Is it better to enable Unity’s launcher (the “Resolution Dialogue” in Player Settings) or better to leave it out? Likewise, it is better to default to fullscreen or not? Every game I’ve played on Steam just goes directly to the game itself without any launcher, and most (or all) of them default to fullscreen; but I don’t know what the norm is.
I usually see the launcher on prototypes and demo builds, not final releases. I don’t remember ever seeing a final release with the launcher, though maybe on smaller final builds.
Most think it is ugly - personally it serves it’s purpose and doesn’t bother me. Hearkens back to previous era of PC games.
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What about fullscreen as default? Most of them seem to default to fullscreen.
Not form my experience playing a lot of alpha, prototype and demo versions. I think it is personal preference. I agree having these options in a final build, in the game rather than the game launcher is aesthetically cleaner.
A lot of 2D games don’t full screen by default - from my experience.
I absolutely never use the launcher on anything but the most basic of prototypes. I think it’s tacky as all hell and rarely matches the overall aesthetic of the game or the menu systems I’ve created.
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i always disable it, and have my own in game menu instead.
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How do you rig initial settings without the launcher?
You just use native screen res and default quality?
Because of the usage of linux system, I depend on games having the launcher. Often times I cannot get them to work because of default settings. It should at least be documented how the settings can be manual set.
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Windowed 720p, typically set to the most midrange of the quality settings to ensure the game looks alright, but won’t bog down older computers in case they need to lower the settings. I don’t like taking over the full screen in case something goes wrong, as can easily be the case in certain multi-monitor configurations.
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depends on the type of game, if it is more immersive type of game, i will default to native screen res, with medium settings, if it is less so a 720p window is good enough.
Also if you are trying to choose the best defaults, it is often good to have it write out a config file on first run, that is in a human readable form that is used for settings in the future. That way if it someone gets into a state where the user cant see things they can simply edit the config to something they know works on there system.
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Thoughts on custom bootstrapper? Do people like those or not?
EDIT: Do you think it’d be reasonable to make a small custom bootstrap window in unity (for easy cross platform support) that launches the main app? Would there be some kind of problem with that?
You can always just ship with a base json config file to avoid the default load menu. Just inject the json settings when you run the game.
Many gamers are comfortable messing with config by hand, but some aren’t. I would think very simple custom bootstrap (basically modify config file and launch) would be an ideal? It would take almost no effort really if a unity front end would be reasonable for it (otherwise annoying to manage cross platform imps).
Unless people don’t like these for some reason?
I just don’t really see the point in having a custom bootstrapper if you’ve got a nearly empty scene containing your options menu, honestly. It seems kinda redundant.
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i figure the amount of cases where it would fail at getting useable settings from the start are pretty slim and the config as a final safety net in case the remaining few % have a issue and go to support. Also good place for less used settings that only a power user would want to touch.
Really? So general consensus is that any kind of bootstrap is not worth it for desktop game?
What specifically goes wrong with Linux, and how can we avoid that? Isn’t it enough to have a settings menu where the user can change the resolution?
just a assumption, but things can differ a lot between linux distros so i could see issues where the game might think the native res is much higher then it really is, and then it being to hard to switch it back while the game is in a bad res.
I don’t believe I’ve ever heard complaints for Bethesda’s launcher.
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Honestly it wouldn’t be that hard to write a small application with those buttons and just fire the game build exec from there with command line arguments.