Additional widescreen menu tiles for Duke3D

[NightFright]

These can be added to the widescreen assets for Duke3D if you think they are good enough. They were made by myself.

[Dynamo]

The larger menu tile is especially nice

[NightFright]

The loading screen didn't require many edits since many graphical elements don't touch the edge of the screen. It's barely noticable ingame, but still better than before, I guess.

[NightFright]

I have just released the Duke3D Fixes v1.4 mod for EDuke32. Raze support is also included. I have added a lot of additional widescreen versions for menu tiles which are currently not part of the Raze package, e.g. the help menu, 3DR intro logo or loading screens, also for all official addons. Feel free to cannibalize it for Raze if you want.

[Graf Zahl]

The main problem with these is that they are not aspect ratio independent so while they surely can be added, the menu tiles or those cutscene screens with text on them will require extra coding. I'll probably take ones that scale down to 4:3 but the rest is a bit tricky.

[NightFright]

The issue I see is that some of these tiles are used in custom maps. E.g. the level ending screens tend to be used on computer monitors ingame. When using widescreen replacements, graphics would exceed the edges and look weird. Therefore it would have to be made so that widescreen tiles are only used when in menus or in case of level start/ending or end of episode. If that's even possible.

[Graf Zahl]

I already changed all scripted 2D code to use names instead of tile numbers and set that up using the tiles' symbolic constants. I'd have to add a few .def extensions to allow overriding an actual named texture with a widescreen replacement. Just dumping the widescreen texture in there with the right name won't work because it still needs to do CRC checks to only replace the stock version. That approach would only affect the 2D use but not in.game texturing which still would only access the original tile by number.

Considering what you just said it'd be a worthwile addition to handle it like that.

[NightFright]

Sounds/reads like a good approach.

[NightFright]

BTW, here is the SW loading screen taken from Classic Redux. That one isn't hard to do, though...

[Phredreeke]

I think for a truly aspect ratio independent version of the Duke3D menu background it would have to be divided into separate elements, and parts currently obscured by the pipes and such would have to be filled in

[Graf Zahl]

Let's see if Nash comes up with something after finishing WidePix for GZDoom.
At least the Blood background screen was done like that for NBlood, so one issue less.

[NightFright]

Well, with the Duke3D menu background I did something you shouldn't do: I altered center parts of the image that shouldn't be touched. This is a tricky one because you cannot just continue the patterns beyond the edges. But well, this needs to be handled by someone who knows what they are doing.

[Rachael]

The engine can take the left and right edges, split them off, and then make the center a repeating pattern. It would render the center first and then the edges on top of it. This may result in a seam on the right edge, but that can be avoided also, depending on how the graphic is cut, the right edge can also have some sort of transparency pattern that allows it to seamlessly merge with the rest of the graphic at any position.

[Nash]

It was an idea I was tossing around in the other forum - if the engine wants to do that, then it wouldn't be too much work to make separate border graphics and the central, repeating pattern...