Hummm it seems that not many widescreen users are actually interested :hmmm:

OK, we saved us a lot of effort :yeah:

I don't think that's it. I think that a lots of people are waiting (and secretly hoping) for the SHV mess to be sorted out and that the SHV will replace SHIII.
I believe that this thread might get better response about 2 weeks - month after SHV is released and turns out to be a flop.

I, for one, would love to see SH3 fully in widescreen. I have been using rubini's mod, but the unmodded stuff is just bad (stretched images, dials etc.).
I got 32in Bravia for Xmas (1920x1080) and games look amazing on this thing... :rock:

I'm actually waiting for Hitman's new GUI for SH3 (normal, not wide-screen). There is a special installation of SH3 on my disk waiting only for this, so I hope that you will finish soon, Hitman :salute:

Oh yeah, Hitman, at least a screenshot or something :D
BTW, if anyone want to hijack this thread and talk about what his perfect interface would look like (in SH5), go ahead, maybe some of those things can be implemented in SH3 too

It's not that I'm not interested, it's just that having followed a number of attempts at this over the years that always hit the same stumbling blocks I'm not sure I'd ever prefer it over fixed-aspect...unless the stumbling blocks were overcome.

I'm fortunate in that I have an nVidia card, which means that even with my widescreen monitor I can maintain 4:3 ratio and with scaling.

For me, black bands on the left and right of the monitor are preferred over ovalled circles and such. Find a fix for that, and I'd be interested.

I'm very much interested but as I have said the widescreen only works on ATI cards, this splits people interested in half, this really is the main problem, I would work on it further but can't pass this first hurdle! so far I have been completely ignored!:-?

Humm OK I understand your position guys.

@Karamazov:

The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that the only way to overcome this problem is to go 3D. It would also be the less work-intensive way to do it.

Basically, the idea would be as follows:

1.-Strip all 2D screens from dials and rotating things (Periscopes, UZO, TDC). In the tool bar, the 6 dials that are there can be replaced by simple digital readouts. The work done to rescale periscope will anyway serve also for the UZO and the other periscope. But I would leave the Notepad out, as that can be a big headache. If many users request it, it can be added later, but I would go for a first functional release, and then slowly implementing more things. Otherwise the job will burn any takers.

2.-Rescale the images of all 2D screens that are to stay. This is the most work intensive part, specially the icons. But it also is the less important one, because it's actually the oval dials what looks worser. This should therefore be done, as I said, in different steps.

3.-Rework certain 3D stations and link them to the F keys. For example, the TDC screen would no longer be a 2D screen with attack map, but instead hitting the key would take you to the conning tower to a zoomed view in front of the TDC. That TDC would benefit from a new, higher resolution model, for which we can use what Karamazov already created for SH4.


In all, this would give a reasonably looking interface, at the expense of not being as detailed as the ones that can be created in 4:3

I would suggest making first the stripped version of the interface WITHOUT resizing dials and letting widescreen users download and test it, so they can voice their opinion about if it is too simple to be of good use and not worth the effort, as it would fall short.

And there are already some functionalities for that in game.
When you right clic on the weapon officer you get a fixed view zoomed on the bottom part of the TDC. Now you'd need to move the WE in the conning tower (doable I think with the open hatch mods) and have his camera fixed on the TDC.
And why not use some hyper hi-res textures for that particular part to have a more acceptable level of detail compared to the 2D interface.

Same for the LI if I'm not mistaken, right clicking on him gives you a fixed view on the telegraphs and rudder controls on the wall behind him. It could be moved to have a larger fixed view showing both the engine, rudder and depth control dials.

You can also have the "goback" button set on the right-click, but it's a bit cumbersome when using the tools on the navmap (you usually use right clic to "cancel" a tool, now it puts you back in the CR).

Sorry if it's already been posted, I only read the thread quickly :oops:

That's a damn good idea I had forgotten about :yeah:

How does it work in SH4, are the needles there not 2D image overlays?:hmmm:

SH4 has a new parameter hardcoded and that is correspondly reflected in the menu.ini, allowing to re-scale the 2D items. Basically when applied it seems to rescale everything keeping the 4:3 aspect and using either the original heigth or width of the object as base, depending on what you set the menu-ini to do. Karamazov knows a lot more than me about this, you can find the relevant info here: http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...28&postcount=7

I've just added a few images to that post, just to make things more clear.

A very good idea and intention indeed.

I'm playing at 1440x900 resolution and I only need the periscope done to fit my wide screen ratio

Another good thing to resolve is the disappearing mouse cursor on higher resolutions!:yep:

Only one relevant comment in response from me.

