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iosopengl-esgame-engineretina-display

Tile size, retina vs non-retina, iPad vs iPhone

Kind of a fun question. I am hoping that is generates a lot of good thinking.

I am in the design, early alpha stage of my current orthogonal game project. I am experimenting with different tile sizes. A few questions as I would like to step off on the right foot.

  1. Should we differentiate tile size (80x80, 32x32 etc) on retina vs. non retina displays, iPhone vs iPad displays?

  2. What is a good recommended tile size that accommodates both the designer and the artist... and why?

Goals:

  • I would like to a clean, crisp visuals no matter the display format. Cartoony, colorful 16bit to 32bit images no matter the display.

  • I would like to keep to a 1024x1024 texture size for my atlas. I am hoping this will give me enough tiles to make the world look good and not crush my tile map system.

  • My current map size is 200 tiles wide x 120 tiles high. The map will be a a low detail (nautically focused) mercator projection of Earth.

Thanks in advance for all the good advice.

E

Solution
    1. I usually try to make my games for iPad screen aspect where I'm making sure that the important elements are in a smaller Safe Zone. And the UI can be anchored on specified distance from the edges. Then for iPhone screen aspect I crop a small portion of the screen and layout the UI accordingly.

    So if you are working in landscape here are the sizes you need to support: 480x320 - iPhone (0.5) 960x640 - iPhone Retina (1) 1024x768 - iPad (1) 2048x1736 - iPad Retina (2)

    The number in brackets indicate the scale. I just like picking iPad (1024x768) for my ingame units. At this point I have all textures in 3 sizes, since I'm using OpenGL I use different mipmaps for each resolution I need. My texture loading function can skip mipmap levels so that on devices that I don't need high res I safe memory and loading time.

    1. Depends if you need to click on individual tiles. In case you need to I'll suggest using 64x64 on iPhone (480x320) 256x256 on iPad Retina (2048x1736). Having all your art in power of 2 is always good. If the size is too large then consider 48x48 for iPhone and 192x192 for iPad Retina. If your game requires you can have smaller tiles but consider having larger active zone around the entities that you have to click (hopefully not every tile will be clickable).