Set Resolution in-game

I'm sure this has been asked before, but I have 2 obvious questions:

1. When you look at every game, there is an options to change the resolution. What exactly is this doing to the images? Is it shrinking the actual rendered image size, or just changing the size of the sprites?

2. Is it possible to implement something like this into construct 2? I feel if someone is playing a C2 game on a 11" screen, and the game was made at 1080p, it's rendering everything so much harder due to the fact that everything is being rendered at the same size.

I would imagine you could do it by changing the canvas size, but that would obviously change the gameplay experience for every player (which should not be the case)

Yes, changing the canvas size is the way to change Resolution. it's up to you to compensate for the fact that everyone will have a slightly different gameplay experience.

Yes, changing the canvas size is the way to change Resolution. it's up to you to compensate for the fact that everyone will have a slightly different gameplay experience.

sqiddster - How do other games usually do this?

My idea is to set the ui elements to the anchor behavior and the let the canvas change without altering any of the art.

Okay so I tried setting project fullscreen to "OFF" and creating a list of all resolutions. Just as a test, I set the resolution to 640 x 480 and set the canvas size to 640 x 480 and requested fullscreen - centered.

Everything looked as if it was shifted to the left and down a bit. What am I doing wrong?

EDIT: I think I'm thinking I'm changing the window size when that's not the case...There's no way to change the project window size, is there?

No! You cant change the windows size at runtime.

Has anyone been able to make a plug-in for this? This seems to be a standard feature in games.