are a whole bunch of things I can't do yet, (I'll slowly increase the complexity of my projects lol), but once you get the basics and how everything fits together, Panda is incredibly easy to use!

I have a current subscription to Construct 3, which is a very good tool, and super easy, but I'm not using it very much - nothing beats the Panda 2 workflow and flexibility!