Hi, dweezil. You still need to decide how you want to handle different aspect ratios. There's no "magic" solution, since there are several different things you might want, depending on context.

The Android screens are tall and skinny compared to the iPhone, so either you crop some iPhone content, or you have extra content on Android. In many cases, the "extra" content can be filler (which is easiest), but in your case you want something at the bottom of the screen. That's your choice.

To find the bottom of the screen on any device, use display.viewableContentHeight. That will tell you the position of the bottom of the screen, in the coordinates used by your app.

Note that the ACTUAL screen size wouldn't help you with this problem, since an app using content scaling is working in SCALED coordinates, which makes the actual device pixels meaningless. Think of it as "virtual pixels" rather than physical pixels.

[Edit: changed "display.contentHeight" to "display.viewableContentHeight"]

@dweezil

If you just want to provide your assets in only 1 resolution (the same assets for all devices) then the solution I would clearly choose is to go with:
1) no base content in config.lua (delete width,height,scale) and 2) relative positioning (using a percentage of display.contentWidth and Height wherever you want to set a x,y coordinate)

Try it, it works...

dweezil,

I had the same issue. I saw no purpose in extending the background which wasn't really a usable part of the screen.

I resolved it by drawing creating a display group with two black rectangles. One rectangle was placed at coordinates (0,-1) to (display.contentWidth,-50) and the other at (0,display.contentHeight+1) to (display.contentWidth, display.contentHeight+50).

You may need to keep pushing the group to the forefront at the end of every draw cycle, which is easy now with object:toFront().

@Corona Team: Would be good if there was an option for this to be done automatically.

@Evank

You say...

display.viewableContentHeight just returns whatever is set in config.lua!

@bedhouin

And you are saying use width and height in config.lua? Also there should be no need to push the filler objects to the front each screen update, just place them in a layer that's at the front.

Also when you say usable part of the screen, of course it's usable if you target the devices real size, for example 480 * 800.

@Ansca

I would really like to see a REAL project of how to do it, as I'm now very confused by the whole thing. So as I understand it you cannot place an object at the bottom of the screen and the top of the screen for all devices. Is that right? If not PLEASE COULD SOMEONE SHOW ME AN ACTUAL WORKING PROJECT!?!?!?!

Seems to me you cannot even have a target build for Android and a different project to build for iPhone as the Android devices are all different in sizes. So it seems that the answer is to target the iOS devices and compromise the Android ones. Is that what others do? Seems mad as all those Android users will be thinking hell this game has black gaps top and bottom. And iPad users thinking hell there are black gaps on the left and right!

This seems to be the only way to ensure the game is 'framed' correctly for iPhone, iPad and Android...

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-- BLOODY FILLERS!
 
local fillTop = display.newRect(0,-1, display.contentWidth,-50)
local fillBottom = display.newRect(0,display.contentHeight+1, display.contentWidth, display.contentHeight+50)
local fillRight = display.newRect(display.contentWidth, 0, display.contentWidth+50, display.contentHeight)
local fillLeft = display.newRect(-1, 0, -50, display.contentHeight)
 
fillTop:setFillColor(0, 0, 0)
fillBottom:setFillColor(0, 0, 0)
fillLeft:setFillColor(0, 0, 0)
fillRight:setFillColor(0, 0, 0)