A World full of Aspect Ratio

What is aspect ratio you ask? It’s the ratio between your TV, laptop, tablet, or your phone display’s width and height. Aspect ratio is easily identified by maximum resolution of a display, if you reduce a 1080p display’s resolution 1920/1080, you get 16/9 or the aspect ratio 16:9.

So, what’s this about world full of aspect ratio? While 16:9 has dominated the display market for the past decade or so, it was never quite alone. 16:10 never quite went away, mobile market has seen both 15:9(Nokia Lumia) and 3:2(iPhone), and PC gaming is seeing a huge demand for 21:9 display in recent days. While having different aspect ratios is great for filling every niche in market, it makes it difficult to compare display sizes. A 27” 16:9 display is actually bigger than a 29” 21:9 display, a 5.7” LG V20 with a 16:9 display is bigger than a 5.7” LG G6, which has an 18:9(2:1) display or even a 5.8” Galaxy S8. And it’s not just total area, different aspect ratio also means different device width on a phone, or a different device height for a pc display.

Galaxy S8 has the same display width as a regular 5.2” display phone. A 29” 21:9 display has the same display height as a regular 23” display.

These properties actually make these great choices if they fit your need. As a matter of fact, I am writing this on a 21:9 29” display, it’s amazing for gaming. And the reduced width makes Galaxy S8 much easier to hold than its diagonal size would make you think. But the point of me writing this is that people should know what they are getting, and if you’re reading this I assume you’re the type who likes to know what you are getting.

Diagonal	Resolution X	Resolution Y	Width	Height	Area
23”	1920	1080	20.05”	11.28”	226.04”
27”	2560	1440	23.53”	13.24”	311.50”
29”	2560	1080	26.72”	11.27”	301.19”
5.7”	1440	2560	2.55”	5.10”	13.00”
5.7”	1440	2880	2.79”	4.97	13.88”
5.8”	1440	2960	2.54”	5.22”	13.23”
5.2”	1440	2560	2.55”	4.53”	11.55”

There is a formula for that, it’s not that hard really, some basic trigonometry can get you here. All I did was make it into an easily pluggable format. You’ll remember I said that the resolution will give you the ratio, which in trig is Tangent value, so adding the diagonal to the mix we can figure out the display’s height and width. And the area is just multiplication, which looks like this,

Of course for our purpose we need separate equation for height and width. So,

 

Which in MS Excel terms, (SIN(ATAN(resY/resX)))*diagonal

Which in MS Excel terms, (COS(ATAN(resY/resX)))*diagonal

Happy hunting! 🙂

GameDev Checklist

Good heavens! Is this what you call a AAA game?

We all understand making a game, that is designated AAA, is difficult. And they cost a lot of money. So I am just going to skip over a lot of thing I don’t like such as poor graphics, poor optimization, frame rate lock. Because either they are too complicated for me to fully understand and talk about, or the discussion would be too long for me to stay interested at this late hour.

What irks me are some little things. After all these years in the history of video game, it should be fairly easy to gather how these things should be.

• Let me skip the intro videos! Maybe not just by hitting a button just one time, you don’t us to miss the videos by accident, I understand that. But do something like long press a button. But please let us skip it.
• Let the game run at any resolution or aspect ratio. Seriously! Why are you so intent on punishing people for having something extra? 21:9 is a runway success among gamers, but even at 2017 we have games having trouble with it. You may want to do this much for your paying customers.
• Save games. What is it with save game files and game developer/publishers! Why do they feel the desperate need to hide save files in the most godforsaken corner of my hard drive? I first played NFS Most Wanted in 2006, and even now I can install it and just pick my profile and career, same for Elder Scroll Skyrim. But that amazing comfort is found in less and less games as the save files are moved from the relative security of My Documents to locations that even an moderately advanced users have trouble finding, much less an average one.

As I said before, I believe these issues are extremely annoying and similarly believe them to be extremely easy to fix. I myself fail to see much real benefit from doing these. They don’t accomplish much except for making the life of the gamer harder. So please have some heart and stop doing them!