Automatic screen res, watch for portrait pivoted monitors

Something minor here but figured I'd mention it since its a regular annoyance I deal with.

Many games deal horribly with monitors in portrait mode. On initial launch they detect the screen aspect ratio and match it, which is cool, except I've run into a good deal of games that have a main menu that is unusable with the default res they give because it stretches something weird, so changing the screen res can get fun.

I completely understand that most games don't play well in 10:16 aspect ratio, however even if I try to go to windowed mode the screen res choices provided to me are still in the 10:16 aspect ratio, and (for most of the more recent games I've played) you can not resize the window with the mouse to an arbitrary res.

Worse yet is that even if I exit, switch my monitor to a 16:10 mode, launch the game, pick a windows res that would fit, exit, relaunch with my monitor in 10:16 mode... some games automatically detects this and changes the res for me to a 10:16 ratio...



So three main things I'd like to see:

Make sure the screen res chosen does not keep the player from using the main menu to change his video settings.

If the windowed size still fits in the monitor, don't resize it when launching the game.

Allow the user to set an arbitrary windowed size. I wouldn't consider this last one nearly as important and it might a pain to implement, but the other two should be pretty easy.





Some general notes.

Yes I know this a minor issue, but I have a large number of windows running in the background and if I set the monitor to landscape mode to play then switch back I have to resize them afterwards. I especially like doing this if I want to have a casual session.

And yes, I did try searching for this. Mostly I got info on multiple monitors, and a little talk about mixing portrait and landscape mode while (I assume) in full screen mode across multiple monitors. If this topic is dealt with already I'd appreciate a link to the thread.

Re: Automatic screen res, watch for portrait pivoted monitor

Good call.

All configurations & orientations of monitors / TVs / etc should be tested!

Re: Automatic screen res, watch for portrait pivoted monitor

Guess who's testing those?

Re: Automatic screen res, watch for portrait pivoted monitor

Alpha that's who!

Can't wait to jack the hdmi into a 60" LCD. This is gonna be awesome!

Re: Automatic screen res, watch for portrait pivoted monitor

You can categorize all usable aspect ratios very simply as such:

4:3 academy standard, baseline film and tv
16:9 widescreen, wider than 4:3
5:4 TFT, taller than 4:3
16:10 golden ratio master race, taller than 16:9
anything taller than 5:4, vertically aligned monitors
anything wider than 16:9, 21:9 or dual and triple monitor layouts etc.

all forms of display fits one of these, the hardest ones are the arbitrarily wide ones where it might be of interest to limit the maximum fov or concoct some form of panoramic projection to avoid distortion

I find that a single fov can be problematic, fov's tuned for 16:9 look claustrophobic in anything else, fov's tuned for 4:3 can be heavily distorted in widescreen etc. So it would probably be best to have an adaptable fov that recognizes the relationships between the aspects

Re: Automatic screen res, watch for portrait pivoted monitor

You may have to wait a bit longer:

http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=721615#p721615