Wintermute Engine Forum
Wintermute Engine => Technical forum => Topic started by: Mnemonic on July 18, 2008, 06:54:13 PM
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Hi folks, I've been working on widescreen support lately. The idea is, if you run 4:3 game on a widescreen monitor, the settings dialog will offer you a check-box titled "Maintain aspect ratio". If you enable this option and run the game in full-screen, it will not use the original resolution, but a nearest higher widescreen resolution and black bars will be added to the extra space. That way screen distortion is avoided.
This feature also works the other way around, i.e. 16:9 game running on 4:3 monitor (such as Chess Worlds).
However, since I don't have a widescreen monitor, and since this feature required quite large changes to WME renderer, I'm asking for your help with testing before I make this build "official". If you have a widescreen monitor and you'd like to test, please download the testing WME build (http://dead-code.org/download/wme_test_widescreen.zip). Unzip the files to your WME installation folder (you can either backup the original files or reinstall WME 1.8.6 update later to get back).
Once installed, please try WME Demo and WME Demo 3D (and possibly your own game) to see if it offers you the "maintain aspect ratio" check-box and if the games work correctly with the option enabled.
Please post your experience in this thread. Thanks!
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tested and works great! Thanks ::beer ::beer ::beer ::beer ::beer ::beer ::beer ::beer
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I tried a widescreen project (1280x800) on my not widescreen monitor and it also works. Alien feature! ::slug
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Here i am brave tester !!
chess worlds is working fine (1280 *800)
just two things ...
it starts on my secondary monitor ...
and the mouse can get off screen .. that meens behind the top and bottom bar ... could this be avoided ?
but this is a very cool feature wich will make it so much easier for us !
thanks very much for the work !!
i have to think about adding a god like creature to our game and call it mneomnic ! by the way ... would you like it to become part of chess-worlds population ?
so no i dare to take a bath , brave tester that i am ...
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It should offer you two devices, one for each monitor. And in full-screen in multimon environment the mouse pointer is locked to one monitor. That's intentional and it has always been like that, actually.
by the way ... would you like it to become part of chess-worlds population ?
Oh that would be cool, so far I only appeared in Bloody Christmas (and Five lethal demons:))
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I ran both WME Demo and WME Demo 3D and choosing "Maintain aspect ratio" caused the games to be centered in the middle of my widescreen monitor (bars on the sides and also above and below the game screen) in what seemed to be their original resolution. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "nearest higher widescreen resolution"...
Not selecting "Maintain aspect ratio" ran the games stretched to the entire area of my widescreen monitor.
On a side note, thanks for implementing this feature. I always believed it was a very important feature for those whose video cards do not support not scaling the image in full-screen mode.
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I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "nearest higher widescreen resolution"...
WME checks the aspect ratio of your desktop. Then it tries to find a resolution with the same aspect ratio, which is closest to the original game resolution. That's how it's supposed to work.
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So if my desktop's resolution is 1680x1050 and I'm running the 800x600 WME Demos, what is the expected behavior on the part of the engine? Is it ok that I see the original/unstretched game surrounded by black bars on all four sides or did you expect a different behavior? Don't get me wrong, the way I see it, running it like that (completely unstretched) is the best way to go.
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This worked great on my widescreen laptop (1280x800) with my own project - haven't tested anything else.
The stretching was bugging me quite a bit, so well done for fixing this! ;D
Out of curiosity, is there any reason for even giving the option NOT to maintain aspect ratio? I can't imagine any situation where I wouldn't want to.
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I tried this out and it worked great. We might be changing our game over to native widescreen now as a result since the gameplay area has always been widescreen anyway. One thing...I ran it in the engine and I got the maintain aspect ratio option, but after I closed the window and tried it again the window went away. Would there be an option, by chance, to play at the native res and still utilize the full screen? So if you have a 1280x720 game and you're playing on a 1680x1050 monitor, the game would remain at 1280x720 and be surrounded by black space when in full screen mode? Or perhaps the option to scale the game to lower than native resolutions for people with older monitors (I know, you're probably sick of hearing this)? ;D
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So if my desktop's resolution is 1680x1050 and I'm running the 800x600 WME Demos, what is the expected behavior on the part of the engine? Is it ok that I see the original/unstretched game surrounded by black bars on all four sides or did you expect a different behavior?
