Why do lots of VNs still run at such low resolutions?

[Barktooth]

This has been bothering me for a while now. There are many VNs released in 2010 and later that are still using resolutions from a decade ago. Grisaia was released in 2011 and uses 1024x576 (WTF is this? Some weird widescreen variant of 1024x768?), HoshiMemo was released in 2009 and still uses 800x600, SubaHibi is 2010 and ALSO uses 800x600... My question is, why?

Compatibility reasons? I doubt more than 1% of the population still has a screen that doesn't run at least at 1024x768, and even then, why not just make the game support changing the resolution like most video games do? Actually, I think you even CAN change the resolution in Grisaia, but the game content itself is still 1024x576.

Do they not want to draw CGs in higher resolutions? I'm not an artist but I'm pretty sure most work with much higher resolutions anyway, and then scale them down when releasing their work. And HoshiMemo definitely has higher resolution CGs than the game can display since you're able to zoom 2x on them.

Do they not think there's a benefit to higher resolutions? Personally, I am quite tired of the pixelated mess that the beautiful sprites in HoshiMemo are when displayed at 800x600. I suppose most VNs released now are at least 1280x720 after which it's mostly redundant to go any higher, but even so, most people use LCDs nowadays. LCDs only have one native resolution, generally the highest, so most VNs likely appear blurry when they are run at a non-native resolution.

Am I missing something here? What's up with this?

 

 

 

[sanahtlig]

6 minutes ago, Barktooth said:

Do they not want to draw CGs in higher resolutions?

That's it.  Drawing high-resolution CGs greatly increases production costs, and CG already consume a large part of a game's budget.

800x600 is generally sufficient.  Just leave the game in a window.  Alternatively, @Tyrosyn advises to run the game full-screen in a virtual machine and resize the VM window to the desired size.

[Eclipsed]

720p+ didn't really become standard 'til like 2011-12+, so yeah all those VNs you listed from '08-'10 are still 600p ftw

My Grisaia runs at 720p, idk 'bout chu. 

[Barktooth]

1 minute ago, sanahtlig said:

That's it.  Drawing high-resolution CGs greatly increases production costs, and CG already consume a large part of a game's budget.

800x600 is generally sufficient.  Just leave the game in a window.  Alternatively, run the game full-screen in a virtual machine and resize the VM window to the desired size.

That's a bit surprising... HoshiMemo for sure has higher resolution CGs since you can zoom into them. I don't know about other games, but I was under the impression that most artists draw in much higher resolutions, at least, I would think, they would use 1920x1080 or more. Do they really draw CGs in 800x600 for the games that use that resolution?

As for me, I use an old CRT monitor where any resolution is technically native, so it still looks sharp even in full screen at 800x600. I guess you LCD plebs have to run it in a window though

2 minutes ago, Eclipsed said:

720p+ didn't really become standard 'til like 2011-12+, so yeah all those VNs you listed from '08-'10 are still 600p ftw

My Grisaia runs at 720p, idk 'bout chu. 

Huh.. time flies fast I guess, I didn't realize it has already been 6 years since 2010  And yeah, Grisaia runs at any resolution you can set in the System Options, but the CGs are still rendered at 1024x576 so there's no benefit (besides running at native res on an LCD) to use a higher res.

[sanahtlig]

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if VNs were designed with laptop screens in mind.  Keep in mind, they're making games for a Japanese audience.  They're targeting young males with pornographic games in a culture where privacy commands a premium.  Their audience is likely playing strictly on laptops in their bedrooms.  Some of these laptops might be older and might not support high resolutions.

[Fiddle]

I believe I heard somewhere that 4:3 resolution was the standard resolution for Japanese monitors for a while, but they've been switching to 16:9 recently. 800x600 probably doesn't look as bad on an actual 4:3 monitor. In any case, I concur that many such resolutions are disappointingly behind their time, and I suppose the Japanese developers don't care to expend the resources to make fullscreen-size VNs while most people (apparently) used windowed mode in the first place.

[Decay]

34 minutes ago, Eclipsed said:

720p+ didn't really become standard 'til like 2011-12+, so yeah all those VNs you listed from '08-'10 are still 600p ftw

My Grisaia runs at 720p, idk 'bout chu. 

Grisaia runs at 1024x576. When it's running at 720p, it's doing software upscaling. 

38 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

That's it.  Drawing high-resolution CGs greatly increases production costs, and CG already consume a large part of a game's budget.

800x600 is generally sufficient.  Just leave the game in a window.  Alternatively, @Tyrosyn advises to run the game full-screen in a virtual machine and resize the VM window to the desired size.

