I don't think so... I mean, it probably does support it, but c'mon, what's the resolution? 2732 x 2048? That's more than 2K. The 1136x640 resolution of each and every Buildbox game will look very pixelated and ugly. Buildbox in general is not build for tablets but for phones. And the bigger the phones the more problems...
What do you mean with critical design? On my iPad Air all Buildbox games look pixelated. The one I am working on too. I use 1:1 ratios on all graphics. No scaling up or down at all. Also, how can you optimize if you have to "invent" 3 times the resolution? The 640px width get upscaled 3.2x times which is impossible to optimize in my opinion. If there are ways @seanjonathanconnor, I would appreciate if you can share the knowledge on how to do it.
As a hack I import graphics at 2x or more and downscale them. Things tend to look pretty good on iPad and Mac that way
I use the same trick with graphics that @dan_counsell if you create your graphics at a larger size and scale down they look much better.
Are you for real? The Buildbox team always recommended not to do that... now I'm a little lost. Almost impossible for my first game since this would mean to remake the game completely. I'm not sure if I want to do that (and I definitely do not have the time to do so). I always thought that Buildbox can not upscale already downscaled graphics which basically would mean to throw away precious atlas space and memory power. It would also mean that a game is going to lag much sooner. At least, this is what I read somewhere else (posted by the Buildbox team I think). But if this is working, it would mean that a final Buildbox build actually can get the original graphic size back and make use of it with bigger screens. That's a bummer. And it also means that your games are ready for the bigger screens (including the aTV) while I somehow feel like a fool now. The only downside I can see doing some quick tests, the diagonal lines get distorted with a "stair" effect. This is also noticeable in the screenshot of yours Dan... or am I hallucinating?
Including graphics at 2x and scaling down will look very slightly worse than including graphics at 1x and using no scaling. The only thing using 2x graphics will do is increase your memory usage by increasing your atlases. It looks better in BB preview but not when exported to a device.
Hmm, it looked really bad on iPad and Mac (retina screen) with 1x graphics, hence why I switch in 2x graphics and downscaled. I had no noticeable issue in all the testing I did. Thankfully Almost Impossible! is a simple game with small graphics anyway, so hopefully I won't suffer with any issues on older devices… we'll see. @Andy - Might be worth writing something up on the best way to handle building for multiple devices… kinda like a best practices guide. Cheers, Dan
It's simple, design your 1x graphics based on the iPhone 5 screen (iPhone retina). This should get you the best possible quality from Buildbox. I did test this for myself about 6 months ago. Now that said I'm completely open to taking a look at any examples of poor quality. Just send example BBDOC to support along with a description of what to look for on the device, providing screenshots would be helpful as well.
Thanks @Andy, valuable info. Btw what other engines are doing is something similar to what @dan_counsell just said: SpriteBuider for example use 4x resolution of images, however, when exporting and building these images are downsized and properly sized images loaded runtime - Maybe that adds some extra size to the app but less memory usage on lower resolution devices. Do you think this is something BB could do in the future? Such auto-resize feature would be extremely useful when designing the game -- so the game designer not need to resize images every time changing the object/char size...
Just my tuppence worth. The iPad Pro is targeting a very specialized market. I'm not really sure what percentage of sales a game will have any success on there but I wouldn't at all be surprised to see the figure at something like less than 1% of a games overall sales. Unless you have a massive $10Million hit on your hands I think most of us will be lucky to even see $100 come our way via iPad Pro game sales!
