Hi. So I have been working with XNA for a month or two now and I am pretty comfortable with 2D graphics. I have been running my game on the 360, and I can't get my graphics to look as good as I know the 360 is capable of. For those of you unfamiliar, the 360 does a sort of auto-scaling so the images you have on your computer appear about twice as big on the TV (at least with the way I am doing it). My problem is that when I get the images small enough to be the right size on the TV screen, they have poor resolution so they don't look very good. Does anyone have a recommendation for how to fix that? Should I be using a specific image type? Is there a (free or inexpensive) program I can use to save small images of high resolution? Any help is greatly appreciated, this has been a huge holdup for me. Thanks.

 

What do you use currently for image editing? My small team uses GIMP which is a great free solution for image editing. http://www.gimp.org/  I save in .png format though of course you can also use some other formats.  I am pretty sure most if not all of the samples and starter kits for 2D games that are on this site use .png for the file extension.

What resolution are you setting the back buffer to?

Try setting that higher - then the xbox won't have to scale things up so much.

Thanks! I just downloaded GIMP and and going to start using that. As for the question:

The ZMan [MVP/Moderator]:

What resolution are you setting the back buffer to?

I have no idea. What is a back buffer and how do I change it?

The back-buffer is what you are drawing too. You should set your backbuffer size to a good value, i think the default is 800x600 which is not so good. Maybe try 1280x720, a standard HDTV resolution. If you play the game on a non-HD tv, the XBox will scale it down for you :)

In your graphics device manager, you should set the properties 'PreferredBackbufferWidth' and 'PreferredBackbufferHeight'. This should be done in the games constructor.