320 x 240 games on a widescreen monitor

Dave Gilbert · Fri 29/02/2008 18:05:05

Hi all,

I recently got a new laptop with a nice widescreen monitor. All my previous games were made in 320 x 240 resolution, and they look all stretched out now. In looking through the setup options there doesn't seem to be a way to make it look right, aside from playing it in a window. The "force alternate letterbox resolution" option is greyed out.

Is there any way to fix this or am I just stupid?

Ubel · Fri 29/02/2008 18:16:01

Well, I had this problem with my previous laptop. With this laptop I'm using the picture is automatically resized to correct proportions. I'm really not an expert in this area but I'd advise you to see if you could find some drivers and utilities for the graphics card, that your laptop uses, that automatically maintains the aspect ratio of the picture.

Just see what graphics card you have from the Screen Properties and google for drivers and utilities for it. With luck you'll find what you need.

So to sum up, you're not stupid and it can be fixed. In most cases at least. Just not with the AGS setup alone.

GarageGothic · Fri 29/02/2008 18:18:00

Possibly your video card settings (right-click windows desktop -> properties -> settings -> advanced) will allow you to center the image with black bars on the side. But this option depends on your video card drivers and doesn't exist on all laptops.

I've been trying to draw people's attention to the issue of widescreen monitors for a while now, but it seems to be a problem that nobody understands until they get a widescreen computer of their own. I'm shopping for a new laptop too these days, and it's pretty much impossible to get a standard 4:3 monitor anymore.

Edit: You might be interested in my later post in the same thread that shows off some interesting behaviour when running Blackwell Unbound windowed in a resolution bigger than the current desktop. This is exactly how it looks on-screen.

SSH · Fri 29/02/2008 20:26:58

Windowed with the 3x filter?

Pumaman · Fri 29/02/2008 21:18:05

Yeah, this has been discussed quite a bit in the thread that GarageGothic has linked to.

The effect in your screenshots is rather strange, it looks like it's running with half a letterbox in the bottom one. My monitor isn't large enough to run 1280x960, but I tried running a 320x240 game with the 2x filter and the letterboxing appeared to work correctly .. could you take a screenshot that includes the window border so that we can get a better picture of what's happening?

GarageGothic · Fri 29/02/2008 21:35:40

There wasn't any window border when I took these screenshots, because the game resolution was 1280x960 and the desktop resolution 1280x800. In other words, it's no mystery that part of the screen was cut off, but I'm quite fascinated with how the GUI has automatically been relocated to the top of the cropped screen. My first reaction wasn't "whoa, a bug" but rather "cool, I wish we could control this behaviour".

Unfortunately I've returned the borrowed laptop I grabbed these on, but this is as exactly as it appeared. I also grabbed a screenshot of the main menu, to show the very obvious offset of the GUIs:

Dave Gilbert · Fri 29/02/2008 22:02:26

Yeah I had this exact same problem, GG. The GUIs shifted all over the place.

Is there's no possibility of a "widescreen monitor option" where the the playing area shrinks to the proper size and black bars are put on the left and right side of the screen?

A few Blackwell customers mentioned that their game looked "fuzzy" but played just fine in windowed mode. I never thought to ask if they had a widescreen monitor.

SSH: Good idea, but the plan was to avoid using windowed mode altogether.

Pumaman · Fri 29/02/2008 22:15:01

Yeah, this behaviour is because AGS doesn't always distinguish between a 640x480 game, and a 640x400 game running letterboxed -- which means that the GUI co-ordinates can get mixed up.

Really I think the whole resolution system in AGS needs a bit of an overhaul. I don't think that the option to run in 320x240 vs 640x480 is actually very useful these days, so it would be better to have a fixed game resolution and then allow graphics filters to be used on top of that if the player wants to.

Dave Gilbert · Fri 29/02/2008 22:20:13

Well I found a dirty solution but it works.

My display properties allowed me to set my screen resolution to 800 x 600. When I ran my game at 640 x 480 after that, it looked fine.

Gilbert · Sat 01/03/2008 02:22:35

Quote from: Pumaman on Fri 29/02/2008 22:15:01
Really I think the whole resolution system in AGS needs a bit of an overhaul. I don't think that the option to run in 320x240 vs 640x480 is actually very useful these days, so it would be better to have a fixed game resolution and then allow graphics filters to be used on top of that if the player wants to.

Yes, and probably remove that low game resolution limit (i.e. only even coordinates at high res.) at the same time, seeing that speed and size is probably not that big a problem nowadays and this would aviod flooding of these forums with similar posts about thinks like object placement and masks not working. (hint hint

)

Layabout · Sat 01/03/2008 03:08:06

If your graphics card allows it, you can get around this problem as I discovered after I asked for support for 16:10 screens running 320x240 and 640x480 games. It puts black bars down either side of the screen.

