just curious...question about smaller screen...

[lalala11]

Random thing just occurred to me as a I was playing a runner game. The screen is smaller, so the environment the little runner guy is in is smaller and the little guy himself is smaller. Since the Droid Pro screen is smaller than other Droids, the speed of the guy also slows down proportionately, right? Because if it were somehow separate and didn't change in proportion to the size of the environment, wouldn't the guy at some level increase to a speed too fast for the smaller screen? And how is the the running vs. background movement programmed? frames/second?

I'm imagining playing a video game on a 60" TV versus a 20" TV and I don't think screen size affects game play, but it somehow feels like on a giant TV my jumping timing is a little off (I'm thinking of Super Mario here), but it seems like it shouldn't work that way, so that could be psychological because everything looks bigger.

Basically, does screen size ever affect the game? Just a curiosity question. I guess it's obvious I have ZERO programming knowledge. As to the "how is it programmed" question, I'm not looking for anything technical that will take up your time, just enough to settle a thought.

Thank you!

 

[Astaroth]

the speed of a character running on your screen is irrelevant, what is relevant is the movement of the frame or of elements on the screen across the screen itself (not in the game world). if the character is always in the same spot tracked by the "camera", and we imagine a little speedometer on there, it doesn't matter what speed the character is moving at because he's always on the same spot on your screen. maybe that's a little too obvious but i just wanted to point it out.

if by speed you mean the framerate your phone is achieving while rendering the game, then yes, if you have two phones with the same processing power and different screen size, the one with the smaller screen will render faster giving you a better framerate. the only thing you'd notice is smoother motion on screen, not faster. this is because typically larger screens have higher resolution, so there are more pixels for the processor to draw in each frame, therefore more processing work to do per frame. you could also have two screens of the same physical size but different resolution, and the higher res screen would require more processing power to give you a certain framerate.

if the timing is off e.g. the character responding to you hitting "jump", that could be attributed to the processing power of the machine you're using (i.e. there is input lag). that doesn't directly correlate with the screen size because you could have a really fast processor trying to render a huge resolution and a really slow processor rendering on a low resolution and they could have the same performance.

in terms of the Droid Pro specifically, the resolution is 320x480. if you compare that to, say, the Droid X, which is 854 x 480, that's more than twice as many pixels that the phone has to draw for each frame. both phones run on a 1 GHz TI OMAP processor, so i would expect the Droid Pro to perform better. however, i've never used the Droid X so I can't say whether that's true. i found this:

so i guess it does perform better, especially in the 2D and 3D parts of the benchmark, which is what you'd expect.