how many assets sizes do I need to support iPhone and iPad?

cocos2d-x C++
#1

Hi,

If I want my game to support iPhone and iPad, do I need to have all this assets resolutions?

  • iPhone non retina
  • iPhone retina
  • iPad
  • new iPad

Or do you just have a big version and then scale down the graphics?

Thanks.

JB

#2

It depends on your game. And yes you can zoom in and out, that works well.

On my game (www.arrowmania.com - see the videos), I designed it so I have a set of sprites (spritesheets) for retina and a set for normal res. My level maps are TMX tile maps, just one TMX file, I have tile PNG’s for both normal and retina though.

Arrow Mania runs on iPhone and iPad in one universal app. On the iPhone, most of the levels I have zoom out to 0.75f scale, these same levels are all non-zoomed (scale 1.0) on iPad. I also let the user pinch and zoom in/out a bit on both iPhone and iPad too. Obviously on the iPad you can see more of the map, since on the iPhone you are zoomed out to 0.75 you can see enough though.

And it runs on the 3G (slowest device I support) really well, 30+ fps. 3GS/iPad 1 and above 60 fps pretty much constantly.

#3

great game! do you use the same assets for the iPhone 4 and 3G without retina? that means you are not using retina graphics in iPhone 4?

#4

Thanks.

3G uses the normal res graphics (and 3GS). All the Retina files have the “~~hd.png" ending and I enable retina mode. So the iPhone 4, latest iPod Touch, and iPad 3 use Retina "~~hd.png” files. And as I mentioned the iPhone & iPod Touch versions zoom out 25% (to scale 0.75f) so really the graphics aren’t exactly as I drew them pixel for pixel but they still look great, especially in Retina mode. I did notice (being a bit of a perfectionist) depending on the zoom out value (say 0.85) you could see where the pixels get chopped a bit because of the scale, 0.75 is pretty good for that though.

#5

thanks!

#6

just to be totally sure:

2048x1536 for iPad and iPhone (with scale down) and 480x320 for non retina displays?

Thanks.

http://ideatree.posterous.com/ios-screen-resolutions

#7

Well for every sprite I have a Retina version and a normal version. So a Retina sprite that is 64x64 pixels will have a second version at be 32x32 normal (just scale it in your art package - bicubic works best). And then I have all my sprites in a sprite sheet (I use TexturePacker Pro to make the sprite sheets), of which I have say “sprites.png” and “sprites,plist” and a “sprites-hd.png” and a “sprites-hd.plist”.

As for whole screen images I don’t really have any apart from the title/launch screen. Again, depends on your game.