Designing an Android game with different aspect ratios in mind.

Karriz

Hi, I hope that somebody who's more familiar with different Android devices could help me out.

My Xperia U has hardware buttons and 854x480 resolution so I've been developing with that in mind. Now, making separate APKs for different aspect ratios would be fairly easy.

However, I'm not sure if the on-screen buttons (home, menu, back) work in the new Android devices. Do they take up screen space even in full screen applications such as games? Should I take this into account when setting up the resolution?

If the on-screen buttons are hidden, should I add an "exit" button to the game menu so that the user can go back to home screen?

ar2rsawseen

@Karriz those devices, that do not have hardware buttons, have always software bar with buttons on the screen, no matter the app, and in Gideros they are not part of the screen, so you don't have to take them into account

Karriz

Okay, but one thing still confuses me: 800x480 is said to be the most common Android resolution. Is this with the button bar, or without it?

ar2rsawseen

hmm, unfortunately I think that provided screen resolution is with the bar, so provided dimensions in which you can operate will be lesser.
But with the Gideros Auto scaling it should not be such a problem

OZApps

The worst on screen buttons are with the Kindle Fire (Gen 1). They stick out on the screen like a sore.

ArtLeeApps

Love the way Gideros "fits" all screen sizes. Im learning that i need to make my default graphics large and high res, so it looks ok on big screens and downsizes to little ones
with Native android, you have to run the graphics through graphic tools to get 4 sizes, which is painful.

Karriz

The only problem with autoscaling is that it shows the black bars around the screen if aspect ratio is not right, which I'd like to avoid. I was thinking about doing separate 800x480 and 854x480 versions of the apk, but since the button bar changes the usable aspect ratio to something unknown, I probably should just stick with one version.

Thanks for answering!

ar2rsawseen

@Karriz check out this post for an idea of how to overcome this:
http://www.giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/comment/13692#Comment_13692

somezombiegm

@ar2rsawseen You say that we don't need to take the software bar into accout. But I set the Logical Dimensions to 720x1080, with Scale Mode = Letterbox, and when i test it on the emulator with the same resolution it looks good, with no bars at the top and bottom or at the sides.

Then when I test it on a Sony Xperia T (720x1080 also) it shows a top and bottom black bar, with the software bar at the right side (On Landscape mode). It seems as if the software bar was interfering with the game's width, and it loses width so the game will fit, ending up with the mentioned top and bottom black bars. Any thoughts on that? :-/

ar2rsawseen

@somezombiegm do you change your application background to black?
Because I'd say what you are referring to are called whitespaces, and yes you need to create larger backgrounds to cover them

somezombiegm

@ar2rsawseen yes, I change my background to black. And I just wanted to see if the size of the bar really interfered with the game size.