Honestly, 800x600 windows can look very small on higher desktop resolutions. I'm reminded of a friend who refused to play Umineko because "this game's for ants." The game window was really small on his machine, full screen was super not what he wanted to do as someone who multitasks all the time, and he probably didn't want to jump through too many hoops to play this pure zero-gameplay VN I recommended to him (he hasn't played any others). It was a completely reasonable reaction, really.

To be honest, any VM is going to have sub-par upscaling and the games you play will look like crap if you actually use that method. I'm really not sure if I'd recommend that to anyone. It's probably more convenient to use the windows zoom feature anyway, while having the same level of crap upscaling.

[Eclipsed]

Yeah, I have to change my 15.6" lappy's native 1080p  to 720p and then window mode to acceptably read low res VNs. Full Screen is not an option due to the horrific blur and native's just too tiny.
 

Spoiler

vs

 

And the dreaded Full Screen BLURRR. 

 

 

[Decay]

If actual fullscreen mode is giving you blur but windowed mode on a low-res desktop isn't, then that sounds like there are some driver settings you can change to fix that. Because both of those options should theoretically be doing the same thing, your graphics drivers should be handling the upscaling. Try tinkering around in your driver settings and see if you can force a different upscaling method.

Many games use "virtual fullscreen" or "borderless windowed" mode however, which for 2D games that means that they're doing software scaling in-game. This upscaling is often worse than whatever upscaling your graphics card, driver software, or display does. So for games that give you an option, like the Majikoi series, I recommend you turn off virtual fullscreen or at least play around with the settings to see what looks better for you.

Grisaia is actually a good example of this. Their software upscaling on the art looks okay but the text becomes heavily artifacted for me when using it, so I have to convince it my fullscreen res is the game's native res and go full screen with that in order to make it look decent.

[sanahtlig]

33 minutes ago, Decay said:

Honestly, 800x600 windows can look very small on higher desktop resolutions.

I've played 800x600 and even 640x480 games in windows at 1080p desktop resolution on a 23" monitor.  800x600 looks fine.  640x480 is a bit small but tolerable.  There was one game I played at 640x480 that had font aliasing issues that made the Japanese text really difficult to read, but that was a special case.

The real issue here is that scaling support is really bad.  Resolution issues could be easily circumvented by scaling at integer multiples (i.e., enlarging the window but not full-screening it, 640x480 -> 1280x960), which wouldn't introduce any visual artifacts (like blurring).  Why 2D games / video card drivers / Windows / anything don't support this is beyond me.  They should.  This could end up being a genuine problem if I try to play 640x480 games on a 1440p monitor.

[Barktooth]

1 hour ago, sanahtlig said:

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if VNs were designed with laptop screens in mind.  Keep in mind, they're making games for a Japanese audience.  They're targeting young males with pornographic games in a culture where privacy commands a premium.  Their audience is likely playing strictly on laptops in their bedrooms.  Some of these laptops might be older and might not support high resolutions.

That's probably true, even in the west lots of people aren't using traditional desktops anymore. But why not just have the game auto-detect the desktop resolution and scale things down to that? I'm not entirely certain, but as far as I know, scaling a higher resolution image down to fit on a less capable monitor should not result in any loss of quality.

I guess it is probably due to costs, as you said. It's a bit baffling, though, considering how much time some higher-profile VNs put into implementing fringe features in the UI that are likely to benefit almost no one. With how customizable some games are, it's hard to see why they wouldn't spend a bit more time to implement a resolution selector. I'm also still skeptical that they actually draw CGs in low resolutions.. looking up Grisaia CGs online, some seem to be 2560x1440.

56 minutes ago, Fiddle said:

I believe I heard somewhere that 4:3 resolution was the standard resolution for Japanese monitors for a while, but they've been switching to 16:9 recently. 800x600 probably doesn't look as bad on an actual 4:3 monitor. In any case, I concur that many such resolutions are disappointingly behind their time, and I suppose the Japanese developers don't care to expend the resources to make fullscreen-size VNs while most people (apparently) used windowed mode in the first place.

Interesting, didn't know they still used 4:3. I actually do have a 4:3 monitor though, and while it does look better since the image fully fills the screen, the pixilation is still pretty bad.

I always play in fullscreen so I didn't realize so many people use windowed mode. Even then, looking at the images Eclipsed posted, some of the low-res games are too small to read in windowed mode.

