WHAT SIZE IS FULL SCREEN - DEBATE

I feel like you don't fully understand part of the first question you're asking. The resolution of a game has nothing to do with the user's desktop resolution, as monitors switch screen modes when running a game. Nearly every game you've ever played has been running at a different resolution than your desktop.

Higher resolution is obviously better. If players have the option to increase the game's resolution, they will invariably do so until it starts to lag. However in a 2D game, having a higher resolution means you need to either draw larger, more detailed sprites and backgrounds, or else increase the viewable area on the screen which affects the gameplay and makes the game feel "zoomed out."

Also, obviously, it's absolutely vital that your game function properly on both fullscreen and widescreen monitors.

I've never seen a game other than browser games that doesn't run as a fullscreen application, and I've never seen an engine that doesn't support fullscreen by default, so the answer to your last question is A) yes and B) impossible for you to mess up.

/\ that's kinda similar to what I do--except in ace so I use 640 x 352 which is the closest to 640x360 (16:9) that still supports whole tiles. The good thing about using relatively low pixels is that you can zoom them to uneven sizes like 5.12x and the deformations in zooming up will not appear.

author=JosephSeraph
The good thing about using relatively low pixels is that you can zoom them to uneven sizes like 5.12x and the deformations in zooming up will not appear.

That is... absolutely not true. It will 100% look janky as fuck on every single monitor in the world.

Are you trying to convince me that's not FUCKING HORRIFYING? Because it's FUCKING HORRIFYING. The pixels are all fucked up and I'd rather kill myself than play a game that's stretched out unevenly like that.

The second one is way less bad, but still very clearly not right.

author=JosephSeraph
/\ that's kinda similar to what I do--except in ace so I use 640 x 352 which is the closest to 640x360 (16:9) that still supports whole tiles. The good thing about using relatively low pixels is that you can zoom them to uneven sizes like 5.12x and the deformations in zooming up will not appear.

Terrible idea. No display conforms to that weird resolution, such that any nearest-neighbor upscaling will result in uneven pixel widths and shuffling. The latter is especially unsettling and noticeable during play. I allow this lind of stretching to occur for the weirdos that want it, but my default internal resolutions are specifically chosen because they perfectly scale to the most common displays, whereas yours does not. Reconsider.

... What's wrong with the second/bottom image example again? I also think the top example was meant to show what happens when you make a standard zoom, while the other shows what happens when you don't. The bottom scales pixels evenly and looks far from the mess that's the top.

Oooh, I love this stuff.
Technical crap for those that want to understand this topic at a granular level:


(Taken from the 2nd image, the nicer of the two)

Bickering aside, as one can see, the the scaled pixels alternate between 5x5, 5x6, 6x6 and 6x5 when that image is scaled up to 1320x880. It looks okay to the untrained eye, and it's kind of annoying to the folks who notice it, but what they're noticing is pixel scaling. With that said, there's not a whole lot you can control about it. Period. That's kind of how you have to look at it, because it depends completely the display resolution of the physical monitor itself and what it's capabilities are. It's an unknown variable.

With portable consoles, pixel scaling is always 1:1 because the screens are still relatively small enough that they don't require scaling. What you absolutely can control is the aspect ratio, which is what Jude was talking about. If you are developing from the ground up, you can take aspect ratio into account to figure out your desired scaling preference. JS is right in that by picking the right resolution that works for your game, you can minimize undesirable pixel scaling while still maximizing common screen ratios.

For instance, GBA games are 240x160, which is a 3:2 ratio, nonstandard for PCs... so scaling that up to 1920 width (800%) would require a height of 1280 (higher than 16:10's 1200px, and 16:9's 1080px). Let's say you had a 16:10 monitor. In order to see the whole picture in the correct aspect ratio, you have to scale it to the height of 1200, making the width 1800 (750%). 1800x1200 isn't a standard windows resolution, so, it has to use 1920x1200, but pads it with black bars on the left & right (pillarboxing) to retain that aspect ratio. If you absolutely had to have 1:1 pixel scaling, the closest you could get in that case would be 1680x1120 (700%), where you'd end up with both pillarboxing and letterboxing (top/bottom) in a 1920x1200 display resolution.