I guess it depends on what resolutions your video card / monitor offer. If there's no other resolution with 16:10 aspect ratio in between, the engine will end up using the native resolution. Perhaps the algorithm should be more benevolent and use also 16:9 resolutions on 16:10 monitors?
Out of curiosity, is there any reason for even giving the option NOT to maintain aspect ratio? I can't imagine any situation where I wouldn't want to.
I can think of several reasons right now:
1) people prefer if the video driver does the dirty job instead
2) non-standard/misconfigured machines causing wrong detection
3) there may still be bugs in wme :)
Would there be an option, by chance, to play at the native res and still utilize the full screen?
It would be possible now. The question is, how to know what native resolution is, or rather recognizing CRT monitors and not offering this option for them.
Or perhaps the option to scale the game to lower than native resolutions for people with older monitors (I know, you're probably sick of hearing this)? ;D
Sorry, no scaling. That would require tremendous amounts of work and it's not worth it, IMO. There is a possibility to let DirectX scale the screen automatically, which is virtually for free, but the result looks very ugly.
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Or perhaps the option to scale the game to lower than native resolutions for people with older monitors (I know, you're probably sick of hearing this)? ;D
Sorry, no scaling. That would require tremendous amounts of work and it's not worth it, IMO. There is a possibility to let DirectX scale the screen automatically, which is virtually for free, but the result looks very ugly.
Understood. Well perhaps if people want to use small monitors they should be forced to suffer through those results. 0:)
Also, I'm getting a lot of crashes in SceneEdit now. Just FYI I guess.
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Also, I'm getting a lot of crashes in SceneEdit now. Just FYI I guess.
Hmm, crashes when doing what? Any reproducible steps?
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I guess it depends on what resolutions your video card / monitor offer. If there's no other resolution with 16:10 aspect ratio in between, the engine will end up using the native resolution. Perhaps the algorithm should be more benevolent and use also 16:9 resolutions on 16:10 monitors?
I believe then that you should offer two check boxes instead of one: The first would be "Maintain original resolution" that would use the original game resolution surrounded by black bars on all sides, while the second would be "Maintain aspect ratio" that would use the nearest higher resolution with the game's aspect ratio.
If I understand correctly, using only the "Maintain aspect ratio" check box as it exists now in this test version, it may not be possible to run a game in its original resolution.
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Also, I'm getting a lot of crashes in SceneEdit now. Just FYI I guess.
Hmm, crashes when doing what? Any reproducible steps?
Yeah its after I've saved a scene and hit close. It will crash after that. It's not every time but its a fairly high ratio. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.
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I believe then that you should offer two check boxes instead of one: The first would be "Maintain original resolution" that would use the original game resolution surrounded by black bars on all sides, while the second would be "Maintain aspect ratio" that would use the nearest higher resolution with the game's aspect ratio.
Wouldn't it be equal to "use native resolution" as suggested by DocBass above?
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Anyone else is getting crashes in SceneEdit? I can't seem to be able to reproduce it.
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Wouldn't it be equal to "use native resolution" as suggested by DocBass above?
Yes, I meant the same thing. I just wanted to point out that this suggested option is slightly different than the one we are testing at the moment. One is "Maintain original/native resolution" while the other is "Maintain aspect ratio".
SceneEdit seems stable on my machine, btw.
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"Original resolution" in reference to what, though? The resolution of the actual game viewport is always the same. What changes is the resolution of the visible area, i.e. the amount of blank (black) pixels around the game viewport, so to say.
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i dont have any option to choose between my two monitors.
if i start the game it gives me the option for the aspect ratio and then it starts on the wrong monitor. my secondary !
and i did mean the mouse is geting behind the top and bottom bar that is created to keep the aspect ratio.
Keeping the mouse on one monitor is a good thing, i didnt mean that ...
