Widescreen behaviour of INTERPIC graphic

[Tormentor667]

I noticed a small aesthetic issue with graphics and the intermission screen, it's not much but somehow it bugs me and I think it could be improved a bit. It is actually about 16:9 ratio graphics and the intermission screen, that always displays every kind of background in 4:3. It doesn't matter if my game resolution is 4:3 or 16:9, the INTERMISSION gfx works fine if it is also made in 4:3 but if I have added additional material to the left and right to make it widescreen friendly, instead of displaying it as it is actually meant (making it fit to the top and bottom of the screen and adjusting it's width analogue), it actually gets "stretched" into 4:3 instead making it look deformed. So actually now it is as follows...

• A gfx with a ratio of 4:3 gets displayed normal when the resolution is 4:3
• A gfx with a ratio of 16:9 gets displayed squeezed when the resolution is 4:3
• A gfx with a ratio of 16:9 gets displayed squeezed when the resolution is 16:9
• A gfx with a ratio of 4:3 gets displayed normal when the resolution is 16:9 (with black borders)

My suggestion would be (as this might make more sense)

• A gfx with a ratio of 4:3 gets displayed normal when the resolution is 4:3
• A gfx with a ratio of 16:9 gets displayed normal but trimmed left/right when the resolution is 4:3
• A gfx with a ratio of 16:9 gets displayed normal when the resolution is 16:9
• A gfx with a ratio of 4:3 gets displayed normal when the resolution is 16:9 (with black borders)

Any chance of making this happen? It doesn't seem to be too complicated, but I am not a coder either.

Thanks anyway, would help a lot for future projects in widescreen making them also 4:3-friendly

*UPDATE*
By the way, this whole issue is also a suggestion for the TITLEPIC and other alike graphics in the engine that behave similar (bad).

[Graf Zahl]

Not that easy. 320x200 is 16:10, not 4:3.

[Enjay]

Hey Torm, don't forget that there are other widescreen (and other non-widescreen) ratios too.

My 1920x1200 monitor is a 16:10 widescreen ratio. This is of course handled differently to the 320x200 graphics that Graf mentioned are 16:10 but which are handled in a way to make them look like they did in the old Doom resolution so, even at a 16:10 ratio, I still get black bars at the edge of my titlepics and interpics.


Why is 16:10 quoted as that and not 8:5 anyway? (I'm going to guess for easy comparison with 16:9.)

[Tormentor667]

Not that easy. 320x200 is 16:10, not 4:3.

In that case you could add black bars to the left and right of 16:10 screens, just as you would do with 4:3 in 16:9. Beyond it doesn't make sense to squeeze a 16:9 gfx in every case to 4:3. Simply "cropping" 16:9 gfx for 4:3 resolutions and keeping 16:9 in 16:9 resolutions would be an improvement that makes sence

[Graf Zahl]

And who decides at what point a graphic is 16:9, 16:10 or 4:3? It's not that easy. A titlepic can be any size and is guaranteed to fill a 4:3 screen. I'm not sure if there's mods out there that use this behavior in any way that would break with this change.

[Tormentor667]

But why can't a graphic fill a 16:9 screen as well if it already has the right size? The only way right now to hack around this is to place a TITLEMAP that displays a gfx via script that is 16:9 and 4:3 compatible and I find this a bit of too much work for such an easy task.

What about always scaling a gfx down/up to fit the height amount in the resolution but without squeezing its aspect ratio?

This would at least give modders an easy opportunity to add gfx that look good in 4:3 and also in 16:9 (or larger) aspect ratios for INTERMISSION, TITLEPIC, HELP1 and CREDITS graphics

[Graf Zahl]

That's not compatible with how it works now. I have seen titlepics with weird aspect ratios and all of them would not look correct anymore.

Auto-recognition is probably not going to work here, unfortunately.

[Enjay]

Something that could be added to the gameinfo section of MAPINFO then? Like, I don't know, a way of explicitly stating the ratio of a graphic and at what screen ratios to use it?

[Tormentor667]

Why won't auto-recognition work? You already have all kind of resolutions separated into aspect ratios in the menu itself where you choose the video modes. I think it would at least be a useful solution if you auto-recognize standard formats and then apply the ratio to the scaling.

For example the modder has created a 640x480 titlepic (4:3) and the player has a 1680x1050 resolution (16:9) everything stays as it is now (with the black borders) but if the modder has created a 1680x1050 titlepic (16:9) it only gets cropped to 4:3 but not squeezed when the player has a 4:3 resolution (or different things). Otherwise (in case of title and ingame resolution), the 16:9 stays as it is.

