Preserving aspect ratio for menu and in-game messages

[Lippeth]

I'm sure this has been considered, but because It's not implemented makes me think that it wasn't worth the effort in some way. Similar to the option "HUD preserves aspect ratio", it would be great to see an option for the main menu and/or the in-game text to preserve aspect ratio. It's always been an eyesore being so squashed looking. Though I have a feeling it would destroy the menu option font if they're at all connected.

I specifically remember reading a thread about pick-up messages fading and showing multiple stacked messages being hard-coded in, and being too much work for such a small/nonexistent benefit, as well as the overall menu scaling being smaller to allow for 400 horizontal units rather than 320, but I haven't found anything regarding the lack of aspect ratio compensation, for the menu, messages, intermission and story screen.

[Rachael]

This is not feasible without a direct way to scale the menu. The menu currently operates on the screen resolution.

There is a little trick, though, to change the pixel ratio, but that may or may not look good to you.

You can try "vid_setscale 2650 1200 1 1.2" to achieve this effect. Doing this will cause the entire screen to render to the new pixel ratio, including the menu graphics, which will give them the squish you are looking for.

[Lippeth]

Other than the Options menu and console text being stretched, it's exactly the result I was looking for! I set it to 2650x1240 in order to fill my screen, though if the pixel-shape is now off by 40 pixels, it's so minor that I'm not sure if I can tell. Thank you so much!

[Rachael]

That is by no means a replacement for your actual suggestion which I think has merit and should be done; nevertheless it's a trick that I use to do exactly what you are asking. I like the stretched menu graphics.

[Graf Zahl]

With today's high resolution screens this isn't really an issue anymore, but it will affect large parts of the menu code and may break some mods that have a scripted custom menu.
The actual problem will be for those who insist on playing Doom in low resolution modes like 640x480 or 800x600, there the inconsistent pixel size will be very apparent.

[Gez]

Food for thought:

1:1 scaling (no aspect ratio correction) results in 100/120=83.333% of intended height. In other words, it's 16.667% too short.
5:6 scaling offers pixel-perfect aspect ratio correction, 120/120=100% of intended height. However, it requires at least 1200 pixels in vertical resolution to fit (200*6).
4:5 scaling offers an exaggerated aspect ratio correction, 125/120=104,167% of intended height. In other words, 4,167% too tall. It's less error than 1:1 scaling. It requires 1000 pixels in vertical resolution, which is quite common (1280x1024 screens are commonplace).
3:4 scaling offers an even more exaggerated correction, 133.333/120=111.111% of intended height, or 11.111% too tall. Still less error than 1:1 scaling. Requires 800 pixels in vertical resolution, which we can assume everyone has nowadays (unless perhaps if playing windowed).

[Rachael]

Much as the majority of us shun trilinear filtering for our textures (it honestly does not look right), I think the majority of us do not do likewise for the screen scaling. There's a reason why I uncoupled it from the scaling mode - with almost any of today's screens, from 1280x800 to higher, it's nearly impossible for linear scaling to look bad when it comes to resizing the screen - at the very least, not any worse than the standard display scaling which has become a necessity with screen pixels becoming static (which was not the case with CRT screens).

I'm not so eager to trade my LCD screens in for my old CRT's but that is one thing that we definitely lost when moving to newer technology.

[Graf Zahl]

Let's just say this: In Raze I coded the menu to scale to 320x200 instead of doing ZDoom's clean scaling shenanigans - and you have to look very closely to see the discrepancy in pixel height. But the overall visual experience is magnitudes better than the clean scaling. Same for the level summary screens.

It's one of the things I definitely want to backport, but need to be careful with the script interface here. For the internal menus it's no issue but if someone has extended it by directly using the low level drawers there may be problems.

What does not work so well is doing the same for the option menus. Due to the size of the font the doubled pixels will stand out quite awkwardly.

[Gez]

But the options menu uses the VGA font anyways.

e: the various aspect ratios I was talking about, all scaled up to the same vertical size:

[imgur]https://i.imgur.com/v1U1gny[/imgur]