I run a triple screen rig using an NVidia 8800 GTX running through a MATROX TripleHead2Go splitter box. My 3 flat screen 21" colour LED monitors creating a display that is 12 inches high by 5 feet wide, absolutely perfect for portraying the ocean, sky or landscape totally convincingly in a wrap around way. Once one has experienced this kind of perspective one can never be content with a single small screen again. Being old, retired, with no woman in my life currently and having a classic addictive personality, I use this rig to compulsively enjoy the most ultra-immersive and realistic simulations available, including motor racing and civilian flying but especially ground, sea and air combat.

Currently that includes the following simulators.

Ground combat . . . . ARMA ii, Modern Warfare 2 & Red Orchestra
Civilian Flying . . . . . FSX
Air combat . . . . . . . IL2 1946, Lock On (LOMAC), KA 80 Blackshark, Rise of Flight.
Ocean Combat. . . . . SH II, SH IV and as soon as it comes out SH V

(Although they have the correct wide-screen option I so seldom use the best of the motor racing sims like GRID and DIRT that I haven't included them above. This is largely because their user interfaces are appallingly clunky perhaps because they only have to cater to a younger and shallower gamers market not a mature bunch of obsessive, critical, intelligent and demanding realists like heavy sim users!)

My MATROX driven triple display gives me fantastically immersive HD wide angle and transorms ALL the sims above into things of wonder that cause visitors jaws to drop. They virtually (sic) always say something like "I never saw the point of them before because I never knew that simulations could be THIS realistic but now I can entirely see why you are so enthusiastic and involved!" This is almost inevitably followed by "Can I have a go?" Even non-computer literate women have this reaction rather than the near universal dismissal of simulators as "video games".

The MATROX software automatically allows for the deviding bar between screens and keeps the perspective correct, with no "jumps" and also adds a triple screen resolution or 3XXX by 12XX to all one's simulators but not all of them adjust the perspective, so it is the game sw not the MATROX sw that needs to be updated or Modded. I should add that triple-screen users are an exceedingly rapidly expanding community who tend to only buy games that have the correct perspective, so the gaming houses need to see this as a sales issue too as the gaming drives the tech and the tech then drives the gaming in a highly profitable cycle that WE all pay for as long as they give us what we ask for next!

[Note. I only actually play ONE or at most TWO of the above obsessively most of the time, the others are occasional treats. Otherwise I would scarcely have time to do anything else! I seldom post for the same reason but my rare posts are always too long anyway.]

If you have seen Avatar and had your ear to the grape vine in 2009 you will know that the future is 3D and that will include TV and Gamingnot just "a few movies". I disagree with complacent and pompous self-appointed TV pundits like Mark Kermode who think 3D is just a re-run of a "geeky fad. The same was said of the ZX80, Commodore 64 and BBC B by the same kind of pundits who proved to be only "legends in their own lunchtime"! LOL Remember?

So what's my problem, comment or response for this thread?

Well, apart from FSX, ARMA II, K-80 Blackshark and Rise of Flight which are all modern sims built with state-of-the-art and future tech in mind, virtually NONE of the simulations listed above (plus dozens more unlisted that i have and have tried) have true "correct perspective" for triple-screen, ultra-wide-screen or even simple wide-screen displays.

So when fighting in Modern Weapons 2 for example although the landscape and buildings all look pretty correct, the human avatars look squat, broad and a tad comical, wasting the vast effort put into their now near "photo-realism". The mind rapidly adjusts and ignors this but it does cancel out some of the immersive realism of expensive wide or triple screen displays.

I mention it here because all such comments equally apply to any ultra-wide-screen view in any simulation.

Can I take this opportunity to sincerely commend MATROX TripleHead2Go to every virtual submariner on this forum! You cannot BELIEVE how gloriously real the waves, weather and night sky all look in SH IV in a 5' ultra-wide-screen view. As currently configured however, as in part this thread addresses, SH doesn't utilise my display edge-to-edge but creates a kind of semi-wide-screen display that half overlaps the left and right screens, wasting and denying me the "full width display" that i have invested so much to enjoy.

It is worth adding that I also employ Track IR, so in aircraft, race cars, tanks or on the bridge of a sub it is very very like being in a real cockpit as one can glance in any direction and the screen view responds to one's head movements in real time.

UM . . . . I don't get a lot else done and sometimes forget to go shopping or cook meals. LOL sad I suppose but HUGE FUN and my grandsons love it!

Another setting I would love to see in most or even all simulators is split sound channels with one channel for ambient sounds t be output from one's surround-sound speakers and one for one's headphones and boom mike. This simple division would enormously enhance all those simulations of real world situations where one wears, hears and talks clearly on a headset whilst in a noisy surrounding environment, such as a modern race or rally car cockpit, an aircraft cockpit or in modern infantry combat.

