[DISC]Screen sizes

[Doush.]

Hey peeps, just a quick question for me. Just wondering what do you all generaly set your screen size for your flash files. I know it would depend on the sort of game being built. Im thinking more towards what screen size you would use for a side scroller. To keep the tie between good display size and performance. I did a quick look on miniclip and noticed that both the heli attack games are 450 * 320. Not sure if there is a propper answer to this question. Was just curious as to what size people generally use. And what people think is the best way to go for a good screen size and decent performance.

Cheers

[Doush.]

[nGFX]

For personal projects I tend to use good old 4:3 640x480 screensize (but mostly the visible area is limited to 16:9, using the border for sound options/infos).

For client projects (fish'n'fun for instance) the size may vary - like 720x395 or even 800x500 for wintertales.

nGFX

[DayDream]

If you want to go casual I would suggest going 800x600 and allowing fullscreen as an option.

For client projects it depends on their website layout and the space available - as nGFX said it varies a lot (you can do anything from banner size to 800x600 - or larger)..

[renderhjs]

usually I set the screen layout to 955*600 (wich fits in each browser @ 1024*768) and based on that I create some smaler layout within that area.
The Flash movie itslef is usually just a very smal item (520*320, 400*400,...) but never the entire available screensize because I really care about performance even on older computers.
here is an older layout from me- where I wanted to show this matter to the client:

there are some kind of norm sizes that you can take for certain screen- resolutions, like:

640*480 maximized = 600*300;
800*600 Maximized = 760*420;
1024*768 Maximized = 955*600;

But never try using it at all because people might have some widgets an instant messanger or some side panel activated wich reduces the screen resolution even more.
My former boss always designed his layouts in full 1024*768 or 800*600 (just like the screen- resolution he aimed for) however he did not gave it much thought so that I in the end had to reedit the designs so that they would fit within the browser window. Because the OS and browser interface take quite an amount of space and you need to substract that from your actual layout.

Recently there are 2 layout types:
- Hybrid: (deformable tables, css, scaleable flash movies) that try fitting in the browser window with just scrolling in 1 axis or completely without.
- Static: as the one shown in the image I posted- just a fixed active element on the screen that should ensure that a certain screen- resolution will run at least.

[scheletro]

I love flash because let me experiment with different screen sizes, depending on the game or the experiment, my last platform game was 650 x 150

[Doush.]

Thanks for the reply guys. I thought the answers would be far less then what was posted. For instance a game I was working on had a whole heap of mcs flying around the screen. I thought making the screen size smaller for something like an action game would increase performance some what. I guess its like you have all said Its something that is probably individual to the game being created. Thanks for the reply guys really helps. I guess ill have to experiment a little.