MGE: I think swift's code is neat (and automatic which is great) but commercial 2D games with lots of hand-drawn or pre-rendered 2D art that has to fit on precise screen layouts and HUDs doesn't look good when stretched (or shrunk) - I've tried both. And thus many casual game developers who know polish is king don't want to mess with the graphics that they've shelled out tons to get pixel perfect (except for particle effects which naturally scale all sorts of ways). Perhaps scaling suits some 2D game types better than others (ones with moving instead of static graphics), but you won't find scaling in many commercial casual games at all (go and look, you'll find BAD graphics, but that's not the same) - which is why I've never added it to my framework.
My last game didn't support widescreen at all - I brought the issue up with BFG but they really weren't bothered with supporting it. However, we may add support for the next game. Any method I end up using won't do any scaling (which surely also has a GPU overhead along with the overhead of displaying graphics at a very high resolution (TFT natural res)). I'll find the closest res to the game's res and then use black bars if need be. Just a matter of preference I guess - not saying either is correct...
Actually an interesting point is this: What looks best/worse: scale graphics shown on a TFTs natural resolution OR non-scaled graphics shown on a TFT at something OTHER than its natural resolution?
My last game didn't support widescreen at all - I brought the issue up with BFG but they really weren't bothered with supporting it. However, we may add support for the next game. Any method I end up using won't do any scaling (which surely also has a GPU overhead along with the overhead of displaying graphics at a very high resolution (TFT natural res)). I'll find the closest res to the game's res and then use black bars if need be. Just a matter of preference I guess - not saying either is correct...
Actually an interesting point is this: What looks best/worse: scale graphics shown on a TFTs natural resolution OR non-scaled graphics shown on a TFT at something OTHER than its natural resolution?