I am planning to create a 2D side scrolling action/adventure demo in the near future (which will eventually turn into a full featured game). I want to include paralax scrolling and some other special effects, but for the most part nothing too intense, calculation wise. Also I don''t plan on using a screen size bigger then 320x240. So my questions is... which is better, using a windowed mode or full screen mode? and why choose one over the other? I''m kinda leaning toward using a windowed mode, simply because the graphics will look nicer at 320x240 on the average windows user''s desktop (640x480 or 800x600). If I end up using a full screen mode, I assume my 320x240 will be streched to fit, and might look blocky afterwards. I know games like Earthworm Jim and Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure used a windowed mode and they seemed to work out fine. I plan to program the entire game in Delphi 5.0 (if that makes a difference). Any advice anyone could give would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

I would suggest that the average user''s desktop is a lot larger than 640x480 or even 800x600. 1024x768 would be the average these days.

Myself, I use 1280x960 on a 17" here at work because a) 1280 is the highest horizontal resolution this TNT2 M64 will do, and b) it keeps the same 4:3 ratio as 640x480, 800x600, where 1280x1024 does not. At home I use 1600x1200 on a 19". 320x240 would be far too small for a windowed application. Perhaps an option to double the pixels would be handy. Very easy to do because Blt can stretch the image for you. 320x240 in full-screen is not too bad. Nearly every game up till the mid-90''s used 320x240 in full-screen. Sure they were blocky, but with smart graphic design they still looked damned good.

There is very little difference to making a game run in windowed or full-screen, so why not support both? For windowed mode, you create and attach a clipper to the primary surface and use Blt instead of Flip. Perhaps some conversions at load-time to get the graphics in the correct format for the desktop, but that''s about it. I wrote my own DirectX wrapper classes in Delphi 5 that handle all this for me. I just set one property (set the Exclusive property to True for full-screen or False for windowed) before initialising the screen mode and it does all the work for me. Using Delphi 5 is no problem and makes no difference at all.

Steve ''Sly'' Williams  Code Monkey  Krome Studios

I would guess the "average user desktop resolution" to be closer to 800x600-1024x768 these days. And the higher-res modes like 1600x1200 and 1400x1050 are becoming more common every day. So keep that in mind. 320x240 is shrinking...

As for windowed vs full screen...use the one that works best for what you want. One advantage of windowed mode is that people can play your game at work or as a quickie-time-killer while waiting for their printout to finish.

Ultimately, it''s your decision.


DavidRM
Samu Games

Maybe 640x480 would be more appropriate then. Now that I think about it 320x240 does seem kinda small. My initial reasoning behind using 320x240 was it would keep all my images rather small, thus the load times would be quicker. But I can see how someone with a large desktop resolution would have to infact resize just to play my game in windowed mode (which obviously would be an inconvienence). Now I have another question. Is it easier to implement both Windowed and Full Screen modes at the same time? or is adding one or the other at a later time just as easy. Also what graphics library would be best adept to handle such work. I currently am using FastGraph, would DirectX be easier? or maybe OpenGL?

640x480 is still pretty small, people would rather have a full sized game than a little window. Average is 1024x768 I think, with maybe a quarter using lower and a quarter using higher. However I really think fullscreen is the way to go. For one thing resolution isn''t an issue, when you go fullscreen you get to set the resolution to whatever you want. So go ahead and make it 640x480, but only if you are going fullscreen. I heard fullscreen runs faster too which makes sense. It also looks more professional. Actually a lot of people do have 640x480. These people of course are the people who don''t know how to change resolution (probably don''t know what it is either) and don''t play games other than solitaire. You can safely ignore these people.

TheCounter.Com statistics (January 2001, a little outdated but still important).

800x600 154460354 (54%)
1024x768 84574806 (30%)
640x480 21340104 (7%)
1280x1024 7957872 (2%)
1152x864 7304411 (2%)
Unknown 4711995 (1%)
1600x1200 1155087 (0%)

As in a previous post, I really think that the user should be able to switch between fullscreen and windowed modes, just like the user should be able to reconfigure controls, etc. Then you please everyone, not just those that want full or those that want windowed.

I highly suggest supporting both, so that you can test it in windowed (it is preferable over having to wait for your monitor to change resolutions and color depths just to test a small change to your program) and let the user have choice.

Well, if you end up going with OpenGL (and probably with DirectX also, I''m not an expert with DX8 though) making your program handle fullscreen and windowed at the same time is pretty easy. I know that Nehe''s OpenGL framework supports both (though I modified it a little to support fullscreen more "gracefully"), and the DirectX API might have some examples of both, you might want to check it also.

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