The headset position is already picked up by Track IR and the screen view moved with the surround-sound remaining oriented to the craft, vehicle, or aircraft's orientation and sounds. i.e. when one looks to the left in a twin-engined aircraft one hears the left engine more loudly than the right and when one passes a nopisy static object such as a steam train, it's sound passes the moving aircraft or vehicle in the correct directional way, reflected also in the motion of one's head. So such a dual sound channeloption would need to tie the head motion to the headphones and the surround-siound to the vehicle. This is feasible using one's head as one (mobile) axis relative to the vehicle, plane or craft, whose orientation relative to the surrounding virtual landscape, sky or ocean is the second axis.

Final note. IMO the sound track of the title sequence of our current SH IV is absolutely stunning and I often replay it just to listen! But am I alone in finding the "speeded up visuals" utterly utterly dumb, distracting, inexplicable and unnecessarily destroying the theatrical granduer of the voice over? Who ever accepted those visuals should be shot and whoever chose the sound voice over promoted and put in charge of the SH V titles! I say this as a modern jazz loving art house movie goer, not as a conventional visual conservative. I can see what the intention may have been but the conflict between the pace of the voice over and the pace of the visuals just looks like a system failure and does NOT work IMO.

Sound is SOOOOOOO important. A young jazz orchestra leader friend of mine, sadly now deceased, once made the telling observation that a crap film with a stunning sound track appears deep and one will tolerate a great deal of ambiguity and wait ages to see what it's about, yet a deep film with a crap sound track is almost unwatchable and one may turn it off in seconds. This is perfectly illustrated by almost all porn although of course "I've seldom watched any" NOT.

Hence the ocean sounds in SH are extremely important as are the underwater sounds from inside and outside the boat. Far from being as it was once called a "silent world" the sub-sea environment is surprisingly noisy and sound highly directional thanks to being transmitted 4 times further than in air. As a professional saturation diver back in the day it often sounded in deep water as if I were being "digested by the sea" with very similar sounds to those heard by stethoscope in the human allimentary tract! This is generally well-simualted in classic submarine combat movies underwater views and needs to be an equally important focus in SH.

:arrgh!:

I did a bit hardcoding and trying to develop my own widescreen soloution which is a replacement of the HighRex Fix d3d9.dll. It's not perfect by now, needs more code, but 3D interrior is no longer stretched in 16:9 (without camera mod). Next steps are the correct positioning of 2D overlays and variable input configuration of screen resoloutions

http://s4b.directupload.net/images/1...p/a5pt5hrh.png

see the command bar is not stretched, maybe I render it in the middle of the screen:hmmm:

@ Lionman: SH3 definitely wouldn't work with a triple display :haha:. I can't wait to get my hands on a Head Tracker but I'll wait 2-3 more years to get enough side money to make myself a good DirectX 12 rig with a metal cockpit and the best joysticks on the market. You might want to keep an eye on the progress of the HMD's.(Head Mounted Display). There are a few nice ones out there at very low prices but their resolution is very low (<800x600). This year the prices will drop to around 250$ for an HMD with 800x600 resolution and a 35 degree screen. I reckon that in 2 years max we will have an HD version with 60 degrees HMD. That is the limit of what your eye can focus on such devices. Note that all will have 3D and head tracking included. But they still will not allow you to rotate your eyes inside the device, you still need to look "forward". The real breakthrough will be in (i hope) 4-5 years when the current 20-30.000 $ professional HMD's will become cheap and widespread. I can't wait for it :haha:. Just imagine playing the next IL-2 with that :D Full 160 degrees vision OMG111 :haha:

@Seadler: Can you makeobjects appear outside the 1024/768 box? Also, can you load in a wide image to fill the screen?

No, but if the viewport is set to 1024/768, i can set it to other res. The viewport is the area on the screen where objects are rendered.

Not by myself in a meaningful integration into the game mechanics, but I can see if the engine prepares a loaded texture to be rendered over the scene as a gui element. At this moment I can scale the loaded texture.

That is happend in my posted screen. The 3D scene was set to 1680/1050 but the loaded image for the dials bar was set to 1024 width and positioned on the left edge.

My intentions are to implement a mechanism as you described it here:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...28&postcount=7

Amazing Seeadler, would boost a lot of new life into SH3, since many have given it up because of the fixed screen res :up:

That technique only worked for SH4. SH3 elements don't have a zone line. Try to move an interface object like the Notepad a few hundred pixels to the left (just increase the X offset of the main group). And see if it's cut off. I doubt it. I think it will show in full.

As for the image, just rescale one background in photoshop, for example the background image of the periscope. Make it as big as your screen can handle. I think that the game actually draws elements regardless of the viewport size.
Or just upload the dll file as it is. We'd work faster together :D

EDIT: Oh BTW, does the mouse work outside the 1024 box? We have to be able to click there. :))