Matrix Games Forums

Is there any way to adjust the screen size?

A player wrote to me

"I’m going to have real problem playing operational art of war. The font sizes are so small and the background contrast is poor enough that my 59 year old eyes can barely read the text on screen."

ORIGINAL: MilRevKo
Is there any way to adjust the screen size?

A player wrote to me

"I’m going to have real problem playing operational art of war. The font sizes are so small and the background contrast is poor enough that my 59 year old eyes can barely read the text on screen."

Let me play with it a little today, I just saw something I want to try, although it will probably only make it into the Opart 3.ini file.

Here are a bunch of other suggestions...

These could get you hurt...
1) Convince your significant other that you eed a 60 inch big screen TV and hook it to that<g> There's a picture somewhere of that, possibly on the gamesquad forums.

2) Convince your significant other that you need an iPad and soemthing like iTap RDP software. I have been running TOAW on iPad by remoting to my desktop PC.

Now for the serious suggestions.
All of these require that TOAW be restarted between tries.

1) Try turning off PNG graphics in the options. This goes back to the old style graphics which have a lot more contrast. There are also several other 'skins' for TOAW. If you like those better, you can turn that option back on and move all the PNG graphics from the Graphics directory and move back the ones you want like Supply and Weather. The PNG graphics have the huge advantage that you can make the images only partially appear so when you turn on weather, you will still be able to see what's in the hex. I wouldn't be surprised to see someone convert JMass's graphics set to PNG files.

2) There are contrast and brightness options in the options menu. You can try adjusting those to see what works well for you. They go between 0 and 255. You need to restart TOAW between tries since it adjusts the picture while loading the graphcis so there is no performance hit.

3) There is an Opart 3 fonts.ini file that can be adjusted, it changes the text fonts and colors. The default is to use bitmapped fonts, but there is also an option to use Windows fonts. I normally use windows fonts (which don't have the SS symbol) but are crisper. I also oversize them a bit, they overrun the margins a bit and aren't professional, but they're more readable.

4) There is a contrast option in the menu to set Normal, high and maximum. It effects the backgrounds and text highlighting.

5) You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Zooming all the way in and using the mouse to drag the map works pretty well.

THX

ORIGINAL: MilRevKo
THX

No problem. I'm glad you asked anyway, it looks like it may be simple to change to 800x600 or some other resolution, I wish I'd checked earlier. I'll try to test it and get it tinot the INI file, but it won't make it into the interface, I'm afraid. We'll see if it works.

ORIGINAL: ralphtrick

ORIGINAL: MilRevKo
THX

No problem. I'm glad you asked anyway, it looks like it may be simple to change to 800x600 or some other resolution, I wish I'd checked earlier. I'll try to test it and get it tinot the INI file, but it won't make it into the interface, I'm afraid. We'll see if it works.

It 'sort of' works. It will change the resolution of the display, but minimizing leaves it still as 800x600. I can play around and see if I can get the other pieces to work. It's going to be experimental since I don't have time to test it, but it looks good right now.

Ralph

3.4.0.187
Added support for changing screen sizes. This doesn't work while remote desktopping into another PC. I wasn't able to do anything good with the UI, but if you change the N to a Y it will change the screen resolution and will change it back when it's done.
ChangeScreenResolution=N
ScreenY=600
ScreenX=800

In other words, after installing the final 3.4.0.187 production patch (not the beta or alpha) and running toaw once, you can go into the Opart 3.ini file and change ChangeScreenResolution to Y and set the screen resolution if you want to (I wouldn't go down below 800x600) and you've got it. For a list of resolutions, you can right click on the desktop and there's an option in there somewhere to change the resolution which should give you a list of options. I tested it on Windows 7 and XP. It probably doesn't work on Windows 98.

It does an ugly double-flicker when changing to maximized, but I couldn't figure out any way to get it to maximize cleanly. I plan to fix that for 3.5. I would have to do a lot more testing to make it work better, so I'm calling it good enough for 3.4.

As with anything like this, there is always the possibility that the program could crash or be killed in the middle of running, which would cause the screen resolution to be left where it was set by the program, and you would have to manually reset it.

Ralph