Widescreen support

[Jensemann]

Hi

sorry if this has been adressed elsewhere, but will admirals edition have widescreen support. My laptor uses 1280 x 800, and i have to play WitP in windowmode to keep the text sharp.

so please include this:)

[Don Bowen]

ORIGINAL: Jensemann

Hi

sorry if this has been adressed elsewhere, but will admirals edition have widescreen support. My laptor uses 1280 x 800, and i have to play WitP in windowmode to keep the text sharp.

so please include this:)

No, there is no change in basic display options. Not easy, or we would have done it.

[Jensemann]

ok, to bad... Thanks for the quick answer though

[Cmdrcain]

ORIGINAL: Jensemann

Hi

sorry if this has been adressed elsewhere, but will admirals edition have widescreen support. My laptor uses 1280 x 800, and i have to play WitP in windowmode to keep the text sharp.

so please include this:)

I use WITP full screen in 1680x1050 and no problem with text

However you say a Laptop, which has a smaller screen then my 24"

You should be able to reset laptop to something like 800x600
before play game I'd think

[Akos Gergely]

No matter what, if WitP/AE doesn't support the resolution then the text etc. will be distorted a bit as they won't be matching the phsyical pixels...

This is the only sore point with AE for me (to be honest I don't even know why the original developers did not include higher resolutions when even Uncommon Valor had a switch to change between 800X600 and 1024X768 and in 2004 there already were a lot of TFTs supporting 1280X1024 and even a lot of wide screen ones.)

But the main thing for me is the hope that in the future higher resolutions might be supported...

[Erik Rutins]

Check your driver options. The vast majority of folks we've had complain about fixed resolution games weren't aware that they could adjust their scaling in their video drivers to eliminate any distortion.

[Dili]

In a big screen your 800x600 will be big too. There is also an option to degrade the screen resolution. I'am remembering i always played witp windowed.

[Grotius]

Check your driver options. The vast majority of folks we've had complain about fixed resolution games weren't aware that they could adjust their scaling in their video drivers to eliminate any distortion.

I use an nVidia card -- but I am not sure I see this option. I see "change resolution," but I can do that with Windows, and I'm not sure it's what you mean.

I also see "change flat panel scaling," but the only relevant option seems to be "use nVidia scaling with fixed-aspect ratio." It doesn't seem to let me define that aspect ratio, though. Is *that* the option you mean?

Also, does this mean we have to scale our video resolution every time we play the game?

[drw61]

I have a ATI Radeo HD 3450 video card. I had to go into the card software (ATI Catalyst Control Center) and turn on the image scaling attribute to "Maintain aspect ration"
It will be different for you depending on the video card and software you have.

Hope this helps,

ORIGINAL: Grotius

Check your driver options. The vast majority of folks we've had complain about fixed resolution games weren't aware that they could adjust their scaling in their video drivers to eliminate any distortion.

I use an nVidia card -- but I am not sure I see this option. I see "change resolution," but I can do that with Windows, and I'm not sure it's what you mean.

I also see "change flat panel scaling," but the only relevant option seems to be "use nVidia scaling with fixed-aspect ratio." It doesn't seem to let me define that aspect ratio, though. Is *that* the option you mean?

Also, does this mean we have to scale our video resolution every time we play the game?

[Akos Gergely]

Hi Erik,

thanks for the tip but probably I haven'T made my point clear. Witp supports 1024X768 resolution in 32 bits. Now that is a 4:3 aspect ratio. If you scale this to TFT resolutions and don't use a windowed mode it gets distorted no matter what, since TFT panels have a fixed amount of pixels (called native resolution and it is mostly 5:4, 16:10 or nowadays 16:9 ratio). This results in a really strangely distorted screen, simply becouse the software generated resolution does not match the pixel pitch layout of the panel. Now on a 32" Full HD LCD TV with 16:9 ratio this gives a rather messy look, trust me (I've tried a lot of setups). One can also run the program with scaled back resolution but that would simply use the middle 1024X768 pixels of the screen with the rest of it going blank - no big difference to the windowed mode but one looses the desktop which might come in handy otherwise.

So unless the software resolution can be altered I don't see a realy change in this issue.

Please anybody correct me if I'm wrong, probably I've missed something...hopefully..

