Screenshots must be 960 by 640

[Omadan]

Hey all, just got informed by Apple that iOS game screenshots must now be at high res 960,640 and no longer 480,320. Has anyone heard about this? And does this mean that whole game has to be 960,640 or just the submitted screenshots. If someone knows I'd really like to hear about this. Thanks a lot.

[Ian Price]

I got the email too.

It's just the screenshots. It can't be the whole game, as Apple still supports older devices that don't support these resolutions. Although I suspect that these won't be supported for much longer...

Time for me to get a new iPod I think (once the new versions are released).

[spacefractal]

Yep, Retina Graphics is now required by that means in my throught. Its not just about screenshots, elsewise its would not give any means at all. Apple want to force developers to update thier apps to support Retina, since its have been around long time now.

Also 3gs is the last supported device, that still have 480x320 resoulution. But its might soon got discounted and only get limited support (example all ios5 updates). When that device is out of the market, then there is simply no more reason to support 480x320 at all, other than supporting old devices.

So my think, yes its all updates is required to support Retina, so gonna update your graphics to support that!

Look more here:
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/02/07/apple-now-requiring-iphone-developers-to-submit-retina-screenshots/

PS. My game support any resolutions from 320x240 all up to iPad 3 resolution (2048x1536 i except), so I wont have that problem at all.

[okee]

Is it possible to compile your app to support all devices ?, from 1G up to the latest versions.

[spicypixel]

So effectively you could open an Apple Dev account with your 3GS and find you have to buy a new phone to test your apps. Great! Especially now I'm halfway through development of a game FFS.

[Ian Price]

So effectively you could open an Apple Dev account with your 3GS and find you have to buy a new phone to test your apps. Great! Especially now I'm halfway through development of a game FFS.

That's Apple for you. Something they supported yesterday is no longer even tolerated today. Gotta love Apple.

[Crivens]

I got that message even though I did submit retina iPhone screenshots (only yesterday for Snake Revolutions). Interestingly when you download the images from iTunes on a PC the images are back to 320x480 and even have these dimensions in the filenames. Strange...

As for testing, just make sure you use one of the methods for generic screen sizes. I posted one ages ago that resizes all graphics and Ampos has done a few types. Plus if you turn everything into 3D then everything will be fine.

I, for example, used 2 techniques for Snake Revolutions. The actual game is 2D, but the objects are 3D (flat plains). I don't resize the 3D textures and the game looks identical on any device when playing. On an iPad (I don't have one BTW, just a TP which is the same Res) it looks the same but because of the difference in ratio you see slightly more of the play area than an iPhone.

For the GUI I was going to use 3D here too, but I couldn't get Gernot's static 2D code (stick a 3D object to a 2D position on the screen) to work in the 3ES functions. Well not fully anyway. I abandoned that for now and instead used my old graphics resize code (see code snippets) which resizes all GUI graphics (inc transparency) based on the resolution (only the first time run or if graphics change in an update). This works nicely (esp for memory usage and speed) but has the downside that differences in screen ratio (iPad vs iPhone) make these images slighter fatter than their intended iPhone retina display (not exactly a deal breaker though. Looks fine really). It's also a bit harder to code for but hardly rocket science.

It's extra work to make a game work on any resolution, but worth it in the long run, and is easy enough to code into a new game. An old game might be a total pain to convert, although Ampos posted some useful code that resizes each screen on the fly. It's brilliant for easily and quickly converting an old game, but the downside is it eats into your FPS. Roughly 50% reduction from what I've experimented with on my old games. On the other hand if it's a simple puzzle game or a game that doesn't require fast screen updates (ie. an arcade game is probably out) then you are sorted.

Oh and with any of these solutions always set the project resolution to 9998x9999 (or 9999x9998 for landscape). This way the device will try and use the highest resolution it can. Hopefully Gernot can implement my idea of device specific resolutions for GLB11. This was the idea that you might code for retina but an iPhone4 might not have the beans to really fly on retina even though it can handle the resolution. The 4S would be fine though. So you need a device specific setting to set everything to 9998x9999, but made the iPhone4 (and ipod4) set to 320x480. I still cross my fingers he can implement changing resolution whenever you want (retina menu, but low res game once you do a quick benchmark of capability), but Gernot reckoned that would be massively hard to do. Fair enough. Just device specific thanks!

Cheers

[spacefractal]

you can still support older devices, but you can no longer just make 480x320 games, which might force to support a least 960x640 now in near future.

In some games I do gonna seen graphics still is 480x320, but redraw font and hud display or such thing, so its have primary support of Retina (easier to read the text). Also retro games is of course "blocky" pixels, which is even easier to add 960x640 support by upscaling (etc 960x640 screenshot is more clean than upscaled 480x320 screenshot). So that depend which kind game that is. So in many chases you property could just upscaling without issue.

In Jungool (a none glbasic game), we did drawn all graphics to 480x320, but used Genius Fractal for upscaling to 960x640 later in the development (Lobo feel redraw would take far too much time and I agreed here). That plugin did a awesome upscaling job to Retina/iPad resolution (etc I have to say I "only" created music for that game), since Lobo (graphics) diddent like upsaling general elsewise (and no its NOT relativt to my username at all, we also laughed about the name due that).

[Crivens]

To be fair I don't believe it said the game had to be retina, just that the screenshots had to be... Considering retina devices upscale non-retina graphics on the fly then *maybe* can get away with just resizing non-retina screenshots to retina resolutions. Might get past them considering the device will upscale anyway, and possibly is just lazy method to get HD screenshots for a new app store layout (instead of resizing on the fly).

Cheers

[Ian Price]

Indeed, as I stated - it is just the screenshots. For now...

TBF We all knew this was coming anyway. It's been 2 years since retina display was introduced. That's plenty of time to accept progress really.

[spicypixel]

So if I'm to support 960x640 and 480x320 only (personal choice) I don't need to set the resolution to 9999x9998 just 960x640 and create 2 sets of gfx. I will then check screen res to determine the gfx used.

I'm presuming doing this will work for iPad too even using the 2 resolutions above? Don't wanna upscale as my game presently is a fast arcade game and I don't wanna lose upto 50% framerate.

[Ian Price]

You don't necessarily need two sets of graphics if you scale down from 960x640, although the images may/will degrade a bit.

It's always better to develop for the larger size and downscale than the smaller one and upscale.

How you do it is upto you though, obviously.

[spicypixel]

You don't necessarily need two sets of graphics if you scale down from 960x640, although the images may/will degrade a bit.

It's always better to develop for the larger size and downscale than the smaller one and upscale.

How you do it is upto you though, obviously.

Yeh but the gfx I've drawn are presently drawn for lower res lol. So I need to draw a larger tileset. To be honest if I had drawn them at a higher res I'd shrink to 50% and then touch-up by hand the benefit of being a pixel artist

[Ian Price]

Indeed

[erico]

upscaling something on a 2x bases won´t hurt your gfx if don´t use any pixel blending.
downcaling will always destroy your art.

Being a fan of 320x240 (ye kof 98 best art ever) I tend to do things that way or proportional to that, gotta love fat pixels...
I have to mention though, that the latest kof, XIII, has got me waaay impressed on the gfx/anim, there is a hidden 3d technic there that is just awesome, that is a 720p resolution I guess...