[Lykurgos88]

Hi,

ever since I downloaded 3.7.0 and made a fresh install after a very long pause I almost immediately noticed some issues regarding the GUI and the in-game HUD. I noticed that the widescreen mainhalls are a known problem, but the other problem isn't probably ever mentioned, because a lot of players seem to ignore it. It happens in all the builds I have tried; including Yarn, BP and the newest Nightlies.

It's related to the in-game message screen. The invisible box, that is supposed to contain 3 lines at a time, is a bit too small on the left and on the top. This effectively means that some pixels on the left and on the top disappear even though there seems to be a enough room to render. To demonstrate this issue, I played the "Surrender, Belisarius" mission with both FSO and FS2 retail in order to make a screenshot comparison.

This is how it looks in FSO:


And this is how it looks in the retail FS2:


The easiest way to spot these disappeared pixels is to look the first character of Alpha: "A" and the number "2". "A" is almost missing its left leg and "2" is missing its "hat". Also the big "F" and "T" are missing their upper horizontal lines. Retail FS2 seems to render messages pixel perfect, but FSO doesn't.

I played FSO with a resolution of 1920x1080@32bit and Retail FS2 with 1024x768@32bit. FSO had every Mediavps_3612 addon enabled.

[zookeeper]

Just for the record, this is a problem that also manifests in FotG, but apparently only for me (or at least not for everyone). I originally suspected that the HUD tabling was simply off by a few pixels, but that wasn't the case.

[Yarn]

The severity of this seems to depend on the game resolution, the aspect ratio, and the resolution of the messages gauge. For me, playing the game in 1920x1080 with the standard HUD makes the text look as bad as the first image above, but playing in 1440x900 or 1920x1200 makes it look a bit better (but there are still missing pixels). The text looks perfect if I play in the same resolution as the messages gauge (1024x768 with the default HUD).

[headdie]

so hud gauge scaling issue?

[Kolgena]

Might be. Keep in mind the current "widescreen" HUDs out there are for 16:10 instead of 16:9. You would have needed either one of the tables I posted or one you made yourself to get a HUD that isn't stretched on 16:9. (Or use the new build that auto-scales HUDs for you)

More likely that for some reason, the window size for chat text and the size of the chat text itself are being scaled differently when you're above 1024x768

[Lykurgos88]

As I said, this happens in Yarn's build (Adaptable HUD build) too. The problem is that either the text is scaled to be too big or the messages gauge is just too small. Or both.

Besides, 16:10 isn't true widescreen. I can't believe why anyone would want to play games in 16:10 anyway. 16:10 was a bad experiment and it failed for a reason. The industry has already made 16:9 a standard, as it should be.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Besides, 16:10 isn't true widescreen. I can't believe why anyone would want to play games in 16:10 anyway. 16:10 was a bad experiment and it failed for a reason. The industry has already made 16:9 a standard, as it should be.

Uh... 1920x1200 gives you exactly as many pixels as 1920x1080, you just have some extra on the top and bottom. Given that there are a lot of 1920x1200 monitors out there, I'm not sure anyone can call it a "failed experiment"...

Note: I use a 1920x1080 monitor myself, but my dad's is 1920x1200.

[Mongoose]

Honestly what I find more embarassing is that you could crank a decade-old CRT up to 1600x1200 and get more vertical pixels than the current HD standard.

[Lykurgos88]

Okay Yarn, I think we can rule out the the possibility of Aspect Ratio causing this issue. I made 2 custom resolutions:

1) The largest 16:10 resolution on my screen: 1728x1080
2) The largest 4:3 resolution on my screen: 1440x1080

No enforced resolution scaling on the monitor (not that it would matter in the end, since screenshots are always pixel perfect). Black bars appear on the sides as it should be.

Here is the new comparison:

16:9 (1920x1080)


16:10 (1728x1080)


4:3 (1440x1080)


4:3 RETAIL (1024x768)


So as you see, aspect ratio doesn't have any effect on this issue. They are all just as messed up. I used Adaptable HUD build with every resolution and all hud element scaled perfectly, except of course the message gauge. So this issue MUST be a resolution scaling issue (actually, only the vertical pixels seem to matter. You can put 10x the amount of horizontal pixels and it still wouldn't change a thing). Does anyone have larger monitors, like 2560x1440? It would nice to know how it scales the text.

----------------

(Now a little bit of derail where I defend the 16:9 aspect ratio. Ignore this if you really don't care about this debate ;P)

[derail]

Given that there are a lot of 1920x1200 monitors out there, I'm not sure anyone can call it a "failed experiment"...

Yes, they are out there (http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/), but it's becoming harder and harder to buy new ones. The great majority of new monitors are 16:9.

Uh... 1920x1200 gives you exactly as many pixels as 1920x1080, you just have some extra on the top and bottom.

That is true, but 1920x1200 and 1920x1080 monitors were never even competing: They are in completely different prize classes. When 1920x1080 monitors were coming out, they were primarily competing against equally prized 1680x1050 monitors. And the choice between these 2 was a no-brainer. You got larger Field of View in games AND 30 additional vertical pixels in the workspace with the new 16:9 monitors.

And yes, the 16:9 FOV is better in EVERY game, FPS or RTS, you name it. If you are playing multiplayer games with 16:10 native resolutions, you have an automatic disadvantage. The resolution SIZE doesn't matter with FOV, only the aspect ratio matters: You can get a better Field of View in games with 1024x576 resolution (PAL wide) than with 2560x1600 (16:10) resolution.

