I did a bunch more testing today and decided I needed to be very methodical to try to figure out when some strange things were happening. This may be overkill, but I thnk it is important because it does impact on how players will see your game at different game and display resolutions.
1) I started with a matrix with 9 game resolutions across the top (columns), and 9 display resolutions along the side (rows). The idea is to try all of the combinations of these game and display resolutions.
2) I created a simple project with a default scene for each of the different monitor resolutions:
a) Background is the size of the display resolutions.
b) Floor is the size of the display resolution.
3) Then I looped through the following:
- For each display resolution:
-- Make the corresponding scene (see 2 above) the startup scene
-- for each game resolution (set at top lhs of project manager), run the game observing:
--- was the Maintain aspect ration option displayed (Y/N)
--- Screen capture of the display.
--- If the background isn't totally visible, does it scroll when the actor moves?
--- Any other problems?
I recorded the results in a spreadsheet. A pdf printout of it is here:
http://fisherbee.com/knbShare/aspectRatio.pdfYou'll notice if you look at the resulting spreadsheet, that the way the scene is displayed is sometimes hard to predict. In particular, it is hard to predict when the game will be displayed centered on the display, when it will be displayed at the top left. (IMO, it should always be centered.) I highlighted the wide game resolutions (columns) in yellow and the wide display resolutions (rows) in pink, and that does seem to be one important factor.
You cannot set the width of the game resolution higher than 1600.
Sometimes the game mysteriously switched to windowed mode -- sometimes only window mode was available, sometimes the next time I ran I could turn window mode off.
Sometimes I didn't get the "Maintain aspect ratio" option one time, but the next time I would. Didn't seem to be any particular pattern for this.
I'm sure I made some errors, because there was a lot to do and not much time to do it. Still, it seems to point to some potential problems.