[Reg]

ORIGINAL: csatahajos

Hi Erik,

thanks for the tip but probably I haven'T made my point clear. Witp supports 1024X768 resolution in 32 bits. Now that is a 4:3 aspect ratio. If you scale this to TFT resolutions and don't use a windowed mode it gets distorted no matter what, since TFT panels have a fixed amount of pixels (called native resolution and it is mostly 5:4, 16:10 or nowadays 16:9 ratio). This results in a really strangely distorted screen, simply because the software generated resolution does not match the pixel pitch layout of the panel. Now on a 32" Full HD LCD TV with 16:9 ratio this gives a rather messy look, trust me (I've tried a lot of setups). One can also run the program with scaled back resolution but that would simply use the middle 1024X768 pixels of the screen with the rest of it going blank - no big difference to the windowed mode but one looses the desktop which might come in handy otherwise.

So unless the software resolution can be altered I don't see a realy change in this issue.

Please anybody correct me if I'm wrong, probably I've missed something...hopefully..

There are actually three ways of handling the game/display resolution mismatch which should be supported by your monitor or video card*.

• 1:1
• Maintain Aspect Ratio
• Fill display

You can use the second method to (almost) fill the screen without aspect distortion. However you will still get some image fuzziness as the pixels will not line up with the display cells and some interpolation will need to be used. (See In a window? thread over on the BTR forum).

Either way, your desktop is still accessible with the Alt-tab key combination. There are several other threads on this topic so have a look around (best of luck with the forum search engine [8|]).

To display low-res games to the best effect, I believe you can't go past a large CRT monitor which natively supports the resolution. [:D]


Edit: * Not all system setups are the same. For instance my laptop's ATI Catalyst Control Center video card software only supports "Full screen" and "1:1" (centered) Image Scaling. Fortunately my 24" external monitor does support Fixed Aspect Ratio scaling through the monitor settings.

Something to look out for when you next upgrade your hardware. [;)]

[jwilkerson]

I've played on 1920x1200 mode, full screen for years, I don't see any distortion, in fact the hexes are better proportioned, than on a narrow aspect monitor, since in the code they are a bit "squished" in the horizontal dimension.
[:)]

[Akos Gergely]

Well I've tried all what you say (in fact I've spent hours with this when I upgraded to an LCD TV). I've played Witp windowed for long before so in fact the windowed mode looks much better on the big screen but the fully scaled picture is badly widened to 16:9 and looks horrible. I can still set the aspect ratio to 4:3 then it looks OK so so, but does not offer that much more above the windowed mode.

On the other hand this is still just enlarging the viewable area of the map in actual display size. Unless we get real wide resolutions we can not see more of the map at the same time (just imagine in 1920 one can have full Australia in one view).

[jwilkerson]

Right, changing the game to a different resolution is "easy up to a point" the issue comes in rescaling things like all the various text pieces on all the screens. All of these are placed according to specific pixels, so all of this would have to be tediously redone. Essentially all the screens would have to be redone - so we could've either done that (ONLY) or done what we did - and as players - we prefer the rules changes. But there is a completely new map and pretty much all new art - so lots of new things to look at. And the scale of the new map is such that the size of the Pacific becomes much more evident. So instead of all of Australian on the map, now if you're lucky, you might be able to get half of Queensland on the screen!
[:D]

[Akos Gergely]

Yep, understood and it's good news . I was just wondering why it was not implemented back on the original when in UV it was done (though from 800X600 to 1024 but back then it was the biggest common res. I guess). Thanks for the input anyways, really appreciate what you've put into AE-Witp.

[ETF]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

I've played on 1920x1200 mode, full screen for years, I don't see any distortion, in fact the hexes are better proportioned, than on a narrow aspect monitor, since in the code they are a bit "squished" in the horizontal dimension.
[:)]

Is this hard to do? My LCD easily can handle it. How does one change this for ingame performance. Is there a setting in the preferences outside the program?

[ETF]

ok So if I do

Best way is to use it in windowed mode, with the " -w" command after the .exe name? How would I go about changing this? In Win 7?

[ETF]

Ok I have in my short cut "C:\Matrix Games\War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition\War in the Pacific Admiral Edition.exe" -f -px1920 –py1200 -skipVideo -w

My Windowed screen though is very small. Take only about 40% of my monitor space. Anyway to stretch it a tad??

Thanks

[Dan Nichols]

You are giving it conflicting instructions. The -f tells it to use full screen and the -w tells it to use windowed mode. Then you are giving it -px1920 -py1200 which is probably full screen resolution.

Here is mine that works fine in windowed mode.

"C:\Matrix Games\War in the Pacific Admirals Edition\War in the Pacific Admiral Edition.exe" -w -px1680 -py1050 -multiaudio -archive -cpu2 -skipVideo -dd_sw

[ETF]

oh ok thanks sir. May I ask is -cpu2 dual core? What is -dd_sw? And mutliaudio? Archive?