Another widescreen newbie with problems

[Nemo66]

Hi folks,

is use a widescreen monitor with it's best resolution at 1440x900. If i run the game the whole screen is filled with the 4:3 picture, which leads to a distorted image because it's compressed.

The ships/boats are flatened and elongated, gauges and peri are not round but oval.

I read a lot about the widescreen problems but i can't find a way that works. Also my Screen (Hanns.G HW191D) does not seem to have the 1368X768 resolution. I tested out all possibilities at the graphic card (n-vidia G-Force 6600) and the screen menue but the only effect was that i am totally confused and frustrated.

I downloaded Ahnenerbes widescreen and acitvated it with JGSME but this leads to CTD.

With MaGui stand alone widescreen i could not see any effect whatsoever.

It drives me crazy because it's a real hell to play that way. I tried everything i could imagine to get this problem fixed but i do not know enough about PCs to gain any success at all.

All i want is to play the game without a compressed picture. Black parts left and right of the screen are welcome to me.

I do not really understand what the mods do. Do they just stop the compression and make black parts left and right or do they fill the whole screen without compressing? Also i do not understand if there is a widescreen fix that does not alter the GUIs. Do i need to fix the compression problems first and after this i can use the GUI stuff? Or is this done in one step?

Sorry mates, this may sound stupid or like yesteryears problems to you, but i am not really handy with PCS and need your help urgently!

[RushTheBus]

Can you post your mod list? I know you said you looked at the nvidia control panel but did you make sure to use GPU scaling and set it to either aspect ratio or full screen?

Outside of a mod conflict, the only other issue I can think of is that it has to so with the fact that your monitor has an aspect ratio of 16:10. If I recall correctly, the game gets fussy when not using 16:9, but I may be wrong.

As far as the mods, there is a lot of info out there about how they work. Bottom line is 1024x768 is hard coded in the exe and has yet to be hacked or "unchained" to allow more modern resolutions. The mods use a .dll and .cfg to tell the engine what resolution to render. This is why you need a new gui. The gui won't scale without support from the code currently locked in the exe so modders have to draft new 2D Gui elements to work with wide screen resolutions (otherwise the Gui deforms into what you are experiencing).

[sublynx]

One thing you could do is play windowed and use InfiniteScreen to oversize the window to whatever size aspect you prefer. It won't look pretty but you will be able to use the whole of your screen and it won't be distorted.

[Nemo66]

THX for the help so far mates !

@ RushTheBus

Nope, Sir, i don't use any mods at the moment. With aspect ratio 16:10 you may be right, but i do not know for sure because i have no info about the screen at all. It was a present from a friend and it came with no data whatsoever. Also i am absolutely not familiar what resolutions are meant for 4:3 , 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio.

@ sublynx

Windowed mode? Sounds interesting but i do not know where to find and how to activate this. I found a feature where i can trim the screen manually, but i did not find out yet, how to assign this to the game. All i can do is to activate this for the desktop but this has no influence how the game is displayed. But i read in other threads that people do it this way "by hand". Please tell me what "windowed mode" is and how i can activate it for the display of the game. I don't care if i have to do it manually each single time i play.
As i said, It is not so important to me if the whole screen is used, i am fine with black parts left and right, my main problem are the distortions.
What i need to understand is, what the widescreen mods really do, and what finally defines resolution / aspect ratio. What is a complete mystery to me is how graphic card, the screen and the game are related to each other, which relates to what, and who of them is "the boss of 'em all"!
I tried a hell of things with my settings but i can't really find a point "aspect ratio". And with resolutions i only can find such that don't seem to relate to the resolutions the WS-mods seem to refer to. Also i am absolutely not familiar what resolutions are meant for 4:3 , 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio.


@ all

Sorry for being such a PC-Idiot

[sublynx]

I'm on my phone right now so I can't post a screenshot but I'll post a screenshot later if need be. You can switch to windowed mode from SH3 video options (start the game normally. From the starting screen with Career Single missions Museum etc you will find Options and from there Video options, and in there Windowed). The terms might be different - I write from memory and use German in my SH3.

