Book II Video Resolution

[EschalonTheBest]

Thats Ok For Me!

[usiems]

I just bought an EEE PC 1000H with 1024x600 screen. I would love to play Eschalon 2 on it when I'm away from home.
You can have 1024x768 resolutions displayed on this netbook, but then everything is scaled to fit the screen, i.e. stretched in width - or rather compressed in height.

So, are there any chances to have a screen mask with reduced height that fits into 1024x600? This would probably require some rearranging of elements and a reduction of the overview map to half the current size, but would look infinitely better on a common netbook.

[Yeliu]

It's clear everyone has radically different screen resolutions... some wanting it to stay at 800 x 600, others with higher resolutions at 1600 x 1200, users like myself with widescreens, and then others with curious different sizes. My Mac has a resolution of 1680 x 1050, and when the new Macbook Pros come out, I'm buying one with a resolution of 1920 x 1200.

Personally, it seems like the best way is to have the options... in almost all games you can pick what resolution you want. I realize that as pixel graphics aren't scalable it would mean that the players with higher resolutions would have the advantage of being able to see more in their sight, being able to see enemies sooner, &c. Whenever I played multiplayer (LAN) Age of Empires 2 Conquerors with my friends, the guys with the higher resolutions had the advantage of being able to see more and therefore could react faster.

Thus, that leaves BasiliskWrangler with three options. (I'm not including scaling the tiles as an option, because it's just... hideous. :P)

A. He can keep the resolution at 1024 x 768 which he has already announced, and then everyone will just bear and grin it. :D
B. He can make the interface liquid scalable according to the different resolutions, let users choose their resolution, and then players with a higher resolution will just be able to see farther and see when enemies are coming sooner.
C. This would be significantly more complicated, but he could implement B, but add a "line of sight", so that the higher resolutions would not be an advantage. Then a skill of vision might be added, or cat's eyes, or whatever can increase the LOS.

Either way, technically only C is fair to all players, but I would really like to see at least B implemented. I personally would be willing to pay an extra $10 to $20 just so that it can run beautifully and fully on my Mac. I really dislike stretched views, which means I used windowed... but having a 800 x 600 or even 1024 x 768 game on a 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1200 is just sad... :P

[Unclever title]

Personally I'm fine with the 1024x768...

But that's because I just have a laptop now with 1024x768 being the maximum resolution.

Ideally of course a flexible resolution would make more people happy, but then again sometimes pleasing most is enough.

Regardless of what happens I'm buying the game though, resolution is no game breaker for me.


Addendum: that "regardless of what happens" line there does not include the very unlikelihood that that Book II will be way too pricey.

[Kreador Freeaxe]

I'm happy with the current scheme, even on my big, beautiful iMac 24" because I run two screens, and full screen mode on games tends to crash the machine. But that's just me, and as with the save/load stuff, I'd love to see Basilisk able to offer options for everybody -- as long as it doesn't delay when I get to play Book II.

[The Noid]

I don't mind a fixed resolution, but I would at least like the game not to be stretched out of aspect on wide-screen monitors. Just put black bars on the sides.

[BasiliskWrangler]

I don't mind a fixed resolution, but I would at least like the game not to be stretched out of aspect on wide-screen monitors. Just put black bars on the sides.

This is a setting in your computer's control panel. On every system I have ever tested the game on, I have found a way to "maintain aspect ratio for non-widescreen video modes" which keeps the game from getting stretched horizontally on widescreen monitors. Your system will put those vertical black bars up for you.

We use widescreen monitors here in the studio and I would have gone insane years ago if I had to play these games stretched out.

[usiems]

This is a setting in your computer's control panel. On every system I have ever tested the game on, I have found a way to "maintain aspect ratio for non-widescreen video modes" which keeps the game from getting stretched horizontally on widescreen monitors. Your system will put those vertical black bars up for you.

This works for 800x600 on my netbook, but not for 1024x768. Does anyone know a trick to change this behaviour in the Intel driver? I think that would be good enough for Book II (the small font could perhaps be a little bolder then).

[The Noid]

I don't mind a fixed resolution, but I would at least like the game not to be stretched out of aspect on wide-screen monitors. Just put black bars on the sides.

This is a setting in your computer's control panel. On every system I have ever tested the game on, I have found a way to "maintain aspect ratio for non-widescreen video modes" which keeps the game from getting stretched horizontally on widescreen monitors. Your system will put those vertical black bars up for you.

We use widescreen monitors here in the studio and I would have gone insane years ago if I had to play these games stretched out.

I can't find it on my Debian Linux system... But I'll search a bit more...

[CrazyBernie]

On some widescreen monitors I've seen it as an option on the internal monitor menus... in case you haven't checked that already.

[The Noid]

I've found a setting that works in the nvidia-settings tool. I have to force the video-card to scale-up the image to 1920x1200, as the monitor claims it will happily do 800x600 and the monitor doesn't have a fixed-aspect setting.

[Helena]

1024x768 is fine, but I agree with Gragnak, keeping 800x600 too would be fine for those (like me : ATI 32 Mo on a Mac G4 450 dual) who have an old graphic card....

[CrazyBernie]

What really stinks is that I've been shopping around the netbooks for a little while now, and now that I realize that 1024x600 isn't gonna cut it for Book II, I don't want to get a netbook anymore >.<