[QUE] Requests for wide-rez interface

[Hitman]

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

[karamazovnew]

Originally Posted by Hitman

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.

[Castout]

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

[Reece]

Originally Posted by Castout

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!

[Lionman]

Originally Posted by karamazovnew

I've been wondering...
How many people would like a wide-rez interface mod? "

"It might not even be feasable unless you all want to use the same interface mod. It can only be done for a specific aspect ratio. Most probably 16:10 since most monitors now use this resolution. In that case, 16:9 screens would see a 0.9 vertical deformation. (current deformation is 0.75). Plus, many items simply can't be changed (such as the periscope bearing text). Also, such an enterprise would require a rebuild from scratch of the SH interface. This is by far NOT easy.

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.

[Seeadler]

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



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

[karamazovnew]

@ Lionman: SH3 definitely wouldn't work with a triple display . 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 . Just imagine playing the next IL-2 with that Full 160 degrees vision OMG111

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

[Seeadler]

Originally Posted by karamazovnew

Can you makeobjects appear outside the 1024/768 box?

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.

Also, can you load in a wide image to fill the screen?

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

[Hitman]

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

[karamazovnew]

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

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

[BillCar]

I'm very glad to see that this is underway. Can't wait!

[Hitman]

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:

Hummm if you manage to produce something that rescales the images to whatever size the screen res is using horizontally, then I guess it would be easier to make a wide-res screen interface by repositioning everything closer together in the vertical, so that it still fits inside the visible area (Because the wide res will make the screen proportionally not so tall). You could do it in the vertical, and it would be better because that way no modification at all of the menu.ini would be needed, but then the tools bar and rest of items would not be centered. Or would it be possible to put them in the screen centre besides scaling them? Something like "scale Y to current vertical res, then scale X in 4:3 to resulting new Y, then (current screen width minus resulting rescaled width) / 2 is the number of pixels you need to move right, before starting rendering from bottom left corner"

Certainly a major breakthrough

[Rubini]

Very good work Seeadler! Sh3 deserves a very good well resolved WS mod.
Please don´t give up, we can help you making tests and so on.

[Rubini]

Originally Posted by karamazovnew

I've been wondering...
How many people would like a wide-rez interface mod? SH5 might go bust (not proven until release) so we might end up playing SH3 for a long time to come. A wide-rez interface has been requested many times, but the problem is complex. I'd like to tackle this, but only if I see a pattern forming of your wants and needs. The amount of work involved is simply immense and it would take months, be finished sometime during the next winter. The last thing I'd like is to see it downloaded 100 times . At least this thread would point out the necessity of such a mod. We might find in the end that it's pointless and stop caring about it.

Since I can't start a poll with so many features, please answer the following questions in the same template. Counting them would be easier if you don't make jokes about soup .


Q1: What Interface do you use in SH3?
A: ACM gui

Q2: What aspect ratio would you like to use (or type the resolution)
A: 1920x1200 or 16:10

Q3: How many screens would you like redone (please keep in mind that text will still be stretched):
A: Main bars and periscope screens should be enough for me...

Q4: Other comments?
A: Don't expect this to be done fast... It might not even be feasable unless you all want to use the same interface mod. It can only be done for a specific aspect ratio. Most probably 16:10 since most monitors now use this resolution. In that case, 16:9 screens would see a 0.9 vertical deformation. (current deformation is 0.75). Plus, many items simply can't be changed (such as the periscope bearing text). Also, such an enterprise would require a rebuild from scratch of the SH interface. This is by far NOT easy.

Hi mate,

Excuse me by my late reply, i was thinking that this was only another thread commenting the limitations of the WS mod that we have for Sh3 now. But after read/look at your work on Sh4 I understood what you means...

I think that even the stock Sh3 GUI is already enough. My monitor is 1360x768, 16:9. Anyhow what is important is a good WS solution for SH3. Give us that one and Sh3 will stay yet more with us! Thanks for your work!