cool:)

Thinking in integrate it with my engine too:)

Thanks for sharing!

Nice one

My engine is working with a fixed resolution only, so this will help me a lot

This is amazingly sweet!!

This should help a ton for my current WP7 project which I am currently developing at 1280 X 720.

I was dreading resizing all of my textures for 800 X 480 landscape WP7 mode.

Thanks for posting this.

Allan Chaney

[...] the input to make use of the Touchscreen, and finally since I’m using my engine basalt I have independent resolution rendering so I just told the system “run in 800×480 now” and the native resolution is still [...]

Hi Niklas,
No not really, it’s a screenshot of the games just to show what would happen to your game. I’m using a Texture2D and it’s automatically scaled to the proper aspect ratio.

You know what.. Can you please moderate my previous post and delete it? I made a stupid mistake. I switched SetVirtualResolution and SetResolution by accident. Your class works fine. And it’s great! No modifications needed nothing.

Hello,

Nice article, but it left me wondering on two points, maybe you could clear things up.

1) I was wondering if by using this approach, wouldn’t it also be required to transform whatever mouse coordinates you receive from Mouse.GetState() with the inverse of the resolution matrix, in order to get it back into “game space” and be able to do picking or anything you need?

2) And what if your SpriteBatch is already using a transformation matrix (such as for camera transformations). Would multiplying them together be enough (and is the order of multiplication relevant here?)

Thanks,
David Gouveia

Hello David!

I just added independent resolution rendering to my engine today, and would like to share my experiences to make life easier for anyone that reads this and is faced with the same problems.

1) Converting mouse coordinates from “window space” (what Mouse.GetState gives you) to “viewport space” (what you’d have without independent resolution implemented) needs to take into account both the scaling matrix and the translation (that creates the letterbox or pillarbox).

After some tweaking, what finally worked for me was this:

Vector2.Transform(_mousePosition – new Vector2(Resolution.ViewportX, Resolution.ViewportY), Matrix.Invert(Resolution.Matrix));

Where Resolution.ViewportX and Resolution.ViewportY are the X and Y values calculated for the inner viewport (I cached them and added acessors).

AND when drawing the mouse cursor, I also scale it with the independent resolution matrix so that it grows or shrinks correctly.

This way, when the mouse is on the borders of the inner viewport, you get the coordinates specified for your virtual resolution as intended, properly scaled and translated.

2) You were right about the order. So if your game implements a 2D camera by passing a transformation matrix to SpriteBatch and you want to mix it with independent resolution rendering, simply multiply both matrixes together, like so: CameraMatrix * IndependentResolutionMatrix.

David Gouveia

Hey mate, I thought I should let you know that this sample needs a little update to work properly in XNA4.

That’s because starting from XNA4 doing a GraphicsDevice.Clear will always clear the entire backbuffer no matter what Viewport you’ve set!

This implies two things.

1) You no longer need to reset to the full Viewport before clearing to black. You just call GraphicsDevice.Clear(). This also means that it’s no longer necessary to switch between the full and virtual Viewport constantly – just keep it always in the virtual Viewport.

2) You need to use SpriteBatch instead to fill *only* the virtual Viewport with the desired color. Simple 1×1 texture drawn to fill the Viewport’s rectangle should do.

Yes it works, but since the second clear (after setting the virtual viewport again) also fills the entire screen, you lose the pillarbox/letterbox effect.

And unfortunately filling with a quad is somewhat slower than the original Clear :\

I didn’t explain myself properly. What I mean is that even though the pillarbox will still be there and work properly, if you fill everything with black you won’t be able to “see them”.

In a normal game you’re usually filling the entire viewport with your own graphics, so this is not a problem.

But if you want the XNA sample appearance of having a CornflowerBlue background, then obviously clearing it to black won’t work. In that case, if you want to retain a certain background color, you have to replace the second Clear it with a SpriteBatch.Draw call to actually see it.

In your 3.1 version of this article, you’d clear to Black and then clear to CornflowerBlue, so even if nothing was drawn you’d see the difference between viewports. That won’t work now.

Thank you so much for sharing ! Finally i solved my problem with resolution, really thanks !!!

In XNA 4 SpriteBatch::Begin takes more parameters

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff433701.aspx

 
public void Begin (
         SpriteSortMode sortMode,
         BlendState blendState,
         SamplerState samplerState,
         DepthStencilState depthStencilState,
         RasterizerState rasterizerState,
         Effect effect,
         Matrix transformMatrix
)

Try something like:

spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Immediate, BlendState.AlphaBlend,,null,null,null,null, Resolution.getTransformationMatrix());