20 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

I've played 800x600 and even 640x480 games in windows at 1080p desktop resolution on a 23" monitor.  800x600 looks fine.  640x480 is a bit small but tolerable.  There was one game I played at 640x480 that had font aliasing issues that made the Japanese text really difficult to read, but that was a special case.

The real issue here is that scaling support is really bad.  Resolution issues could be easily circumvented by scaling at integer multiples (i.e., enlarging the window but not full-screening it, 640x480 -> 1280x960), which wouldn't introduce any visual artifacts (like blurring).  Why 2D games / video card drivers / Windows / anything don't support this is beyond me.  They should.  This could end up being a genuine problem if I try to play 640x480 games on a 1440p monitor.

Yeah, scaling generally seems to be poorly done no matter where you look.. Maybe it's harder to implement than I thought. Even Windows' native scaling looks like crap. I wonder how all the mobile OSs manage to do it so well.

42 minutes ago, Eclipsed said:

Yeah, I have to change my 15.6" lappy's native 1080p  to 720p and then window mode to acceptably read low res VNs. Full Screen is not an option due to the horrific blur and native's just too tiny.
 

  Reveal hidden contents

vs

 

And the dreaded Full Screen BLURRR. 

 

 

Enjoy having all your desktop icons re-arranged after changing your resolution.

[Suzu Fanatic]

I was using a CRT monitor until at least 2011, when my old computer finally died. And since new vid cards supported hdmi - I switched over to my HDTV. I was a bit behind the times, but 4:3 was still pretty mainstream at "least" until 08-09.

I notice the blur/pixalization as well in fullscreen, but not much choice atm, windowed is tiny otherwise~ (unless you mess with desktop reso on top of windowed mode, that actually works well - but it's a pain in the ass.

[sanahtlig]

32 minutes ago, Barktooth said:

I'm also still skeptical that they actually draw CGs in low resolutions.. looking up Grisaia CGs online, some seem to be 2560x1440.

Just speculation, but drawing the CG at a higher resolution doesn't necessarily mean that's the resolution they're meant to be viewed at.  If you say, "I want to view these images at 1440p", then artists might feel compelled to draw at 4k.  Just a possibility I'm imagining.

[Mkilbride]

Nothing blurry here for most VNs. I can go boot up YU-NO from the 90's and play it in perfect quality on my 27'', 1440p monitor. not so with the recent Muv Luv release - i'm insure why, all other VNS look great full screen, except the Steam release of ML.

 

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/179468

 

But say, take F/SN  or Fate / Hollow, both look amazing in fulls screen. almost zero aliasing. Those are 800 x 600 as well.

 

It is abit frustrating. I feel like VNS shouldn't be drawn below 720p these days anymore, and that's at a minimum. They need to think to the future. 4K CG's, downsized to monitors, not 720p ones, upscaled to 4K, ect.

[Barktooth]

1 minute ago, sanahtlig said:

Just speculation, but drawing the CG at a higher resolution doesn't necessarily mean that's the resolution they're meant to be viewed at.  If you say, "I want to view these images at 1440p", then artists might feel compelled to draw at 4k.  Just a possibility I'm imagining.

That's an interesting take on it. In that case it would make sense for them to downscale them for the game, though I don't know why they'd go as low as 800x600. I'm not an artist but I wonder if it's really any harder to draw things at higher resolution though. I doubt they need to add any extra detail, after all, the image itself isn't any bigger, each part of it just has more pixels.

And why do they draw at higher resolutions anyway? I'm guessing either to hide some of the small artefacts when they downscale it.. or maybe they just want to work zoomed in on the smaller details without it turning into pixel art? If it's the former, it would make sense to work at a proportionally higher resolution to what the final game assets will use, but if it's the latter, there's no point in increasing the resolution beyond what the artist feels comfortable with.

 

[ittaku]

It's not the 600p CGs that bother me so much as the 60p mosaics.

[Clephas]

I almost always play VNs windowed... so I honestly never see these problems, except when they let you change the window size manually. 