16:9 is also better suited for videos (BTW Video shooting/editing is one of my hobbies). If you watch 16:9 videos (which is a longly established TV standard) with 16:10 monitors, you get black bars and effectively waste your pixels, just like in 4:3 monitors.

I might seem a bit overzealous with this issue, but I just had a flashback of some intense flamewars with my nerd friends a few years ago They were saying that 16:10 ratio would be the future when the new 1440×900 and 1680x1050 monitors were coming out. I said that 16:10 was a bastard child of 4:3 and 16:9, and so it would not survive for long. So I hold on to my 1600x1200 CRT monitor until 2008/2009 and then I bought a 1920x1080 monitor. The 1920x1200 monitors would have been a good office solution, but they were simply too expensive and useless for my gaming needs.

Honestly what I find more embarassing is that you could crank a decade-old CRT up to 1600x1200 and get more vertical pixels than the current HD standard.

You are of course right about this. I find it embarassing too, that those 2560x1440 (16:9) monitors are still too expensive in the year 2013. But either way, 16:9 is going to be the future standard all the way to the 3860x2160 (4k) age. 16:10 will remain a historical curiosity of failed compromise between the new and old TV aspect ratios.

[/derail]

EDIT: Spelling

[Yarn]

The problem isn't related directly to the game's resolution and aspect ratio but to the way that the message box is scaled. In your first three pictures, you used my build, so all the message boxes are the same size. I suggest redoing the comparison with a standard build (not one of mine); the results will probably be different.

[Kolgena]

It would also be valuable to test what happens with 1920x768. If vertical resolution is what the game uses to scale elements, then this resolution should have no text clipping problems.

[Lykurgos88]

Okay, I tried to think of every sub-1080 vertical pixel amount that exists in monitors. The next comparison should include:

1050p
1024p
900p
800p
768p
720p

It'll be a couple of days until I get back home to test new resolutions in FSO, so you'll have to wait for results. Anyone else can also contribute in the meantime...

[Lykurgos88]

Alright, here is the new comparison. I must say, that some of the results are a bit surprising. There's no clear correlation between resolutions. I tried several different aspect ratios with each vertical pixel amounts and confirmed my theory: Aspect ratio makes no difference.

However the must surprising part was that only 768p rendered the text pixel perfect (regardless whether the resolution was 1366x768 or 1024x768 etc...). EVERY other resolution EATS pixels.

Here we go:

1080p


1050p


1024p


900p


800p


768p


720p


As you can see, some of them are better than others but each one misses at least some pixels on the big "A"s except for 768p. The 768p produces the only flawless text. Even 720p is somehow messed up, which boggles my mind O_o

Conclusion: I really don't know where to begin with fixes. The first thought would be to lower font size a little bit, but I don't know if it's a sustainable solution.

Any ideas?

[Kolgena]

The Bank Gothic font that FSU uses is in the VPs. I wonder if any problem might have to do with that specific font file? Maybe if the devs never intended resolutions aside from 1024x768, they wouldn't bother making the font scale properly at larger sizes? A quick check would be to look at BP, since it replaces the default font with Arial.

(Coming from someone who has no idea what a font file actually includes)

[Yarn]

The Bank Gothic font that FSU uses is in the VPs. I wonder if any problem might have to do with that specific font file? Maybe if the devs never intended resolutions aside from 1024x768, they wouldn't bother making the font scale properly at larger sizes? A quick check would be to look at BP, since it replaces the default font with Arial.

(Coming from someone who has no idea what a font file actually includes)

The fonts currently supported in FreeSpace 2 (VF) are bitmap fonts; each character can be thought of as a monochrome BMP (or GIF) image. (Most of the fonts that computers use nowadays are vector fonts.) I still believe that the font scaling is at least partially responsible for this problem.

(And I'm sure that you meant FS2, not FSU, since this has nothing to do with the MediaVPs.)

[Lykurgos88]

The Bank Gothic font that FSU uses is in the VPs. I wonder if any problem might have to do with that specific font file? Maybe if the devs never intended resolutions aside from 1024x768, they wouldn't bother making the font scale properly at larger sizes? A quick check would be to look at BP, since it replaces the default font with Arial.

BP2 indeed has Arial and a quick look tells that it seems render at least 1080p text perfectly. BP1 however has the original font so it has the same problems. I guess BP1 isn't needed anyway right now, since you can play Age of Aquarius with BP2 mod, right?

Maybe the whole Freespace Open should change font to fix this problem. It could be Arial, it could also be something else. Is there any easily readable, scifi-inspired fonts, that could fit in the Freespace universe?

[mjn.mixael]

+1 for TTF Font support.

[m!m]

Yeah, yeah, I get it
I'll see if I can get an updated build out within a reasonable time frame...

[niffiwan]

all you need to do is deal with that damn special characters offset (monospace 1, infinity, big radar dot, small radar dot, etc, all tacked onto the end of an otherwise pristine font?  )

More seriously though, it should be possible to keep font01.vf around just for those special (mostly hud related) characters, and have the TTF used in FSO without any modifications required.  That'd make it easier for modders to replace the font without having to build a new font file.

[mjn.mixael]

This may be getting off topic, but wouldn't it make more sense to use the fonts.tbl to specify special characters in TTFs? Then FSU can carry a TTF Bankgothic with the necessary fonts.tbl stuff.