[Nemo66]

@sublynx


GREAT! I found "windowed mode" and made it work, though terms in german version were different. I had to deactivate "fullscreen" but who cares. It looked a bit ugly in the beginning but i changed desktop colour to black, deactivated " show desktop icons" and set the window colour to silver. Looks really ok now! And finally i have no more problems with distortions whatsoever!
THX for the help man, now i could play the first time with my new screen without the compressed sub/ships/gauges!

Is there a way i can make the window a bit bigger? I still have some unused space on top and bottom of the SH3 window. I would like to fill my screen with the SH3 window as big as possible, now it's just a preset window, which is ok but not too big.

[banryu79]

Originally Posted by Nemo66

@sublynx
Is there a way i can make the window a bit bigger? I still have some unused space on top and bottom of the SH3 window. I would like to fill my screen with the SH3 window as big as possible, now it's just a preset window, which is ok but not too big.

To understand the concept of aspect ratio just take 20 seconds and read the first paragraph of this wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio

After you read that, you should be able to easly understand that, for example, your native monitor resolution of 1440x900 pixels implies an aspect ratio of 1440/900 = 1.6 (aka 16:10 beacuse 16/10 = 1.6).

The original game graphic assets where created in a time where monitors with a 4:3 aspect ratio were the norm. In terms of resolution, for a 4:3 aspect ratio you could have:
800x600 (800/600 = 1.33333...)
1024x768 (1024/768 = 1.33333...)
1280x960 (1280x960 = 1.33333...)
and so on, because 4:3 ratio means 4/3 = 1.33333...

My laptop monitor has a native resolution of 1366x768, what aspect ratio it is? Let's see...
1366x768 (1366/768 = 1.778645833333...)
so it is about 16:9 ratio because 16/9 = 1.77777... so not exactly equal but just close enough that any distortion of a game graphics created to be displayed in 16:9 on my monitor will not be perceptible).

I hope that helped!

[sublynx]

Most excellent!

You can oversize the window with InfiniteScreen or you might have the oversize option in the program that controls your graphics card.

[sublynx]

Here's a Youtube clip showing how oversizing in InfiniteScreen works:

[Nemo66]

@ SUBLYNX


THX mate, i got Infinite screen but i can' get it to work properly. I do it as shown in the video, and i get somewhat like a bigger window, but it's not filled with the game. It just a white frame but the game content stays in it at it's old size, connected to the upper left corner. The rest of the frame is filled with whatever content i was looking at before, it looks like a seethrough-effect. So i have the game in the upper left corner at its old size, and two rectangulars, one at the bottom and one on the right side, all inside that white "frame" that seems to show me the new window size. It gives me a new, bigger window but it does not fill it with the game. I tried to make a screenshot of this but all i get out is pure black for some reason i do not know...

Any idea what may be the problem? (Besides my stupidity)

[sublynx]

Oh man that is strange... Never seen the program do something like that. What does it do if you try to make another non- SH3 window bigger?

edit: for screenshots use alt+printscrn key combination. The old SH3 way does not work with InfiniteScreen screenshots.

[sublynx]

Do you have InfiniteScreen's window size at "infinite"?

[Nemo66]

@ SUBLYNX


Yes, "infinite" is activated. I tried it with another old game: "The shells of fury" . The window allows me to make it bigger in height, and fills up the window with the game. But if do this for width, the window refuses and jumps back to its original size. Strange things happen here..

[sublynx]

I get that "jumping back" too, with Microsoft Excel, but not with SH3

Here's my d3d9.ini file. I've been using InfiniteScreen for so long that I can't remember anymore what was the situation with this file back then.

[GLOBAL]
DebugLog=false

[ENGINE]
DisplayWidth=1366
DisplayHeight=768
Refreshrate=false

[LOADSCREENS]
tx=0.01635
ty=0.0
sx=0.0
sy=0.00
maxscale=true

[EFFECTS]
Ocean=false

Are your DisplayWidth and DisplayHeight set to the size you want to use?

[Nemo66]

errrr....whats that d3d9 file about and where do i find it ? And what do i have to do with it ?