[Topgun]

the stars, um you can fly through them?

[mikearthur]

Improved wide-screen support.

I've been busy with university the last few months but I hope to make my foray into FS2 development by doing this. Had a bit of a look at the HUD code and should be doable with a bit of work. Hopefully get started on this this summer or autumn.

[Alikchi]

What's wrong with widescreen currently?

[mikearthur]

If I remember correctly the 3D rendering is all fine. The problem is the HUD and other game artwork is hardcoded to 4:3 resolution so gets distorted/stretched during gameplay.

The gameplay-killing problem is that the targeting boxes are in the wrong place so they don't appear correctly over objects.

[taylor]

Both 2D and 3D are set for a 4:3 ratio, not just the interface stuff.  It takes fundamental changes to frame rendering and view setup to fix this.  Not to mention fixes to FOV and culling.

Getting proper widescreen support is neither an easy nor quick task, which is why it hasn't been fixed yet.  I'm already in the process of restructuring the rendering system to actually allow us to fix it, but that's going to take time (ETA is hopefully for 3.6.11, at the end of the year).

[mikearthur]

Fair enough, a bigger problem than I thought. I'd still be interested in helping, what's the best way of communicating? IRC?

From my viewpoint it seemed to at least half work at widescreen resolutions? Will the viewport culling be partially broken when I'm running like that?

[taylor]

Fair enough, a bigger problem than I thought. I'd still be interested in helping, what's the best way of communicating? IRC?

I don't really do IM or IRC, never really have the time.  PM here is generally the best way to get me, and then something can be setup if needed.

From my viewpoint it seemed to at least half work at widescreen resolutions? Will the viewport culling be partially broken when I'm running like that?

All of the positioning and culling is based on the old software code, which assumed a 4:3 screen ratio.  Well, I take that back, it's not the screen ratio itself that's the problem, it is that it's based on an orthographic view.  The 3D elements in the game use a projection view, the 2D elements use an orthographic view, and that doesn't work out in the least when you need to get the two separate elements to line up.  This is the main problem, and it affects you whether you use a widescreen resolution or not.  The real difference is that with a widescreen resolution the problems are just more obvious, but widescreen doesn't actually cause the problem.

It's easy to notice the positioning of the targeting brackets being off, and the culling is the same way since it's all based on the same stuff.  If you run a widescreen resolution then the game will either not render things that it should, or render things that it shouldn't.  In the first case, it's most obvious with the death screen (even on 4:3), since many ships/weapons just disappear strangely before they hit the edge of the screen.  You don't really see the second case, but it causes a performance issue since it wastes time trying to render things that you will never see.

Most people who look at the widescreen issue just think that changing the interface graphics to not stretch out will fix it, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem.  It can't be done with the HUD anyway, unless you rewrite most of that code.

The basic fix is to restructure the frame rendering code to keep 2D and 3D completely separate, but only when they are not related.  The 2D elements on the HUD, for instance, are rendered after the all of the 3D view setup is gone, which means that you will never be able to get the brackets and ships to line up since you can't really figure out where they were on the screen (unless you are REALLY good at math that is).  So this not only affects the basic HUD look itself, but it affects performance too since it's constantly switching between 2D and 3D rendering modes during the same frame, and it shouldn't.  The HUD needs to be treated as a 3D element just like the rest of the view is, and that takes a bit of work to get situated.  Unfortunately that's not even the best/proper fix, but the better fix would basically require rewriting a large portion of the code, which is why I ended up settling for this option instead.

[Wobble73]

This is probably not for 3.6.10, maybe not even 3.7, but what are the chances of getting dual screen support. I mean if you could code it in? It could be handy if (and your graphics cards could handle it) you could have one screen for a forward view (HUD etc.) and another for say, an external view or even a rear facing view!

[taylor]

This is probably not for 3.6.10, maybe not even 3.7, but what are the chances of getting dual screen support...

-239%, being optimistic about it.

There are no plans to add dual screen support now or at any point in the future.  Adding it would require so much work and code complexity that it's really not worth it.

[Mustang19]

Well, if you want to know what people what, look at the Wiki feature request page. Not many people use it, but that's what it's for.

Unless you're already working on all that stuff, and need even MOAR work to do.

[Col. Fishguts]

I want to hear more about this sudden decrease in memory usage.  Please?

