Scaling pixel art and other 2D art for high-DPI screens

Unity Engine
1

I’m working on a pixel art desktop game. My reference resolution is 640x360 with 8 px tiles, so the game looks fairly zoomed out (like A Link To The Past, zoomed out x2).

It looks good on my 32" 2560 x 1440 monitor, but testing it on on Surface Pro 4, with a 12.3" 2736 x 1824 screen, everything is really tiny. Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if the screen wasn’t so high DPI (say, 1280 x 720), but it is, and so are many new monitors and laptop screens.

Are there any solutions to this problem beyond changing the art? I don’t want to zoom in - I like the view that this scale provides. Lowering the resolution of the Unity executable on my Surface Pro made the image more blurry, not larger. I feel like I’m missing something obvious here.

EDIT: My assumptions were wrong when I wrote this question. There is no meaningful DPI-related size issue with my game. It was simply an issue with playing on a small screen, regardless of resolution. Let me explain why in case someone else stumbles into this thread making the same mistake that I made.

Say we have two identical-sized screens and an in-game scene, scaled up from 640x360 artwork:

  1. 15.6", 1920 x 1080 (medium DPI)
    Each pixel, scaled up from 640 x 360, is now 3 x 3 pixels.

  2. 15.6", 3840 x 2160 (high DPI)
    Each pixel, scaled up from 640 x 360, is now 6 x 6 pixels.

Even though the second screen is much higher DPI, because both screens are the same physical size of 15.6", each “pixel chunk” (6 x 6 for the second screen) takes up the same amount of screen real estate, in physical, ruler-measurable size, as that of the image on the smaller screen, and vice versa. That’s because the second screen, with its 2160 pixels across, will be displaying “pixel chunks” 4x as large as that of the first screen. If “pixel chunks” are 4x as large, the fact that the resolution is 4x as large as well (3840 x 2160 vs 1920 x 1080) evens out the scaling.

Now, I can see where one can run into problems with very small screens, but that’s not really a computer game issue. I was more worried about people playing on a 4K 15.6" laptop screen vs. a 1366 x 768 screen, but I see that my initial assumptions were wrong and that it will be fine.

2

What are your Camera, Canvas, and Edit->Settings->Player->Resolution settings (screenshots - use a screen grabber like Greenshot if you aren’t already, then you can paste images into forum posts easily)?

Screenshots/photos of the two situations would also help.

3

Thanks. It’s not really a “situation” - the behavior is pretty much as expected for high-DPI screens. It’s just that the higher the DPI screen, the smaller everything on screen is (naturally). The proportions are fine. My canvas is fine. I’m just wondering if there is any kind of solution for small images on high DPI screens without zooming in on the game.

3567466--287613--camera.png
3567466--287613--camera.png643×864 61.3 KB
3567466--287614--canvas.png
3567466--287614--canvas.png649×669 48.8 KB
3567466--287615--player.png

4

So the objects are proportional on your large monitor versus the Suface, based on screen sizes?

If so, zooming is the solution, not sure if that’s adjustable by screen size (in inches, not necessarily pixels). I’ve only worked with standard HD on a PC so far.

5

Here’s how to determine the physical screen size in inches in case you wan to zoom for smaller screens:

6

I never knew you could get the physical size of the screen, thanks for that tip! :wink:

7

Thanks for the link. I was wrong in my assumptions about this being a DPI issue. Post updated above.