how to disable retina image scaling in cocos2d-x framework - iphone

I'm porting my android game to osx I'm having problems on devices with retina display, the sprites are either unnececary scaled or the sprites offset are scaled and not in place, I'd like to have a possibility to control this by myself.
Is it possible to work in retina mode without scale factor, can I somehow enable usage of a full screen 960x640 and with scale factor still set to 1.0?
Could you please tell me how can I do it?

You can disable retinal display in AppDelegate.cpp file. In your didFinishLaunching set RetinaDisplay to false. :) Hope this works

Related

XCode iOS simulator - application is pixelated

I'm a beginner with XCode and I've encountered an issue. When I build my application, it looks fine in the standard iPhone simulator, but when I change the hardware to a retina device, the UI elements of my application become pixelated. How can I fix this?
You're seeing that because the retina screen is stretching the image you're supplying across more points on the screen. You can supply hi-res images in your bundle by appending #2x to the filename
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/reference/UIImage_Class/Reference/Reference.html: "If you load an image from a file whose name includes the #2x modifier, the scale is set to 2.0. You can also specify an explicit scale factor when initializing an image from a Core Graphics image. All other images are assumed to have a scale factor of 1.0. "
Here's a guide to supporting high-resolution screens.
As #RobotWoods mentioned, all images in your app need to have #2x versions.
If you're using OpenGL ES, custom code that creates images, or core animation, you need to make sure your code accounts for the display's scale.
If you're using only standard UIKit elements like UIButton, UILabel, UITableView, etc. then all you need to do is provide the #2x images.
If that doesn't help, please post screenshots and relevant code of what looks blurry.

Cocos2d/Cocos2d-x Retina Issues

I have a multiplatform iOS/Android game that I programmed in Cocos2d-x. I have only one set of images to use (I'm only after high res devices) that get scaled according to the device's resolution. For example all images are for the iPad but if you are using a Galaxy S then the image locations and scaling are affected by GalaxyS_screenWidth/iPadscreenWidth.
This works fine for all Android devices and on iPad, iPad2 and old iPhones, but with Retina iPhone there is a problem. On the iPhone 4 all my images look extremely pixelated, a result from the images being scaled to iPhone non-retina resolution then scaled back up to fill the screen.
I tried enabling Retina Mode and the images are half of their intended size (maybe due to the usage of get winsize() which uses points) and scaling manually causes other sorts of problems. I tried playing with a lot of options and attributes but to no avail, so what should I do now?
EDIT:
This is not only a graphics issue, as text gets automatically scaled down then up and appears pixelated.
EDIT 2:
Fonts are bitmaps so my bad. But I don't want to use retina as all images are already retina by default. All of my images are set up for the iPad so for iPhone 4 I just scale them down a bit. This works with Android phones.
For example I have an image, depending on screen resolution obtained through getwinsize():
If current resolution width is 1024 then image stays the same.
If current resolution width is 900 then image gets scaled by 900/1024, no problem.
If device is iPhone 4 resolution width is 480, so image gets scaled by 480/1024, then cocos2d-x automatically scales the resulting image by 2 thus the pixelation. I tried using getwinsizeinpixels, I tried multiplying the screen size, I tried many things but nothing worked out of the box unless I am to redo many of my code.
So the question is, how can I just let the damn engine treat the iPhone 4 as an Android phone with resolution of 960x640?
If you want Retina resolution images to look like Retina resolution images, then those images need to be in Retina resolution (960x480).
If you first scale down the image to 480x320 and then upscale it on the device, it will of course look blurred. You can't magically make the Retina pixels appear from a lower resolution image by scaling it up.
SI couldn't get to the bottom of it so I employed a hack. I enabled Retina Display then I scaled everything x2 through code except for the text. Sounds stupid, but it worked, and pixelation is gone. Thanks everyone who spent time trying to help me.
I tried enabling Retina Mode and the images are half of their intended size
when you enable retina support, cocos2d gets images by appending #"-hd" to their provided filenames. Such images are meant to be double the "visual" size (in iOS terms, pixels vs. points), so that they can be sort of scaled down to make full use of device resolution.
If you have a look at the CCDirectorIOS class, you will find there a couple of methods dealing with this, especially those dealing with the scalingFactor. I don't know what kind of changes you should do to make it work, but if you step into those methods and look at the value of various objects, you might find a way to modify cocos2D default behavior for your specific case.
If this seems to complicated, one thing you could try is changing the CC_RETINA_DISPLAY_FILENAME_SUFFIX so that cocos2d will not look for specially-named files for the retina iPhone, but just use the normal ones.
For example all images are for the iPad but if you are using a Galaxy S then the image locations and scaling are affected by GalaxyS_screenWidth/iPadscreenWidth.
Another thing you might try is not using winSize, but winSizeInPixels, so that when you scale down, you down do it down to the point resolution, but just to the pixel resolution (which is double the point resolution).
Hope this helps.