In my very biased opinion of a person who has a 16:10 screen, you should eliminate 4:3 resolutions since in the days of lcd and widescreen, these formats are becoming antiquated. 16:10 is the future. You can still choose alternate letterbox mode in the setup.

subspark · Sat 01/03/2008 03:58:34

Quoteso it would be better to have a fixed game resolution and then allow graphics filters to be used on top of that if the player wants to

So you mean that our games will be restricted to one resolution only of your choosing and the graphics is scaled up to fit the monitor or do you mean the game will have a fixed aspect and all other aspects are scaled up dynamically?

I'm not sure if thats what you meant but I think if you are going to overhaul the resolution system I strongly suggest an automatic resolution system as I suggested in this thread:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=33578.60

If it is in the hands of the developer, then we can actively choose whatever resolution to support and even multiple aspect ratios. Instead of simply stretching our graphics to fit 4:3 and 16:10 aspects, we can tailor our games to work with both at native resolution.

I think we need more control over game resolution, Chris, as opposed to less. But thats just my opinion.

Cheers,
Paul.

Radiant · Sun 02/03/2008 09:59:28

Interesting.

But fixing this for newly created games won't help with the 1000+ games already in the database...

This is probably pushing it, but would it be possible to have a patch for the AGS runtime that you can download together with any old game, to fix its resolution?

Ali · Sun 02/03/2008 11:19:10

As a half-measure to improve the engine's flexibility, would it be possible to allow the window to expand to fill the screen creating a black border around the game window?

Then users could turn their taskbar off and have a more immersive experience with windowed games. If it was possible to disable the top bar until the mouse moves up to the top of the screen that would also be handy.

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens · Sun 02/03/2008 23:40:14

As someone already mentioned, most new 16:10 monitors will auto-adjust for the lower screen modes properly (my Samsung 22" does), and the ones that do not often have driver updates or software that will do it. The only problem I've ever had, in fact, comes down to digital input, and that's because it blurs low-res images. Analog has no such problem, and setting games to display at 640x400/480 also fixes it. I don't think we should get rid of 4:3 screen resolutions because people are buying widescreen monitors, no more than I would say stop playing 2d adventure games because 3d is the standard. Saying that you should abandon something because it's no longer the standard is a rather narrow and simplistic view.

subspark · Mon 03/03/2008 00:18:10

WHOA SLOW DOWN GUYS!!!

Nobody is abandoning anything! All that has to be done is the following:

Add support for automatic aspect detection
Add a layout editor so that the developer can tailor their game for either 4:3 or 16:10 aspect ratios.
Add support for windowed play with black background instead of desktop. (I was sure this had been done already. Guess not yet).

These few features add onto what has already been established and should not obstruct the compatibility of older games. These features are also a hell of a lot of work for poor Chris so I don't expect this kind of overhaul for another few betas yet. As long as CJ feels he is able then I'm sure the demand will be met. Poor bugger though. It's a lot to ask so soon.

Cheers,
Paul.

Edit: Misspelled compatibility. Darn spell checker changed it to comparability. Fixed.

subspark · Mon 17/03/2008 22:59:15

Is anyone still interested in or excited about what has been suggested above? I sure as hell am. This topic already seems to be plummeting into the abyss of forgotten threads. :'(

Cheers,
Paul.

GarageGothic · Tue 18/03/2008 11:44:42

I'm still mainly interested in my original suggestion:

Quote1) An offset value (Game.ScreenOffset or similar) ranging from 0-40 (in the engine's 320x200 grid), which would position the 240/480 pixels high image within the 200/400 pixel tall viewport of the screen. A 640x480 image with an offset of 15 would thus have 30 pixels cropped from the top of the screen and 50 from the bottom.

2) Winsetup support for the feature (possibly just having the "Force alternate letterbox" checkbox work in reverse if a game is 320x240 rather than 320x200).

And additionally:

3) A 800x500 widescreen alternative to the 800x600 resolution.

One thing's for sure - I'm not going to continue developing 4:3 games unless AGS gets better support for multiple aspect ratios.

subspark · Tue 18/03/2008 11:54:02

Thats all great, but wouldn't my extensive idea I suggested naturally solve those problems for you anyway? If we can kill two birds with one stone, yadayadayada.

As CJ commented, I really do think the resolution system needs an overhaul.

Cheers,
Paul.

GarageGothic · Tue 18/03/2008 12:15:59

Of course it would be great if as many features as possible were implemented, but everything takes time and I'd rather see some basic support of multiple aspect ratios implemented as a first priority. Let me put it like this: If I know that the engine supports different aspect ratios, I can develop my game with that in mind (customizing the GUI for each resolution, design my art to fit either aspect ratio etc.). This is something that is currently holding me back, whereas automatic aspect ratio detection doesn't make any difference while I'm still working on the game. It would be nice to see it implemented before release, but still it's no big deal to me whether the end user needs to check a single box in winsetup or not.

Filtering modes are already available, so I'm not really sure what you're asking for there?