Best Screen Resolution

Nope, it is due to the size of the game vs the size of your monitor. Also many of those games are force changing your resolution to be the old resolution of the game before they run too, which is why they look so sharp. It's very easy to do too, in Windows you can check an option to run a game at 640 x 480 and it will change your resolution for your screen to be 640 x 480 as well while the game is running.

So what we really need is an option to set the resolution of the system we are running on to what our game is. That would fix everything. I know it can be done, Windows has a setting for it, and when I programmed in DOS we used to set our resolutions ourselves and that is what we got, no OS set it for us.

My game Shooty and the Catfish which was made in MV at a resolution of 480x432 looks sharp in its window when stretched to 1080p+ because of a plugin I used that disables the engines forced aliasing (and while its not pixel perfect at 4k its not off enough to be noticeable). Its a practicably unplayable blurry mess without the plugin enabled as soon as you increase the window size to even double. The fact the plugin works as well as it does should be all the proof you need that these games can indeed be scaled, its a rendering pipeline decision on the engines developers end.

Edit: Apologies, I disabled the aliasing through modifying the games core index file.

1080 / 432 = 2.5, which is why it scaled well. You picked a good resolution to scale up with to that resolution. Resolutions that when you divide 1080 by them and get an integer or 0.5 usually scale well, which is why we usually suggest certain resolutions for that reason.

Again, you would need to debunk YEARS of established math and image change research here, as the math just does not support it for EVERY resolution out there. 1080p might be good, but what about 900p? Or even 480p? Or what if 1220p comes out tomorrow? Or even something unusual like 1183p? The only guarantee is to force the monitor to change to the resolution of the game. In fact, that was standard up until say 1995 or so (about the time of Windows 95).

Perhaps having the engine come with a handful of templated resolution options designed to emulate specific systems of the past along with a more modern 16:9 aspect ratio would be a better method to allow people to get creative as opposed to the current system of having an odd default that isnt 4:3 or 16:9 and making users come to forums to try to find out what custom resolution would be best.

@VisitorsFromDreams : That would be a great idea! I myself never understood why they used 48 x 48 tiles too as that doesn't scale well into too many other resolutions, nor does the default resolution. I find ACE's 32 x 32 tiles scales better than MV's tile size myself!

Agreed, 48x48 isnt common in any other engine either, I guess they were worried about things being too small at higher resolutions with 32x32? But even the, theres ways of working around like 64x64 or 32x64 character sprites.

1440 x 768 Game resolution
1920 x 1080 or 1768 x 992 screen resolution.

If i am using photoshop to do an overlay i base the size of my texture on the size of my map.
Example:
48 x 40 =1920
48 x 25 =1200

So far not had any issues but my balance was a mixture of: wanting a limited on-screen view so players can't see the entire map, keeping the details from blurring too much, staying within the 48 pixel ratio, eliminating the black borders and lastly my love for filling up my entire screen.

768 x 432 (16 x 9 tiles) and 1536 x 864 (32 tile x 18 tiles) Are 16:9 and divisible by 48.

This thread aged well.

I'm currently using MZ, and I'm considering between 1280x720 or 1366x768. I was testing out Visustella's menu plug-in. I wrote a profile description for a character, which took up one line of the description box. When I check the status menu, it nicely fit in for 1366x768, instead of getting cut-off like with 1280x720. Nothing else looks too different. I think I noticed the huds being slightly smaller in battle at 1366x768, but still okay.

Which one should I stick with, and is there anything I need to look out for?

Edit: Crap! Didn't realize this was in MV section. My bad. XD

For my project, I run a 960x540 resolution, which displays 20x11 tiles in-game (w/ a tiny bit extra on the top/bottom). This also fullscreens beautifully at 1920x1080 resolution. I also disabled the blur effect, but not via a plugin. I simply added this line of code into index.html:
...which goes right below this line of code:

The 20x11 tile setup works perfectly for me since I wanted the dungeon maps cut up into smaller chunks. Basically, it's 1 encounter per map (which are more like rooms like old school Zelda). Town maps I keep as a single large map though.

I noticed everyone is trying to make their resolutions a multiple of 48. I used to fall for the same logic but realized you don't actually have to do it that way. The 960x540 resolution I use, for instance, is exactly 20 tiles wide, but can also display 11.25 tiles in height. That's why I simply round down to 11 for my dungeon maps. This leaves a 12px black bar/border on the top & bottom, which is barely visible and honestly looks like it's part of the phone's screen or the theatrical bar/border you see in movies. UI can still utilize the extra 24 pixels though (12px top & 12px bottom). But anyway, the whole point was so I could fullscreen at 1920x1080 w/o any stretching since it's a pixel-perfect 2x multiplier.

Currently for me the sweet spot is 1104 x 624, widescreen without your art going all fuzzy.

Just pay attention to your full screen animations. It seems like in my game when I went from 1240x650 to 1280x720 some of my full screen animations started having a blank spot on the sides, even when I increased their size to max.

Interesting topic, I recently got into MV and was wondering the same thing on resolution since 4k has been new standard. Even smartphones have pushed past Full HD. I remeber trying a older RPG maker game and it not scaling right and looking ugly and scaled out of frame.

Does higher resolution in RPG Maker games require more processing power? Because a lot of MV games push the limit on most PC's as it is, with just 720p. I mean, there isn't really a point as long as they are 16:9. It's not like your going to add hi-res texture packs.

I think what you can do is find a way to export the end product in the appropriate resolution according to device. I have this handy-dandy reference from one of Yanfly's videos.

Edit: And to the point of modern 4K and UHD standards, I will say with RPG Maker Sprites or just normal sprites that aren't detail-oriented or incredibly lush with detail, there's only so much the resolution can do for your pixely game. It's really an aesthetic you have to not have issues with, you know the retro style games.

I like the default resolution, but I would prefer a resolution of 320x240, integer scaling, and a CRT Pixel Shader.

Is it best to develop two versions of a module--one for desktop and one for mobile?

As you know or I hope, mobile devices are relatively small, although they are. capable of supporting large resolutions, their screen only has approximately 800px in height and some more like 1200px, based on this that they advise me for my smartphone game, to use a resolution of 816x376 which would maintain an aspect of approximately 16.5x9, based on the modern screens or use a larger resolution

Some smartphones are full HD I think.

But yeah sprite size matters a lot.

What about MZ?