scenarios looks cutted at 320x240

[JQ]

when I ran my game at 320x240, the scenario looks cutted at the left, but it is drawed at 320x240, how can i solve that?

[Ashen]

You mean there's a bit of the background missing on the left of the screen? Try running your game in a window and seeing if it still happens. This has been reported on a couple of monitors (mine included) when running in fullscreen, but windowed mode clears it up.

[JQ]

you were right, but in other monitors, it shall run normally, no?

[Gilbert]

Also, try messing with the settings (usually the buttons/knobs/whatever in front of the monitor) of the monitor and see if the screen can be positioned correctly.

[Monsieur OUXX]

This has been reported on a couple of monitors (mine included) when running in fullscreen, but windowed mode clears it up.

Yeah, it's not really an AGS issue: the problem comes from the fact that modern monitors manufacters don't make sure that the display runs 100% fine in older resolutions (320x240...) : when Windows swaps from hi-res to lo-res, the monitor does not calibrate properly and the image is not well centered, and therefore truncated.

[JQ]

thanks

[WarpZone]

Would it be possible to for the AGS maintainers to address this problem?  For example, by adding a new display mode that runs 320x200 content at 640x480 or higher?  Just a thought.  It seems to have worked out nicely for some emulators I've seen.  Depending on how you scale up the write buffer, you could even get cheap special effects, such as anti-aliasing, scanlines, or even bloom effects!

Of course, I have no idea what graphical libraries are under the hood of AGS.  (I get the impression, nothing hardware accelerated.)  But from what I can tell  from 7 Days A Skeptic, simple software rescales with no anti aliasing are already being used in some games.  I'm thinking at the very least they could apply that type of scaling to the buffer and get a faux-fullscreen mode for those poor souls with tragically cutting-edge hardware.

[GarageGothic]

Would it be possible to for the AGS maintainers to address this problem?  For example, by adding a new display mode that runs 320x200 content at 640x480 or higher?

You'll be happy to know that this actually already exists in the setup. It's called graphics filters, and if you run a 320x240 game with a 2x nearest neighbour filter, it's in fact displaying in 640x480 resolution. The smoothing filters however require the game to be created in 32-bit color. I think it's only supported since v. 2.72 however, so with older games you're out of luck.

Edit: I did actually manage to get 7 Days a Skeptic to run with filters. Rename the game .exe to ac2game.ags, then copy acwin.exe from AGS 2.72 into the game folder. Run "acwin.exe --setup" to open the setup screen and choose a filter from the drop-down menu. The game starts, but I'm not sure if there'll be any problems later on. And it looks pretty much the same as the game would if you just ran it normally with 640x480 resolution selected. Also, the game is 16-bit, so no high quality filters are available.

[Khris]

Actually, the game.exe has to be renamed to "ac2game.dat".

Choosing 640 and using the x2 filter isn't exactly the same; the filter upscales only the output while using the 640-res messes with the game itself (e.g. character scaling makes use of the additional 3 pixels).

Btw, I was running Art of Theft using the 2.72 engine but unfortunately the game always crashed at the beginning of level 4 so I had to go back to running the original exe.
Using the newer engine did work fine for every other game so far though.

[GarageGothic]

Naming it ac2game.ags works just as well, and I said "pretty much the same", not "exactly the same". But thanks for pointing out the difference which I couldn't be bothered to explain.

[Gilbert]

Actually it's more recommended to use .ags, as the .dat part was left there for compatibility reasons.

[Khris]

Sorry GG, didn't want to imply anything.
I was afraid .ags would work just as well but I was too lazy to test it