Ideas and Thoughts: Choose Your Own Resolution

28-Jan-98

And no, I don't mean some "interactive movie", ala Choose Your Own Adventure books... I mean resolution as in graphics, and then some.  In any case, it made a snazzy title.

Wouldn't it be nice to personalize the graphics in a game?  I don't mean the 64DD type of personalizing, with your own face, etc.  I mean making the graphics go as you'd like them to go.  Envision an Option screen, with the choice Graphics.  Within you could alter the way graphics are done in the game.  Perhaps you hate fog, so you'd lower that, and extend the horizon.  Perhaps you're more concerned with smooth animation, so you'd make sure it gave a favorable frame rate.

Of course, we'd LIKE to see all things at the max, wouldn't we?  But this just isn't possible.  So when you'd make something higher with one of the choices, but would be more than the system could handle, the rest would all lower an equal %.  So you would have to work at it to get it just right for you.

About the resolution, I've heard that higher resolutions take more RAM.  I don't know any specifics on this, but if whatever game this was also made to take advantage of the extra 4 MB RAM that will be included with the 64DD if there (which I think is a good idea at any rate), it'd make it that much easier.  Otherwise the higher resolution options would mean a higher penalty in other areas...

But there should be things other than the frame rate, resolution, polygonal model detail, fog/horizon, and those kinds of things.  What do I mean?  Well, for instance, there's a code for FIFA '98 that removes the stadium, which in turn improves the frame rate quite a bit.  So you could remove some of the extra things like that, and end up with the rest of it being better if you so pleased.  It's all about choice, eh?

But mightn't this make newer games less graphic-wise?  I mean, it'd have the same options and all, and you could get them to look the same, right?  But they wouldn't.  The way newer games have better graphics is they learn better ways to program and basically make games for the system, right?  Well, it'd be like that.  What do I mean?  Well, remember when I said once one of the choices got too high, the others would go down accordingly?  Well, for a better programmed game, the others wouldn't have to go down as soon, see what I'm saying?  Well, I guess that's about all I have to say for you to see for now.  'Cept, of course, for the fact that right below this is a picture semi-illustrating my idea.  You can see how there's a sliding bar for most of the things, but below is where you can turn some things on/off, and as you can see, for this I've decided to play without the optional rocks and birds.

Joshua Slone has never danced with the devil in the pale moonlight.