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Author Topic: I need brave testers with wide screens  (Read 36609 times)

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xelanoimis

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Re: I need brave testers with wide screens
« Reply #45 on: July 31, 2008, 11:12:06 PM »

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 :)
« Last Edit: July 31, 2008, 11:15:23 PM by xelanoimis »
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DocBass

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Re: I need brave testers with wide screens
« Reply #46 on: August 02, 2008, 11:09:17 PM »

Hi Mnemonic-

Any luck on why the maintain ratio option would disappear?
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Mnemonic

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Re: I need brave testers with wide screens
« Reply #47 on: August 13, 2008, 08:45:53 PM »

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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Spellbreaker

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Re: I need brave testers with wide screens
« Reply #48 on: September 25, 2008, 07:41:57 PM »

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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Darky

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Re: I need brave testers with wide screens
« Reply #49 on: September 25, 2008, 09:28:03 PM »

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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odnorf

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Re: I need brave testers with wide screens
« Reply #50 on: September 25, 2008, 09:45:47 PM »

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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Spellbreaker

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Re: I need brave testers with wide screens
« Reply #51 on: September 28, 2008, 07:43:11 PM »

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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DocBass

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Re: I need brave testers with wide screens
« Reply #52 on: October 25, 2008, 12:34:52 AM »

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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Mnemonic

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Re: I need brave testers with wide screens
« Reply #53 on: October 26, 2008, 06:04:25 PM »

Ok, I finally released a new version with updated widescreen support. LINK
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