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In the combo-box with video card selection, there's only one item? What about in the previous WME version?
Anyone else with multi-monitor configuration can confirm this, please?
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no i have the usual items:
display device
colors
antialiasing / use hardware t&l
plus Maintain aspect ratio ( this is new to me )
but there is no icon where i can choose between my monitors. should there ?
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"Display device" should contain two items, one for each monitor.
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I've been testing various games (800x600 and 1024x768) at various monitor resolutions up to 1680x1050 with maintain aspect ratio checked and unchecked. Everything worked as expected. That's the good news.
The bad news is that I ran into some other problems when I kept the test version of WME installed and started working on copies of my projects. Over time going in and out of the game in Debug mode, I ran into several problems. I'll report them, but don't know how helpful it will be since trying to reproduce these is going to be tough.
1) After pressing Esc to display menu, lost mouse pointer and had to end game in task manager. (This happened twice, and had never happened to me before with WME.)
2) Several times game froze and had to end using task manager. Rebooted, restarted project manager and was able to run same game fine without changes, so it seems to be some kind of memory leak? (This happened 3-4 times, and had never happened to me before with WME.)
3) Huge slow down. It got so that it took four or five minutes to start a small game. (I've had some problems with this before, but never to this extent. In the past I always thought it was DirectX related since this computer - a Dell E1505 Dual Core with ATI Mobility Radeon X1400-- has problems I attribute to Dell's non-existant graphic card driver updates.)
I hope this is the kind of feedback you wanted. If I can nail things down any better, I'll let you know.
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I hope this is the kind of feedback you wanted. If I can nail things down any better, I'll let you know.
Well... not exactly :) This is not the kind of regression I'd expect from this update. The changes happened in renderer only. Are we talking about 2D or 2.5D game?
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I hope this is the kind of feedback you wanted. If I can nail things down any better, I'll let you know.
Well... not exactly :) This is not the kind of regression I'd expect from this update. The changes happened in renderer only. Are we talking about 2D or 2.5D game?
Oh yeah if it helps at all our game is 2D only. If you want I could give you all the crash info next time it happens. I hope you keep this feature, we have decided to go widescreen native as a result. It was our original desire to do so but didn't because relatively few people have widescreen LCD's but now this works out great :).
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my display device offers me only one solution my Nvidia Geforce 8800. when i remember correctly the previous version gave me two opions ..
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Also it would be nice if we could force to maintain the aspect ratio and not give the user the choice to distort the image. I can't imagine when that would be desirable really...
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Also it would be nice if we could force to maintain the aspect ratio and not give the user the choice to distort the image. I can't imagine when that would be desirable really...
ATI drivers for HD series (2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx) has new (a few months old) similar feature that works better in some cases (maintain aspect ratio, hardware accelerated scaling & full scale with borders only at one side). Those users (like me) will probably prefer to disable the wme option.
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while testing a scene i found that if i run my game in windowed mode i can choose between two grafikcards (monitors)
if i run in non windowmode i only have one grafikcard (monitor). So i cant choose. And this is my secondary monitor ...
hope this helps
greets
stucki
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I've retested with three different computers, and ran into no problems at all. As I said before, I think the problem is with that particular Dell notebook.
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I have lost the ability to select maintain aspect ratio. Both in the engine and after compiling the game. Not sure why it happened, it just went away.
It has something to do with my project file because I get the option on other projects, like the demo. Yep. After opening a few other project files they all had the option. Just our main project has lost the ability, and I cannot figure out why. What would cause this? I hope it's nothing too major since we've decided to switch to a widescreen aspect ratio :P
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Tested without problems. And I must add that this feature is a VERY good idea. I hate to see games distorted on widescreen monitors.
Mikael
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For some reason i don't even get the ratio option to check.
I unpacked to the wme install folder.
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For some reason i don't even get the ratio option to check.
I unpacked to the wme install folder.
You mean like there is no additional option on the startup screen? Try creating a new project and running it immediately and see if it comes up then. I am having the same issue with my current project.
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Tried it but it didn't work Doc
Cheers ::beer
Myles Blasonato.
