Achieving Faux Retina on iPad 3 (screen shot inside)

skotleach

I discovered a way to achieve Retina resolution images on the new iPad using GS. This may be obvious and it may already be commonly known, if so please disregard.

Here's what I did...

I had an actor I wanted to display at 256x256. Instead of creating a 256x256 png image to apply to the actor, I created my png at 512x512. I set my actor's width and height to 512. I then added a behavior to constrain the width and height to 256.

There results are impressive. Here's a screen shot of a side by side comparison:

http://redqueenletters.com/FauxRetina.png

So basically, create all your images and actors at 2x the size you need then constrain or change their attributes to the reduced size. Obviously this will be an issue with large background images but I suspect there are creative work arounds.

Some other assumptions/risks... Obviously this will have some kind of performance impact and I've yet to test it on an iPad 2 or 1 so I've got no idea what happens there. Good luck. I hope this was useful for someone.

Zoyt

Thanks! Good job!

theCodeMonsters

here it is.

jonmulcahy

Official iPad retina support is due in the next release, I wouldn't waste too much time on workarounds.

skotleach

@jonmulcahy you're right, although you'll need 2x versions of your assets anyway. By testing this workaround you'd be working toward getting your app ready for the next release. If nothing else you can at least see how your assets will look.

GraphicWarehouse

wow this works really well!

tenrdrmer

you dont need to constrain anything. just change the actors size attribute to the correct half size just like you will do when we have retina support

ellfire

In anticipation of iPad three way back when (starting building in January), I authored my entire game this way. Basically, all graphics smaller than 1024(2048) wide are in GS at 2x. All actors are then created with iPad 2 dimensions. (Like @tenrdrmer said, a 128x128 actor uses a 256x256 image.)

When you preview in the GS viewer, it will actually use the higher res graphics so you can see a true representation of what the Retina version of your game will be even before retina is officially supported. (You can tell that's the truth because any 1024 wide graphics will appear blurry as they are being blown up. Mainly backgrounds for me.)

My hope is that when they do launch the resolution independence for iPad, my game is all set once I upgrade the 1024 to 2048 graphics.

In the meantime, I just use Photoshop to 50% shrink the graphics from within the .gameproj folder before sending out test builds via TestFlight.