[Objekt]

My girlfriend just got a 22" widescreen LCD.  While SCP will quite happily launch in the monitor's native 1680x1050 resolution, this does Bad Things.  Specifically, there's a huge problem with perspective: things that are far move as if they were near when you move your fighter.  For instance, target a ship 1-2 km away and turn, and it floats away from its HUD targeting box.  It's very annoying and makes the game pretty much unplayable, since models don't appear where the HUD indicates they should.

One fix is to run in a non-widescreen mode, e.g. 1280x1024.  Unfortunately, if I do that, the monitor (or is it the video card?) stretches that picture, which has a 4;3 aspect ratio, to fit the wide (16:10) aspect ratio screen.  So, the picture now looks weird because it's being stretched both vertically and horizontally, but by different amounts each way.

Is there some way to force the display to do something like letterboxing?  There ought to be some way to  have the 1280x1024 screen drawn centered in the display, with black bars to the left, right, and above and below.  This would mean a less-distorted picture and pretty much fix the perspective problem. 

The perspective problem is apparently due to a deep-seated code problem that is not likely to be fixed soon.  I never noticed it on my old machine, using 1280x1024 resolution on a conventional 4:3 aspect CRT monitor, so I can live with it if I can find a way to make it work on the new display.

FWIW, the machine in question has an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro video card, and the monitor is an LG L226WTQ.

[Herra Tohtori]

I would just use the native widescreen image and imagine that the Vasudan deck crew has used your helmet as a football (they have to do something related to headz after all) and in the process, the visor HUD has become slightly mis-aligned. Then, use Mark 1 eyeball sensors to correct the possible errors to lead indicator positions to actually hit things.

The problem is a known one, and apparently related to other issues with stars and suns, and the coders apparently also pretty much know what's wrong but it doesn't have a high priority right now because the time to fix it would be disproportionate to the benefits compared to the benfits/time ratio of other things in need of fixing.


As to making the monitor show some resolution in the middle of it... Well, from the top of my hat I can suggest using windowed mode. It's in the Dev Tool list on the Features tab. If you want the most immersion, minimize all other programs, use black background image and terminate explorer.exe process from Task Manager. After you finish playing, fire up explorer.exe by selecting Run in the Task manager, which will restore your desktop application to life.

If the monitor has 1050 height, you will be able to fit the 1280x1024 resolution window nicely to the screen so that all is visible; just drag it to up middle so that the title bar of the window (the blue/silver/gray/whatever theme or non-theme you're using) is almost entirely above the monitor's upper edge.

[Jeff Vader]

I'd guess you can fiddle something in the Catalyst Control Center. My laptop screen is 1280x800 and I disable the scaling thing so that, when I play FS in 1024x768, the game screen is in the middle of the monitor, surrounded by black bars. I could use the option of scaling to maximum size while maintaining the aspect ratio, but I prefer the pixel sharp option.

[ARSPR]

Is there some way to force the display to do something like letterboxing?  There ought to be some way to  have the 1280x1024 screen drawn centered in the display, with black bars to the left, right, and above and below.  This would mean a less-distorted picture and pretty much fix the perspective problem. 

As already told the easiest way is using -window flag.

But your Catalyst driver should allow you to choose no scaling at all. As example with ForceWare (for nvidia GPUs) you have it in nVidia control panel > Flat Panel Scaling (free translation from Spanish  )

Another important comment. FS2 doesn't support other aspect ratio than 4:3. With any other aspect ratio you can have distortions. So don't use 1280x1024 (5:4) but 1280x960 (4:3). Take in mind that you'll see some blurriness in mainhall and briefings because the windows are scaled up from 1024x768.

I also have a 22'' 1680 x 1050 LCD and I run the game at 1280x960.

[Herra Tohtori]

That's the good thing in windowed mode, it gives no blurriness. The only problem with it is reduced immersion and possibly some other things like mouse floating out of focus and clicking something by accident, pausing the game... (don't remember if this can happen, though).

[ARSPR]

That's the good thing in windowed mode, it gives no blurriness. The only problem with it is reduced immersion and possibly some other things like mouse floating out of focus and clicking something by accident, pausing the game... (don't remember if this can happen, though).