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Hey Mnemonic, any idea why this could be occuring? I've tried to solve it on my end but I can't figure out what it would be. I went through the scene files in a text editor and couldn't really find anything, and I'm not sure if it would be anything within the game files themselves.
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I'm encountering a real issue when I try to alt-tab out of a running game.
Normally I've been able to do this fine.
What basically happens, is the game screen stays visible, but mouse control returns to windows - I ctrl-alt-del but can't see the task manager because the game still has control of the display. In the end my only options was to hard reset.
This is reproducible every time on my Toshiba laptop.
Please let me know if I can give you any more info.
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(just a little note: Mnemonic is currently away for a few days so he can't help with those problems right now. Just have patience or invite a brain parasite ::slug ::slug)
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I'm back. I'll have to make another build with some detailed logging of what's going on inside, otherwise I really have no idea why if should stop working all of a sudden (unless you're running an old version of wme).
serializer: As far as I know, this is a DirectX or driver issue. I've seen it myself and it happens if the game uses the same resolution/color depth as desktop (which can easily happen now when using the aspect ratio feature). I believe it works in Vista, but I can't say for sure.
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I did a bunch more testing today and decided I needed to be very methodical to try to figure out when some strange things were happening. This may be overkill, but I thnk it is important because it does impact on how players will see your game at different game and display resolutions.
1) I started with a matrix with 9 game resolutions across the top (columns), and 9 display resolutions along the side (rows). The idea is to try all of the combinations of these game and display resolutions.
2) I created a simple project with a default scene for each of the different monitor resolutions:
a) Background is the size of the display resolutions.
b) Floor is the size of the display resolution.
3) Then I looped through the following:
- For each display resolution:
-- Make the corresponding scene (see 2 above) the startup scene
-- for each game resolution (set at top lhs of project manager), run the game observing:
--- was the Maintain aspect ration option displayed (Y/N)
--- Screen capture of the display.
--- If the background isn't totally visible, does it scroll when the actor moves?
--- Any other problems?
I recorded the results in a spreadsheet. A pdf printout of it is here:
http://fisherbee.com/knbShare/aspectRatio.pdf (http://fisherbee.com/knbShare/aspectRatio.pdf)
You'll notice if you look at the resulting spreadsheet, that the way the scene is displayed is sometimes hard to predict. In particular, it is hard to predict when the game will be displayed centered on the display, when it will be displayed at the top left. (IMO, it should always be centered.) I highlighted the wide game resolutions (columns) in yellow and the wide display resolutions (rows) in pink, and that does seem to be one important factor.
You cannot set the width of the game resolution higher than 1600.
Sometimes the game mysteriously switched to windowed mode -- sometimes only window mode was available, sometimes the next time I ran I could turn window mode off.
Sometimes I didn't get the "Maintain aspect ratio" option one time, but the next time I would. Didn't seem to be any particular pattern for this.
I'm sure I made some errors, because there was a lot to do and not much time to do it. Still, it seems to point to some potential problems.
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Warmblood I play our game on my 24 inch widescreen just fine 1920x1200, unless you're referring to something else when you mention the max res width.
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@DocBass - Are you talking about game resolution or display resolution?
When I open Project manager and change the resolution width (along LHS, under Startup settings) to something > 1600 -- for example, 1680. I get an error message "'Resolution - width' must be a number between 320 and 1600." Of course I am able to use a higher resolution display -but it didn't show the full 1680x1050 background in my test -- the background scrolled.
Are you saying you can get a non-scrolling background bigger than 1600 to work? Do you hand edit the project start up options? ( I'm afraid to -- assuming that the 1600 limit is not just arbitrary -- although it may be an artifact of earlier technology limits.)
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Checkbox "maintain aspect ratio" is cool! (tested on laptop)
This bug (http://forum.dead-code.org/index.php?topic=2852.0) is fixed! Cool!
Mnemonic, you rock ::rock :)
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@DocBass - Are you talking about game resolution or display resolution?
