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Wide Screen Support.


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  • 1 year later...

No current plans for it, though it is possible we could introduce it later. The main problem with the wider screen is it jumps the hardware requirements up quite a bit. The other problem is the code might not be friendly to such a suggestion. I don't know the answer to this last point. I know that the UI certainly won't be a problem.

Steve

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Steve,

Thanks for the answer. I've no idea about the technical details involved for your side of the equation. For my side, I understand I'll need to open up the credit card a bit wider....

I hope native widescreen can be introduced. Some widescreen gaming workaroun/fix links:

http://www.widescreengamer.com/widescreen_games_database/

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/

These sites provide hacks for many popular games with non-native widescreen formats. Perhaps browsing some of these techniques will reveal possible approaches to enable widescreen for the CMx2 engine.

Thanks,

Ken

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Originally posted by rudel.dietrich:

Dissapointing :(

Agreed. I'm actually very suprised to hear that the engine wasn't designed ground up to support 4x3 and 16x9.

My impression is that the market is trending heavily to widescreen. Certainly at least for laptops, widescreen is becoming close to standard. I prefer 4x3 myself, but when I purchased a new laptop, I had to do some hunting to find a non-widescreen laptop that had all the features I wanted. From what I can tell, Apple, HP/Compaq, Dell, and Sony seem to have moved their entire laptop lines to widescreen only. Just from a rough survey of recent desktop computer purchases of friends and colleagues, it seems like desktop monitors are also heading to widescreen, although not nearly as rapidly. I'd say maybe 60% of new desktop monitor purchases I've seen in the last year have been widescreen (granted I work and live in a relatively affluent community so that might have some influence on monitor purchases).

Considering CMx2 is a brand-new engine which is meant to last quite a number of years, I would argue that it makes a lot of sense to ensure that it can easily support widescreen. I think CM:SF is going to feel very dated in a year or two if it doesn't support widescreen. I personally only have 4x3 screens, but I can imagine for a widescreen user, lack of 16x9 support will be a significant mark against CM:SF.

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In the past in CMx1 those games played fine on wider screen Apple Laptops

I am running at 1280 x 854 now and I hope that is no problem.

It should not be something that has to be build specifically into the game to support a non 4x3 screen aspect ratio. (I think.)

I could be wrong but in CMx1 the screen aspect ratio did not matter at all as the Video RAM just cranked out as much of the game as the player had screen real estate to display. (At least on a Mac it seemed that way.)

No current plans for it, though it is possible we could introduce it later. The main problem with the wider screen is it jumps the hardware requirements up quite a bit. The other problem is the code might not be friendly to such a suggestion. I don't know the answer to this last point. I know that the UI certainly won't be a problem.

I am a little perplexed by this statement because, as I recall, CMx1 had no such limitation. Unless this was something specific to PC's and Windows that I know nothing about.

It should be this simple, if your video card or video memory is up to the task (enough resources or memory or whatever you need) your computer "should" JUST fill your screen/monitor with the game in any aspect ratio you are using.

But I could be all wrong about that.

Sure the Game interface may be designed for 4x3 but the game and the landscape should still fill the full frame irrespective of the aspect ratio. (no?)

I don't know the answer to this last point. I know that the UI certainly won't be a problem.

I would like to think this statement holds promise or optimsm because ALL new Mac laptops and displays are wide screen.

But I may simply be confused. :confused:

What does Charles have to say about support for anything other then the "old" 4x3 aspect ratio?

-tom w

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As Tom says, even CMx1 supported 16:9 just fine.

However, 1920x1200 is isn't possible because for some reason there is a hardcoded limit in CMx1 at 1600 horizontal and 1200 vertical, respectively. So you can do widescreen but not at that resolution.

Steve, please. The hardware requirements and the graphics power required are our problem. There is no need to protect us from accidentally running too high via a hard limit in the game.

I just played through Prey and I currently play Fear in 1920x1200 (other options down) on a 7800GTX, and that card is 1-2 generations behind the current top of the line card (7900 and 7950).

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Maybe you can help, how can I run CM on a 1280x800 screen? (Laptop LCD). It starts the enumeration from 1024x768 200Hz, and can only go below. I even tried to hack the prefs file. (Please BFC next time give us the chance to set the resolution manually, sometimes it's useful)

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Kineas - It looks like the next higher resolution within CM beyond 1024x768 is 1280x1024. Since your laptop display is doing 1280x800 instead, CM is assuming that you can't support the next highest resolution and defaults to 1024x768. On occasion, depending on the videocard and drivers, CM supports resolutions between 1024x768 and 1280x1024 (1152x854 ?).

I agree with Redwolf. If it is at all possible to include support for the higher resolutions then I'd vote for their inclusion, even if current hardware doesn't render very fast at those resolutions. CMx1's resolution range was mildly disappointing in that it only supported a certain number of resolutions. I don't know if the CMx2 code is dependent on hard-coded resolutions for the 'rendering window' size or if it can adapt the window to whatever 3D (DirectX/OpenGL) accelerated resolution is available from the display card/driver. It would be nice to run CMx2 titles at the display's (for those using fixed-pixel displays) native resolution. However I can understand if this isn't possible (at this point) since it may involve a lot more coding to support a variably-sized rendering window.

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Originally posted by rudel.dietrich:

Industry trends are to allow the gamer to choose as high of a rez as their monitor will support.

Half a dozen games purchased in the last few years allow for this.

I am very suprised CMx2 does not allow this seeing as how it will be the CM vehicle for the next 6-8 years.

Nobody said that it won't be supported.

But BFC has a nasty tendency to try to protect the users from themself and impose artificial limits that serve nobody in the end. Hence the reminder notices. The limit in CMBB/CMAK is a real pity by now :(

There are quite a few games that go very high resolutions but don't do 16:9 or 19:10, among other things LO:MAC (or was it F4?) when more primitive games like Wings over Vietnam do. In that case the high resoltion still leaves your 1920x1200 display useless, as you can only use it in 1600x1200. But as mentioned earlier, even CMx1 did 19:9 just fine for example with1 1440x900. So there is no chance that CMx2 won't do it. As long as BFC doesn't get our of their way limiting the resolution we should be all set.

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