Using world coordinates instead of pixels

Question

I've been told that having a set pixels-per-world unit number is bad practice because it will not look the same at different resolutions. Because of this, I am trying to learn about using abstract world-space coordinates instead, however I am having some trouble understanding.

I've setup a quick test project for learning this: http://pastebin.com/GiUiR2NS As I understand it, CAM_WIDTH and CAM_HEIGHT should be the dimensions of the world in world units. However, I must be missing something because the end result seems to have made the world 50 pixels by 30 pixels. (My "wall" texture drawn at (0,0) in the bottom left is 16x16 pixels)

I am trying to achieve a view with which I can see 50 walls on the x-axis and 30 on the y-axis. I was able to do this when using direct pixel coordinates and multiplying by 16 (the pixels-per-world-unit number), however as stated before, I don't think I want to use this method anymore because of negative affects at different resolutions.

Answer 1

You need to specify the width and height when you draw the texture.

batch.draw(texture, x, y, width, height);

In your case you want to set the width and height to one since one wall tile is one world unit big. Because you don't specify a width and height the batch uses the width and height of the texture. That is why it covers 16 world units instead of one.