When I open Project manager and change the resolution width (along LHS, under Startup settings) to something > 1600 -- for example, 1680. I get an error message "'Resolution - width' must be a number between 320 and 1600." Of course I am able to use a higher resolution display -but it didn't show the full 1680x1050 background in my test -- the background scrolled.
Are you saying you can get a non-scrolling background bigger than 1600 to work? Do you hand edit the project start up options? ( I'm afraid to -- assuming that the 1600 limit is not just arbitrary -- although it may be an artifact of earlier technology limits.)
My apologies, I thought you simply meant scaling the screen to be larger. I have not tried to do a game wider than 1600 natively.
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It's great that you're adding support for wide screen. It's becoming standard these days.
Here are some thoughts from another developer who looked into this:
1. it is custom to consider the native resolution of a LCD monitor to be the one currently selected in Windows.
If you want max quality, the game should be able to run at this resolution.
Maybe for a game the difference in size, between the game's resolution and this native LCD resolution, is not so big. A player might want it this way, instead of having an intermediate resolution set, that would produce bad scaling on most of the LCD.
2. It would be great if you could have screen scale inside the engine. With an additional filtering option, this can be a blessing to low resolution games. You could run a 320x200 game in the huge native resolution of a 24" monitor, and keep the sharp pixel aspect of the original resolution. In my engine this was a must, to keep the retro look. It was a bit tricky to do the right pixel perfect rendering, but it works great.
An idea with the engine scaling is to render the game in a render target and show it as a post process step, with scale, filter, tv effects and whatever one wants. This may be tricky for old video cards, but it could be an option.
3. Another thing I have in my engine is a "fake full screen". I keep the game windowed, but I resize it on the whole desktop (no borders). Then I scale the content as much as possible, maintaining the game's aspect. This is fast, and somehow better integrated with Windows (no flickering changes on CRT, no smart background popping messages, like Yahoo messenger does to some games, easy alt+tab, etc)
4. top quality LCD monitors have hardware scaling options and they can set any resolution, with or without scale or filtering, keeping the monitor in the native resolution. But these monitors are quite expensive and I don't think we'll see such features in common monitors soon.
5. dual monitors are a real pain, and you can't predict how they work on every system. Some things can be fixed from the driver, though. Best thing is to try to stick to the official DX and WinAPI guides and recommend driver solutions.
Good luck with it!
Alex
[EDIT]
P.S. cool idea: users donate some money and you buy yourself a big wide monitor :)
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Hi Mnemonic-
Any luck on why the maintain ratio option would disappear?
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Thanks a lot for the feedback, folks. I hope to get a new build ready for you soon, with some changes and detailed logging. That should give us more info for solving potential problems.
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Thanks a lot for the feedback, folks. I hope to get a new build ready for you soon, with some changes and detailed logging. That should give us more info for solving potential problems.
Any news on that Topic?
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I'm curious too.
Also what I'd like to know is if I could start a game with the current build and if I can safely upgrade Wintermute + my project once the new build comes out? I'd love to get widescreen support... I hate to play in window mode ;)
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I'm curious too.
Also what I'd like to know is if I could start a game with the current build and if I can safely upgrade Wintermute + my project once the new build comes out? I'd love to get widescreen support... I hate to play in window mode ;)
This version with widescreen support features should have no compatibility issues.
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Hi there!
Some questions:
1. Why can't I select fullscreen mode when running a game when I enter a 16:9 resolution?
2. Why can't WME simply query the hardware for available Resolutions and calculate the right one? For example, my screen has a native resolution of 1680x1050.
When I run a project with the resolution 1024x768, I have borders all around it.
Why doesn't it run in 1366x768 resultion (sxga) and only have black borders left and right?
When I run a project with the 16:9 resolution 1280x800 ( wxga ), WME doesn't even allow me to select Fullscreen mode when running the Game.
My specs:
Windows XP SP3
LG Flatron W2242T
GeForce 8800GT
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Any word on why my current game project lost the ability to maintain aspect ratio when starting up? It worked for awhile and just vanished. I was never able to figure it out.
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Ok, I finally released a new version with updated widescreen support. LINK (http://forum.dead-code.org/index.php?topic=3185)