SNES emulation has the same problem. The console itself was 256x224, which does not scale up cleanly to a resolution such as 1920x1200 or 1920x1080, so you end up with black bars all around the image. If you were to scale it to the height of that 16:10 screen, you'd only have pillarboxing, but the pixels would be scaled by something like 535% and get that alternating pattern effect of distorted pixels. This looked gnarly back in the day when people had screens that were 800x600, but it's not so bad these days with much higher resolutions.

RM Specific:
This ties a little into what JS was saying about choosing "640 x 352 which is the closest to 640x360 (16:9) that still supports whole tiles." This is actually a great topic in and of itself, because choosing the resolution in tile-based games impacts whether you can display the character in the direct center of the screen (VX Ace) vs. off to the side (2k/3/XP) In 2k3, the screen of course was 320x240, and always showed 20x15 tiles when the character wasn't moving (offset by x pixels when moving). If the character (while still) was centered on the screen, you'd see half of one tile on the far right and half of another tile on the far left, so to combat this, the character was displayed off-center (in 1 of the 4 center tiles). VX chose the 544x416 resolution so that the player could be dead center on the screen and not cut off tiles along the edges. It still displayed at 640x480 resolution, resulting in pillarboxing and letterboxing because Enterbrain didn't want to scale up the image and end up with uneven pixel scaling.

640x352 could work in that it would have 4 pixels of letterboxing on the top and bottom (scaled up to whatever 16x9 display you have).

TL;DR:
The maximum resolution of the display is "full screen" as far as 2D games are concerned, but there are numerous considerations as to how you want your game to display, as outlined above. When you take out the output resolution as a factor, pixel scaling is no longer a concern, because it's not something you have control over.

author=PepsiOtaku
SNES emulation has the same problem. The console itself was 256x224, which does not scale up cleanly to a resolution such as 1920x1200 or 1920x1080, so you end up with black bars all around the image.

As someone who does notice the inconsistent pixel scaling, black bars around the edges of the image are definitely my preferred way of handling the problem. If you use black bars of the right size you can always end up with properly and consistently upscaled pixels. You just get a slightly smaller screen.

Instead of using black bars, some games will solve the problem by using anti-aliasing to blend together the edges of the pixels instead of having inconsistent pixel scaling, which prevents the janky look but causes a blurry look instead. Arguably, the blurriness might actually be a better approximation of how the edges of the pixels blended together on an old CRT television, but it's not what attracts most people to pixel art these days. They're attracted to the cleanness of it.

I think I'm literally the only person in the planet who likes smaller resolutions better. I find it appealing because you can just click out of the game easily and go do something else while it's running on the background and it almost never lags.

I find pillarboxing to be sometimes pretty distracting at first, and terrible if I'm watching movies. After awhile, though, the pillarboxes just sort of blend into the sides of my screen and I forget they are there, especially when I'm doing emulation. Towerfall runs in 4:3 and I somehow didn't even notice that there were black bars until my friend pointed it out to me. My laptop has the infernal 1366x768 max resolution, which makes useful scaling for a lot of resolutions impractical, so I get stuck with either windows or black bars everywhere. I still vastly prefer it over even a single pixel out of place.

From a creator's viewpoint, giving your audience more options is always a good idea. Letting them choose to play in a window, with boxing or with not-quite-right scaling is the best bet, and lots of indie games use this approach. Even in this topic (currently a single page) we have multiple preferences; imagine how many different opinions a larger audience would have?

Lots of us are pigeon-holed by RM's various (sometimes crazy) resolutions, so remember that the struggle is real the next time you see a video option you don't like in someone else's game.