Just removing a bunch of crap off of the stack, getting D3D compiled out, cleaning out a couple of structs which had useless data, dealing with textures in OpenGL differently, dealing with various memory fragmentation issues, etc.  And it will get even better post-3.6.10 as I start rewriting the old graphics code to work better with modern graphics APIs (which will make graphics faster and more efficient too).

We're talking about the memory footprint of the binary here, and not memory usage of the whole game, right ?

[eaterofpies]

this might be getting a little off topic but if you force the res to the right size (eg. 2560x1024) you can get it to span multiple screens at the moment though youll probably want to fiddle with the fov.

As for multiple different views would it at least be doable and possibly more simple to have the game run a network based server so you can retrieve data about targets, ships and so on from the game so that you can have a seperate target, or radar , weapon display?

does that make the chance of it happening more than -239%?

[taylor]

We're talking about the memory footprint of the binary here, and not memory usage of the whole game, right ?

Both.

I'm working on both footprint of the binary and overall memory usage as well, since both need a good bit of work.  The memory usage as a whole is currently a barrier to adding more features so it's important to start slimming down now in a significant way so that we don't run into more trouble as new capabilities are added to the engine.

[Agent_Koopa]

All of the positioning and culling is based on the old software code, which assumed a 4:3 screen ratio.  Well, I take that back, it's not the screen ratio itself that's the problem, it is that it's based on an orthographic view.  The 3D elements in the game use a projection view, the 2D elements use an orthographic view, and that doesn't work out in the least when you need to get the two separate elements to line up.  This is the main problem, and it affects you whether you use a widescreen resolution or not.  The real difference is that with a widescreen resolution the problems are just more obvious, but widescreen doesn't actually cause the problem.

Most people who look at the widescreen issue just think that changing the interface graphics to not stretch out will fix it, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem.  It can't be done with the HUD anyway, unless you rewrite most of that code.

The basic fix is to restructure the frame rendering code to keep 2D and 3D completely separate, but only when they are not related.  The 2D elements on the HUD, for instance, are rendered after the all of the 3D view setup is gone, which means that you will never be able to get the brackets and ships to line up since you can't really figure out where they were on the screen (unless you are REALLY good at math that is).  So this not only affects the basic HUD look itself, but it affects performance too since it's constantly switching between 2D and 3D rendering modes during the same frame, and it shouldn't.  The HUD needs to be treated as a 3D element just like the rest of the view is, and that takes a bit of work to get situated.  Unfortunately that's not even the best/proper fix, but the better fix would basically require rewriting a large portion of the code, which is why I ended up settling for this option instead.

Well, I understand very little of this, but I like to think I'm relatively clever, so I'll take a stab at it. I don't understand the terms "orthographic view" and "projection view", but I think I get what you're saying. The targeting brackets exist in a different plane than the 3D graphics, so that it is hard to derive the position of the target precisely and translate that to the 2D plane. Would it be possible to instead add a "postbox view" to the game, so that black bars are added to the sides, and the game is tricked into thinking it's running in 4:3? This is more of a temporary solution, but it would minimize the problems.

[blackhole]

That might actually work if you took the screen size coordinates that you were feeding the engine and changed them to a 4:3 aspect ratio.

[Goober5000]

Would it be possible to instead add a "postbox view" to the game, so that black bars are added to the sides, and the game is tricked into thinking it's running in 4:3? This is more of a temporary solution, but it would minimize the problems.

Monitors do this automatically -- in fact, that's what happens on my laptop.  I think people are lobbying for actual wide-screen support, so that the HUD is properly proportioned across the entire screen.  That's a little more difficult.

[Agent_Koopa]

Monitors do this automatically -- in fact, that's what happens on my laptop.  I think people are lobbying for actual wide-screen support, so that the HUD is properly proportioned across the entire screen.  That's a little more difficult.

Oh. Hewlett-Packard has a lot to answer for.

[CP5670]

Actually, most monitors can't do that properly without using an analog connection. Only a few are capable of it. The Nvidia drivers are supposed to be able to do the same thing in software, but it doesn't work on many cards.

[Kazan]

What I'd like to see in a near-future release:

Improved wide-screen support.

apparently the projection issue that cuases the busted targeting brackets, etc, will probably not be fixed till 3.7

[taylor]

apparently the projection issue that cuases the busted targeting brackets, etc, will probably not be fixed till 3.7

Hopefully for 3.6.11 actually, but that just depends on how much time I have available to work on it.  It's the same basic bug that screws up the death scene and in-game cutscenes, so it is a pretty major issue overall.