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EeePC Tile Size Cheat Sheet (SVG)

The current EeePC generation uses the typical UMPC minimum resolution of 800x480 pixels. Accordingly to some rumors future generations will most likely use 1024x600. [Update: The resolution has been confirmed. The EeePC 900 has a 8.9" display with a resolution of 1024x600.]

As you can imagine this will cause some issues with full screen 2D games. One can always bi-linearly scale the sprites (or the whole back buffer/FBO), but the blurring may not be desired. After all it's plain ugly. Additionally, it may cause other side-effects such as color bleeding. That is: color values from one frame of the spritesheet may be mixed with the edges of neighbor frames, which causes visible artifacts such as seams or stray pixels.

Fortunately there are a handful of grid sizes which work with both resolutions (see image). While this doesn't really help with pixel art, it makes things a lot easier with pre-rendered 3D sprites or SVG-based artwork.

As you can see in the diagram the aspect ratio of the 1024x600 resolution is off by 24 pixels. 800x480 is 5:3 and the nearest 5:3 resolution would have been 1000x600. This can be addressed with a padding of 12 pixels on both sides, however. With such a high DPI display 12 pixels are almost nothing. E.g. if the diagonal is 9" then 12px would equal 0.091" (2.31mm).

My choice are 16 and 32 pixel cells (20 and 40 pixels respective), because they are a power of two and I like working with that grid size. SVG is also more suited for my needs than pre-rendered 3D stuff. Therefore I'll go with that. Exporting SVGs at different sizes is also very easy. Some manual tweaking might be necessary in some cases for pixel perfect edges tho.

Of course I won't start supporting 1024x600 right away; I just think it's nice to leave that option open. Ironically it only means that I have to use those cell sizes which I would have used anyways. But I think it's good to know all possible grid sizes. Those coarser ones might be interesting for puzzle games for example.

Update: Image fixed. I wrote 800x600 out of habit in the description text.
03/04/2008: The 1024x600 resolution is now official.