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[King Tetiro]

Evening fellas,

Today is something I never thought I would need to worry about. When it comes to developing for the Ouya, something the Ouya guys warn you about is overscan and advice you keep the user interface away from the edges of the screen.

So I have figured out a way to do so and it's very easy for me to implement into the game engine. One problem though is that I haven't worked out margin size between the screen edge and the start of the user interface.

I was thinking of doing it as a %. As that would also allow the overscan prevention to work on other projects. But I am torn on what value to use as the %.

What would you guys use as the % for the top/bottom margin and the left/right margin?

Thanks to all in advance!

[Christian Knudsen]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan#Overscan_amounts

[Gregg Williams]

Almost always its 10% from each edge of the screen for items that can't afford to be cut off. This is the same general rule you also use for Xbox dev, etc.

[King Tetiro]

Well that's sorted the 4:3 and 16:9. But how on earth would I go about sorting out the 14:9 and 4:3 displayed on a 16:9 screen? Any thoughts to working out their overscan margins?

[Gregg Williams]

Are you actually coding support for those modes? I'm not familiar with the Ouya, but on Xbox you often just code at 720p and let the Xbox hardware do all the conversions/scaling for other modes.

[King Tetiro]

Are you actually coding support for those modes? I'm not familiar with the Ouya, but on Xbox you often just code at 720p and let the Xbox hardware do all the conversions/scaling for other modes.

Well I'm using GM for the Ouya so there isn't a direct support for overscan adjustments. So I'm having to program it all myself.

[OniWorld]

Sounds alot like XNA's title safe area, here's some references that might help:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.xna.framework.graphics.viewport.titlesafearea.aspx
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.xna.framework.graphics.viewport.titlesafearea.aspx
• http://tayxsgames.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/xna-lesson-1-titlesafearea/

The last one was really helpful due to this chunk of code:

Code:

iSafeStartX = (int)(graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width * 0.1f);
iSafeStartY = (int)(graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height * 0.1f);
iSafeWidth = (int)(graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width * 0.8f);
iSafeHeight = (int)(graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height * 0.8f);
rectTitleSafeArea = new Rectangle(iSafeStartX, iSafeStartY, iSafeWidth, iSafeHeight);

Just convert that into Java/AS3 and you should be good to go. Good thing I stumbled across this topic, I'm planning on porting the game I'm working on to OUYA also.

Update, converted to AS3 for reference later - might aswell share it:

Code:

var titleSafeArea:Rectangle = new Rectangle(stage.stageWidth * 0.1, stage.stageHeight * 0.1, stage.stageWidth * 0.8, stage.stageHeight * 0.8);