The Drunken Lizard Pub

Is there any way by editing setup files or anything to make the game widescreen, I love the game but the stretched image just feels really strange because mouse movement is off in the isometric view. If not PLEASE PLEASE make some sort of widescreen support in book II.

I'd love to see widescreen support in the future games. I run at 1920x1200 on a wide screen monitor and it's a little painful to play in a little 800x600 box. Full screen mode isn't an option since it stretches everything. Amazing came otherwise though.

I haven't tried this game on widescreen because when I played it some months ago I used my old 19 display. Now I got a 22 widescreen one too.

I think that if the game world and general interface is developed for a more square-looking environment, some kind of decoration could be placed. As example, if the screen is 1680x1050, but the game itself cannot be bigger than 1024, then the other 600px could be some kind of drawing, or whatever decoration, but just fixing the exact pixels of the screen so no emulation is done, with blurring. I mean, something that does not give advantage to widescreen users.

What you need to do is go into the Display Settings and tell your graphics card to "Maintain Aspect Ratio". This will automatically "letter box" the view, putting black bars on the left and right of the screen and keeping the video non-distorted. This will not only make Eschalon look better but also any other game that uses a fixed resolution.

I use widescreen monitors on 4 out of 5 systems here in the studio, and this solution works fine for all platforms (Win/MacOS/Linux). Beyond that, I have looked into what it would take to support a widescreen display with our 2D engine and it would be a tremendous amount of work to do what most video drivers will do for you automatically.

Once we go 3D on future projects (no, not with Book II) then it will be easier to build widescreen support into the engine.

Any way to do this on a mac? I don't see "maintain aspect ratio" as an option in the display pref pane.

I thought I remember an option that allowed users to set aspect ratio, but I could not find it doing a very quick search.

Are you using the display's native resolution or are you forcing a lower (non-widescreen) resolution?

Sorry to bump an old topic, but you know the wooden-ish "border" that the game window is in? The sides could be expanded if widescreen as an option was implemented.

Hmm that would actually work monk....

Definitely, that would work for any screen resolution higher that the default 1024x768. In this case we would request a resolution of 1365x768 (this is the standard widescreen version of 1024x768) and draw bars on the bordering 170 pixel "unused space". In reality, any resolution could be used and we would then just center our 1024x768 game within that X,Y graphic plane.

This has be discussed but the work involved was too great for Book II (basically, we have to offset the "X,Y zero-point" of our game window into the larger pixel field, and this will break every single drawn graphic and mouse-location function). This feature will have to wait for Book III. Book III will be the final version of this isometric engine that we will produce and so it only makes sense that it is the most compatible and user-friendly version.

That sounds good. I guess I'll just play Book II in windowed after I buy my new PC, but 1024x768 is alot easier to see than 800x600 in that case