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Wotcha, folks.

Currently working my way through "Hands on Dark Basic" and think I've come across another (perhaps) quirky mistake in the book.

It's to do with the chapter on setting up the screen and in particular, the listing on page 375.

In short, the listing is this:



My usual desktop res is 1280x1024x32

When this is run, the text appears incredibly small unless the window is resized, which surely can't be what the authors were after?

This got me thinking, when setting up a porgram to run in a window, is the Set Display Mode command even necessary? I can understand a command to check that the display mode is larger than your windowed app, just not what they've done here!

If anyone can shed any light on how these two commands work together, I'd be very grateful.

...it's just that when you see a published manual telling you something, you think "No, it's gotta be me!"

Much ta.

Tobo.

Set display is how the screen is setup in relationship to pixels and resolution... (normally the higher the resolution the higher the display quality, but you already knew that)

check display mode is only to see if the mode is supported by the end user, some laptops these days use wide screens that make typical display ratios look distorted or stretched...

set display is to force the end user's display settings, as to not default to current desktop screen resoultion...

edit: change your desktop settings and see how your icons go from looking clean at 1280 to big and blocky at lower screen resolutions... Now consider your game (if thats what you plan to build) and how your models, textures, sprites will look at those lower resoutions...

If your planning on making a windowed screen just build your media to be sized accordingly to the smaller viewing area while still reaping the rewards of the better image quality at the higher resoultions...

If you want the text size to be the same in windowed mode as it is normally set the display mode to have the same dimensions as the window size.

Thanks, Daemon. That seems sensible.

So when would you use a display mode of say 800x600 and then a window mode of only 640x480?

It doesn't make sense!


Tobo.