Cocos2d iphone app runs oddly on actual iphone

I have a simple application using Cocos2d, and all the images show up fine when running on the simulator. However, when i run it on an iphone, all the images are scaled up and incredible amount, making the game unplayable.
Has anyone got any ideas as to why this is happening, and how to fix it?
You need to consider the possibility that your simulator is running retina. Probably you are trying to display an image that is at the higher resolution on an older, non-retina device.
You can also just add the suffix "-hd" to any image, and then cocos2d will recognize it as being at the higher resolution automatically. But when you actually finish your app you will want to have 2 copies of each image, one at each resolution.
I found out that the problem was that when i initialised the sprite, using spriteWithFile, it set it to a certain size. When i changed the sprites texture later on, it kept the size of the last image, but had a different texture.

Not including non-retina display images in an iPhone project

I have an iPhone Xcode project that currently only contains images for retina display (twice the size as normal and with a #2x.png suffix). When I run the app on the iPhone Simulator (non retina) the images are still being displayed. Does this mean I don't need to worry about including two sets of images: retina and non-retina?
This all seems a bit odd. I would assume that no images would appear on a non retina device if there are no non-#2x files included.
Note: I have not tested my app on a non retina device. Just the simulator.
I'm pretty sure that iOS will just use the #2x and scale it down if you don't have a non-retina graphic. Although that's sub-optimal since you're letting iOS do the scaling at runtime which will be slower than including the non-retina graphic and also iOS might not do as good a job as scaling as your graphics editor of choice.
Even if it works, it's not good practice, and if you have a media heavy app definitely it would impact performance and battery life and memory foot print and ....
By the way, is it just that you don't have the 1x graphics available to you or you are concerned about your apps (download size) or ...
If you are assigning the images in Interface Builder, and you set the image property on a UIImageView to image#2x.png, for example, iOS will not know that it's a high resolution "2x" image. In fact, on a retina display, iOS will look for an image named image#2x#2x.png. Since it won't find it, it will set the scale factor of the image to 1.0.
The contentMode property (just "mode" in XCode) will decide if any scaling of the image occurs to fit the constraints of the UIImageView. You may wish to set the mode to "Aspect Fit" to get the high resolution image to scale as needed for both retina and non-retina displays. In general, the image will display as seen in Interface Builder.
If you are using UIImage's imageNamed or similar function to load the image, and just specify image (where "image.png" doesn't exist, but "image#2x.png" does), then iOS will actually find the image on a non-retina display, though the scale factor will be 1.0. As previously, you'll need to scale it to fit your view. The image will work normally on a retina device, and the scale factor will be set to 2.0, since iOS looks for a "2x" image first, and it doesn't matter if the other file exists or not.
This is from Apple's documentation on imageNamed:
On a device running iOS 4 or later, the behavior is identical if the
device’s screen has a scale of 1.0. If the screen has a scale of 2.0,
this method first searches for an image file with the same filename
with an #2x suffix appended to it. For example, if the file’s name is
button, it first searches for button#2x. If it finds a 2x, it loads
that image and sets the scale property of the returned UIImage object
to 2.0. Otherwise, it loads the unmodified filename and sets the scale
property to 1.0. See iOS App Programming Guide for more information on
supporting images with different scale factors.
If at all possible, you really should include both retina and non-retina images. Using higher-resolution images than necessary negatively affects memory and performance.

AVFoundation Camera Preview Screen gives wrong zoom

I'm currently developing an app that has a camera functionality, with a custom camera screen, featuring a preview screen and an overlay.
I'm using the AVFoundation classes and methods as per the eradication of UIScreenCapture.
The problem I have is that the preview data I get from AVCaptureSession is too zoomed in. If i take a picture with that screen, and another with the iPhone's default camera app, without moving the iPhone, the difference in zoom is far too much.
I need the zoom of my app to be the same as is default for iPhone camera app.
I've tried changing the AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer.videoGravity, to any of it's 3 possible values, to no avail.
Please, any leads on this problem are truly appreciated.
Arcantos' solution was mostly correct. That will work assuming you're on an iPhone 3G (or any device with a camera that supports 640x480). An iPhone 4 may run into some issues there.
A more correct way would be to test for the availability of and apply this preset:
captureSession.sessionPreset = AVCaptureSessionPresetPhoto;
This will use the raw camera data, regardless of the native resolution.
Turned out to be a resolution issue.
It was fixed by using
myCaptureSession.sessionPreset = AVCaptureSessionPreset640x480
Note that iPhone 3g does not support that, so you have to ask wheter the device supports it
[[AVCaptureDevice defaultDeviceWithMediaType:AVMediaTypeVideo] supportsAvCaptureSessionPreset:AVCaptureSessionPreset640x480]
Is the aspect ratio of your preview pane identical to that of the camera capture data? If not, the OS may be changing the zoom to fit the data rect into your requested aspect ratio.