EE Progress Report - Widescreen

SoM and I have worked together to hammer out a raise to the resolution cap, a change in EE's resolution setting UI, and most importantly, support for 16:9, 16:10, and non-standard aspect ratios in the renderer.

Here are some shots:
http://eternity.mancubus.net/pics/widescreen1.png
http://eternity.mancubus.net/pics/widescreen2.png

Only drawing going through R_ codepaths is affected, so the HUD, status bar, etc. still appear stretched. We have some ideas on how we might deal with that.

With the amount of work that has been done recently, I'd expect a new maintenance release pretty soon. I know a lot of people will be eager to get their hands on this. If you know the right people, you can probably get ahold of a SVN build and do some beta testing for us ;)

Will the expanded fov in 16:9 and 16:10 be optional? I've always played Doom in 16:10, so 4:3 (or 16:10 with an expanded fov) looks vertically stretched to me.

I'll have to consider if it's possible to disable FOV auto-adjustment for different aspect ratios or not :P

Quasar said:

16:10

So it will look like classic Doom, yay!

printz said:

So it will look like classic Doom, yay!

No, classic Doom is displayed at 4:3 but using a 16:10 resolution with tall pixels. Eternity already corrects for that in 4:3 resolutions. Widescreen 16:10 means widescreen 16:10. :P

printz said:

So it will look like classic Doom, yay!

How so? Classic Doom is 320x200 pixels stretched over a 4:3 screen, so it actually looks like 320x240. Which is why modern ports need aspect ration correction to display it correctly on LCD screens or in windowed mode.

Looking forward to trying it. :)

Doom_user said:

Will the expanded fov in 16:9 and 16:10 be optional? I've always played Doom in 16:10, so 4:3 (or 16:10 with an expanded fov) looks vertically stretched to me.

that's because of aspect ratio correction, not because of the FOV. Ratio correction isn't really optional, and it's the closest approximation of Doom, which vertically stretched everything due to the video mode used.

Basically here's the situation for all the resolutions EE can support:

320x200 / 640x400: if you choose these, no kind of correction is performed because it's assumed that if you run in these resolutions, you're probably doing so because your hardware supports them properly (as mine does, somewhat at least). If you play them windowed, they'll look scrunched, but very few modern machines can get by with windows this small anyway. On 1680x1050, 320x200 is like a desktop icon.

4:3 resolutions: Nothing special is done here either since our normal scaling code automatically makes the game look correct, given the nature of DOOM's graphic resources. 4:3 is how DOOM is supposed to look.

16:9 / 16:10: An adjustment to the vertical focal length takes care of the apparent squishing (actually horizontal stretching), and an increase to the FOV takes advantage of the additional available horizontal screen space over the closest smaller 4:3 resolution.

EE now allows any arbitrary video mode between 320x200 and 2560x1600. You can set video modes in the menu by entering a "geom" string, of the same syntax as that used by EE and PrBoom's -geom command-line parameters, i.e.:

640x480f
960x720w
1024x768f
1280x800w
1920x1080f

w/f mean windowed or fullscreen respectively. There are some other power-user flags that can be specified at the end, but they are not generally of concern to the average user.

sounds awesome. 1440x900 FTW!!

The future looks better and brighter for EE with every step!

Thanks guys. :)

For me having no widescreen monitors at disposal, can I ask what does widescreen support mean? a) widening of the field of view to cover the whole screen, or b) keep the same 4:3 or 8:5 aspect ratio, and blacken the extra space?
Wouldn't a) give an advantage to players?

printz said:

For me having no widescreen monitors at disposal, can I ask what does widescreen support mean? a) widening of the field of view to cover the whole screen, or b) keep the same 4:3 or 8:5 aspect ratio, and blacken the extra space?
Wouldn't a) give an advantage to players?

Quasar already explained this in his post.

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=797512#post797512

Awesome. Thank you Quasar and SoM, I'd been waiting for this. It's been annoying playing in a window but I can't stand having everything distorted. Looking forward to the next release.

If you really can't wait, you can grab an SVN build from DRD Team: http://svn.drdteam.org/

Quasar said:

status bar ... still appear stretched

:)

Quasar said:

we might deal with that.

:(

Gez said:

If you really can't wait, you can grab an SVN build from DRD Team: http://svn.drdteam.org/

Excellent, thank you.

For some reason I'm having problems getting 1680x1050 after I updated it (I'm not sure I didn't have the latest version to begin with, though). -geom 1680x1050 used to work. I've tried that and -vwidth 1680 -vheight 1050 and it's still putting out 1024x768.

DuckReconMajor said:

For some reason I'm having problems getting 1680x1050 after I updated it (I'm not sure I didn't have the latest version to begin with, though). -geom 1680x1050 used to work. I've tried that and -vwidth 1680 -vheight 1050 and it's still putting out 1024x768.

Are you using the latest official release or a more recent SVN build? If I remember right, the latest official release didn't have widescreen or higher resolutions yet.

DuckReconMajor said:

For some reason I'm having problems getting 1680x1050 after I updated it (I'm not sure I didn't have the latest version to begin with, though). -geom 1680x1050 used to work. I've tried that and -vwidth 1680 -vheight 1050 and it's still putting out 1024x768.

Can't replicate.

esselfortium said:

Are you using the latest official release or a more recent SVN build? If I remember right, the latest official release didn't have widescreen or higher resolutions yet.

I'm using the latest official release, but I could've sworn I did 1680x1050 with it before.

How do I install an SVN build?

Download the latest from http://svn.drdteam.org/eternity/ and install it the same way you would an official release.

Okay, it works. I guess my newbie self couldn't tell the difference several months ago. Thanks!