This check could only be added for standard resolutions that are part of the menue I guess, but that would be okay and give the modders the chance to have a graphic for INTERMISSION, TITLEPIC, HELP1 and CREDITS that works both in 4:3 and 16:9 (and most propably in 16:10 as well with little black borders at its sides).

As it is now, it simply sucks as places where these graphics occur (TITLEPIC, HELP, CREDITS, etc) always have these black borders to their sides and there is no way to avoid this. You can fill your mod with 16:9 graphics but you can't change anything about the hardcoded graphics.

[Tormentor667]

Something that could be added to the gameinfo section of MAPINFO then? Like, I don't know, a way of explicitly stating the ratio of a graphic and at what screen ratios to use it?

This could be added for graphics with very strange ratios, but I'd be happy if standard resolutions and ratios could be - somehow - automated, I think that wouldn't be a lot of trouble.

[Enjay]

I think the point was that existing mods already have weird ratio graphics in them and these expect the current behaviour. Therefore, any new mod that wanted alternative behaviour would have to explicitly choose non-standard behaviour to allow everything else to default back to the original.

[Tormentor667]

I understand this, but I really doubt that anyone made 16:9 standard graphics for the TITLEPIC and the INTERMISSION and wanting them to be squeezed to 4:3, that doesn't make sense at all.

I also find it illogical that these kind of graphics get squeezed at all to be forced into 4:3 ratios.

Enlarging the graphics to fill the screen is fine (without squeezing them in a unnatural way - 4:3 <-> 16:9), making them smaller to fit as well (or actually cropping them).

Here is a little example that I've just created that actually covers the cases we might have (+ some other resolution ratios like 16:10 and stuff)



So in the end, you could add a list of pixel resolutions (or actually calculate them) to the list to keep track of their ratios and then check if an image is being cropped, enlarged (to make the height fit) or if it gets adjusted to the standard screen (4:3)

I have added widescreen graphics (TITLEPICS, INTERMISSIONS, CREDITS, HELPS) to UTNT, Austerity and TCotD2 just to make them also look good in those aspect ratios, the problem now is only that it makes things even worse (before it looked fine in 4:3 but bad in 16:9, now it looks squeezed and bad in both cases), but solving this by creating a TITLEMAP doesn't make sense if it feels more like an error of the engine that squeezes 16:9 graphics into 4:3 ratios.

[Graf Zahl]

That won't work, even under the assumption that no mod exists that uses such graphics.

There's still the question how to deal with graphics that don't fit the screen. Do you want to crop them or to letterbox them? So the best you will get is an option to set in the GAMEINFO section of MAPINFO but certainly not an automatic that overrides the current behavior without options.

BTW, this is not a bug so this goes to its proper place now.

[Tormentor667]

Anyway, I still think that larger graphics shouldn't be squeezed in an unnatural way, that doesn't seem to be right or even making sense. Why doesn't it work at all of the source gfx is 16:9 and the target is 4:3? Cropping the left and right side is exactly how it is done via hudmessage-generated graphics as well (works fine in Stronghold btw) but why where they squeezed to exactly fit 4:3?

What about at least a standard option that doesn't force larger graphics to be smaller in 16:9 if the material is there? Or as a standard enlarge graphics to 16:9 if there are widescreen resolutions used? The problem is still (and that's also what older mods suffer) that all kind of 4:3 graphics stay 4:3 instead of filling the 16:9 display. These black borders on the left and right simply suck as hell, if ingame footage works fine in widescreen.

For an GAMEINFO option, some kind of titlepic behaviour would work I guess, that actually tells what happens to the gfx if it doesn't fit to the resulition (letterbox, crop, etc.), that would be ok but I still have the feeling that things are only getting more complicated that way.

[Tormentor667]

For a small example, just load up the latest version "The City of the Damned 2" btw. I added a 16:9 titlepic that would perfectly fill out 16:9 resolutions and (if being cropped) also fit perfect when there is only a 4:3 resolution used. Even squeezeing the gfx in 4:3 video modes to 4:3 resolutions would be okay. But as it is now, it gets also squeezed in 16:9 to 4:3 and that's what it makes so annyoing without any sense.

Where lies the problem if you set a standard that doesn't squeeze 16:9 gfxs down to 4:3 when actually using a 16:9 resolution? (or even larger)

http://www.realm667.com/index.php?optio ... 6&Itemid=1