Nope, if you don't use 1024x768 you have some blurriness in 2D interface despite -window or not. As I've said, this is caused because 1024x768 images are scaled up and there's no 1:1 pixel match so you have to interpolate.

Ingame 3D models aren't affected by this small issue.

[Herra Tohtori]

Ah, you meant the interface, I meant the rendered 3D graphics.

[JGZinv]

For folks that will find this thread in the future via search.
I've found that using windowed mode or messing with the
settings on a 15.4 widescreen Intel intergrated Dell Inspiron 6000
didn't help anything. You still get a distortion effect that can alter the game.

Wasn't until I hooked up a proper standard display on a different PC that the
magnitude of the difference was evident.

[ARSPR]

For folks that will find this thread in the future via search.
I've found that using windowed mode or messing with the
settings on a 15.4 widescreen Intel intergrated Dell Inspiron 6000
didn't help anything. You still get a distortion effect that can alter the game.

Wasn't until I hooked up a proper standard display on a different PC that the
magnitude of the difference was evident.

Hey guy, you're doing something wrong. The most important things are:

• You must select 4:3 resolution in launcher: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960... If you select any other resolution with any other aspect ratio you can get distortions.
• Then, but only when you have selected a 4:3 resolution, either you run the game in window or you set your display driver to not scaling the output to your LCD.

[Kaine]

It hasn't been said, so I'll say it:

This is a known bug and will be fixed in the next major update. Or so I'm told. I registered this bug on Mantis months ago, the devs know about it.

[haloboy100]

Yes, I have searched and found this thread. So time to mini-necro it, sorry.

So apparently the distortion affect hasn't been fixed with the current 3.6.10 mediavps. I can live with it for now, but it looks to be a FOV problem. Isn't there some way you can change the freespace FOV to eliminate this problem?

Also, the symptoms I'm having are the usual hud distortion problem, which also happens to the stars and suns, and i've noticed it severely on jump notes, and to a slight extent on asteroids and fighters, all on a 26 inch LCD wide screen TV (which has VGA input, comming from my computer, if that means anything. I'm still special ordering that YPbPr cable for my Nvidia card, will i get the same problem with that cable?). It's also running on a 16:9 aspect ratio at 1366X768@60hz. Sorry, this sounds like I'm bragging and some of this information is probably irrelevant, but I'm trying to help further diagnose the problem by offering this info.

Hope thats of help.

[ARSPR]

Apart from widescreen resolution distortions, there's an ancient known issue about misalignments between 2D and 3D data in the game screen: See mantis number 83!!!!. But the solution is not easy to code. This issue is what causes the background displacements you see.

Nevertheless you can play with -fov launcher flag till you get the best results in your system.

[Flaser]

Yes, I have searched and found this thread. So time to mini-necro it, sorry.

So apparently the distortion affect hasn't been fixed with the current 3.6.10 mediavps. I can live with it for now, but it looks to be a FOV problem. Isn't there some way you can change the freespace FOV to eliminate this problem?

Also, the symptoms I'm having are the usual hud distortion problem, which also happens to the stars and suns, and i've noticed it severely on jump notes, and to a slight extent on asteroids and fighters, all on a 26 inch LCD wide screen TV (which has VGA input, comming from my computer, if that means anything. I'm still special ordering that YPbPr cable for my Nvidia card, will i get the same problem with that cable?). It's also running on a 16:9 aspect ratio at 1366X768@60hz. Sorry, this sounds like I'm bragging and some of this information is probably irrelevant, but I'm trying to help further diagnose the problem by offering this info.

Hope thats of help.

This isn't "exactly" a FOV problem.
Some of the graphics (ie. the stars, HUD elements) are drawn with the old orthographic rendering, while models and most stuff on screen uses the new perspective rendering.
You may be lucky and find a FOV setting where the perspective parts almost line up with the orthographic parts, but I'm not savvy enough to know how to calculate that setting - or whether such setting would be playable at all.

[haloboy100]

Alright. Time to fiddle around with the FOV then...