[wyldstrykr]

who cares about the low resolution ( 800x600 )? i want to play vns in 60fps 

[Narcosis]

There are a couple of factors that need to be taken into consideration:

1. As already mentioned above, HD cg assets cost considerably a lot more than SD ones; in overall, cg is the second most expensive part of game production, straight after VA. You can blame the somewhat stagnant market for such situation.
2. Space limitations. Huge assets take a lot of HDD space, thus resulting in a large game size. Even though we have digital distribution available nowadays, games are still being released on physical storage mediums, mostly DVD's; there's a limit on how much data can be stored (To be precise, it's ~4,2GB of actual data); since costs of physical release on a DL DVD's, not to mention BD's are expotentially higher, it's completely out of question for majority of japanese studios. This more or less means, a game has to fit a single standard DVD.
3. Obsolete standards of work. A lot of companies and studios still rely on very old production standards; they use outdated formats and programming routines; they most often fail at grasping any modern possibilities to actually squish as much as possible from the modern tech and use it to the fullest potential. They use raw bitmaps instead of PNG files, rely on WAV formats instead of OGG Vorbis. This results in ultra high file sizes, virtually bloating assets, that wouldn't otherwise have a difference in case of more modern formats, especially when it comes to their quality.

You'd be actually surprised - a well made, high quality, mid-long vn with HD assets and sound CAN actually easily fit under those 4,2GB; the problem is, japanese devs are way too thickheaded to understand it's not 90's anymore and there's a lot more possiblities nowadays.

[Barktooth]

2 hours ago, wyldstrykr said:

who cares about the low resolution ( 800x600 )? i want to play vns in 60fps 

60FPS isn't enough, I want to see that smooth text fade-in effect in glorious 120FPS  

2 hours ago, Narcosis said:

There are a couple of factors that need to be taken into consideration:

1. As already mentioned above, HD cg assets cost considerably a lot more than SD ones; in overall, cg is the second most expensive part of game production, straight after VA. You can blame the somewhat stagnant market for such situation.
2. Space limitations. Huge assets take a lot of HDD space, thus resulting in a large game size. Even though we have digital distribution available nowadays, games are still being released on physical storage mediums, mostly DVD's; there's a limit on how much data can be stored (To be precise, it's ~4,2GB of actual data); since costs of physical release on a DL DVD's, not to mention BD's are expotentially higher, it's completely out of question for majority of japanese studios. This more or less means, a game has to fit a single standard DVD.
3. Obsolete standards of work. A lot of companies and studios still rely on very old production standards; they use outdated formats and programming routines; they most often fail at grasping any modern possibilities to actually squish as much as possible from the modern tech and use it to the fullest potential. They use raw bitmaps instead of PNG files, rely on WAV formats instead of OGG Vorbis. This results in ultra high file sizes, virtually bloating assets, that wouldn't otherwise have a difference in case of more modern formats, especially when it comes to their quality.

You'd be actually surprised - a well made, high quality, mid-long vn with HD assets and sound CAN actually easily fit under those 4,2GB; the problem is, japanese devs are way too thickheaded to understand it's not 90's anymore and there's a lot more possiblities nowadays.

Well, this about explains it. The third point is interesting, they seriously still use uncompressed bitmaps? No wonder these games are so big. Grisaia is over 6GB, Rewrite 7GB... I suppose they tried to keep things under 4.2GB for all this time, but with those outdated standards that meant no HD assets. Thank god for digital distribution, or we'd still have games coming out with 800x600 resolutions

[wyldstrykr]

1 minute ago, Barktooth said:

60FPS isn't enough, I want to see that smooth text fade-in effect in glorious 120FPS

too bad my monitor and me can afford 60fps.....

[Barktooth]

1 minute ago, wyldstrykr said:

too bad my monitor and me can afford 60fps.....

lol, my monitor is a free CRT I picked up at my school, and it supports up to 160Hz  But seriously, there's no point in running VNs at over 60FPS since there's basically no moving scenes or any kind of motion. My previous comment was sarcastic, I mean, I guess the transitions would be smoother but... who cares?

[Funnerific]

8 hours ago, Eclipsed said:

My Grisaia runs at 720p, idk 'bout chu. 

The Grisaia from fuwanovel's old torrents started with 720p when you first launched it, while the Steam version starts at 576p. The text in the Steam version looks pretty bad too, at least for me. I think they just ported the console version, which would explain it.

[Vorathiel]

All hail LIGHT, company that makes their VNs in glorious 4k and then simply downscalling it too still nice full HD.
Or so I heard. Anybody can confirm this? 

[ChaosRaven]

I'm pretty sure I read in one of MangaGamers blogs (probably one of Doddlers) that eroge artists were used to draw their original art assets in a resolution twice as high as the title will be released.

However, considering that titles like G-Senjou no Maou, Clannad or Akagoei Trinity got high-res versions years later, it's certainly possible to release them with a bigger size. Provided that the Japanese know the existence of compressed image formats like PNG or JPEG, size also shouldn't really matter. But since most VN studios use standard engines, I wouldn't be surprised if the size restriction was an engine constraint.