lordmauve/pgzero

Support high dpi (retina) displays

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#34 opened on Aug 9, 2015

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good first issuemajor

Description

Originally reported by: Daniel Pope (Bitbucket: lordmauve, GitHub: lordmauve)

On high resolution displays, Pygame games designed for low dpi displays come out incredibly tiny. We should detect such displays and apply suitable scaling.

Pygame_sdl2 has some support for high dpi displays though it looks like this just returns a larger surface corresponding to the physical display. We would need to honour the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes in the game and upscale before painting the screen.

This may be slow, so we could look at doing the upscaling in hardware (eg. with Pixel Buffer Objects or Buffer Object Streaming).

Contributor guide

Tech stack
python
Domain
frontendperformance
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
4
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-2 days
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
fresh
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
PythonPygameBasic graphics programming
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
30
Research direction
Investigate pygame sdl2's highdpi support to understand how to detect high DPI displays. Look at pgzero's screen module to see how surfaces are created and blitted. Consider implementing a scaling layer that multiplies game dimensions by the device pixel ratio. For performance, explore using OpenGL pixel buffer objects or buffer object streaming to upscale the screen surface. The maintainers may have additional insights in the linked Bitbucket issue.