Resolution and Fonts

[Krice]

Feeling envious, buddy?

I don't know why I should. I think it tells all about these people who are calling smaller than full hd resolution games "stamps". I think they should stick to Xbox games.

[AmnEn]

You're trying too hard Krice. Your flamebaiting and intentional misunderstanding is a "bit" obvious. Mind telling me where I hurt your feelings?

------

Not all monitors cope well with non wide-screen or smaller resolutions. There's a wide array of methods Monitor Manufacturers use. There's simple stretching, which results in unreadable fonts and severely skewed tiles on lower quality monitors. Then there's a method where they just center it in the middle of the screen and be done with it.
Some more expensive monitors come with pretty decent interpolation and can deal with upsizing lower resolutions, many others can not. As a result, things get worse the lower a resolution is enforced. Colors and shapes start to bleed into each other which means two letters appear as one smear. Some monitors even try to adjust to the lower resolution by constantly shifting and re-focussing. Then fail. Then try again. Constantly. So that's the bane of lower resolutions on newer monitors.
And windowed but small resolutions which I called Stamp, which seemingly inspired Krice to his berserker rage, are fine for old graphics based games with low amounts of text. Roguelikes however can't really be played that well because it's too hard to read anything.

[Bear]

Hey Slashie. 

I'm Ray, a longtime poster on rgrd. 

It looks like forums like this one have pretty much killed rgrd dead, so I started looking around to see where the community had gone.

Now, in answer to some questions:

I consider it rude for an application to force itself fullscreen. It's assuming I'm doing nothing else, watching nothing else, or using my computer for nothing else.  That's far too presumptuous.  Games, especially, are somewhat "social," and I may have a web browser or usenet client for a dedicated game website or game forum, text editor for writing reviews or taking notes, chat client or skype session to talk to other players in realtime, etc.  at the same time as the game.  These kinds of things are part of the same "play session" to me, and if the game makes it impossible to do them, they become major features missing from the play experience.

So, if I want to maximize an application, I will maximize the application.  If I want to change its aspect ratio, I will grab the corner and pull and if it doesn't figure out how to use the new aspect ratio I'll be annoyed.  Resigned, because few games "get" that - but still annoyed.

Second, the "game session" is not even usually the only thing going on, on my computers - nor is it the only thing I care about while it's going on.  If I'm at work being the compile-farm, render-farm, or server-farm babysitter (which I have to take a turn at once a month) I damn well better have a terminal screen up to catch "WALL" messages from whichever cluster I'm responsible for, and I damn well better act promptly on those messages. Although on a good night nothing happens, the entire purpose of that particular task is to respond promptly if and when something (usually a router or drive failure) does happen.  The penalty for as much as a two-minute delay would involve losing my privileges to play games at all during those work shifts. This is one of the reasons I play turn-based games; I can instantly pay attention to something else and come back an hour later when the something else is resolved. 

Third, whatever ideas you may have had about screen sizes and aspect ratios, if you're dealing with people who have to read documents a lot, double them.  A bunch of us have portrait-oriented monitors, which is a regular monitor turned ninety degrees, because it fits the A4 page size that a lot of the documents we have to read come in.  And that's a lot more significant than, say, the difference between 16x9, 16x10, and 4:3 ratios.

[Krice]

If I want to change its aspect ratio, I will grab the corner and pull and if it doesn't figure out how to use the new aspect ratio I'll be annoyed.

You must be that hard customer, always complaining about something.

A bunch of us have portrait-oriented monitors, which is a regular monitor turned ninety degrees

Then read documents and cry.

Btw, I'm using 1680x1050 and I can read that 6 pixel quote font on this forum.

[Bear]

Heh.  I won't complain about it much.  As I said, I'm resigned to most games not getting a new aspect ratio.  But I will be annoyed.

I regard console play as a strength rather than a weakness of roguelike games.  As a strength, it is something that the next generation of roguelikes should have. I embrace character displays and limited 16-color palettes because characters are small and both the characters and those colors are easily distinguished from one another.  Small "tiles" allows more information to display, and ease of distinction is a crucial player advantage in a tactical display.  But limiting play to 80x24 or whatever provides no advantage to the player, and doing that, IMO, limits the player's choices by treating console play as a weakness rather than a strength. 

It's about a consistent interface as much as it's about anything.  I chose to make a console game rather than a graphical game, and that means I choose to have it behave like a console application.  A "good" console application uses whatever size and aspect ratio the console currently happens to be, and redraws itself automatically if the console (or font) gets resized during play.  Those things do not belong to the console application and it should not change them or attempt to control them.  Those things belong to the console it's running on.  If the console's normal controls (under view, profiles, etc, or just grabbing the corner with the mouse and pulling) stop working when a particular console application is running, that's a bug in the console being deliberately exploited by code in the application.

Now, I get that if your choices are different, and you think of the main display mainly as a graphical or aesthetic experience rather than a tactical display, you probably don't have a really compelling reason to run in a console or behave like a console application.  But I still think it's evil and rude for a single application out of the many currently running to do things like changing the display resolution or blocking other applications from access to the display.  Those things don't belong to individual applications; they belong to the operating system.   You may feel that you really need to open up a window with a particular aspect ratio and keep it in that aspect ratio, in which case you're not going to work like a console app.  But at the very least, do something reasonable like magnifying the view, displaying more tiles, and/or swapping to a higher-res tileset when users want to resize the window, and for Ghod's sake don't be rude and block out parts of the screen just because your game isn't using them at the moment.

Bear

[Krice]

Those things don't belong to individual applications; they belong to the operating system.

You have a strong idealistic opinion about this. Your life must be difficult, because so many games violate your golden rules.

[Bear]

Eh.  There's nothing "golden" about them - it's just that blocking other apps from using the display creates games where I can't have a full play session with all the extras that other apps provide.  In effect, such games have massive missing featuresets.

[Krice]

it's just that blocking other apps from using the display creates games where I can't have a full play session with all the extras that other apps provide.

If the game is really good I don't mind it using fullscreen and/or taking all resources. But in a way you are right. It's nice to use apps that take least amount of processor time and can be adjusted to different resolutions. It's just always not that easy. Games are demanding for hardware and there is no easy, fast and nice looking (and portable) solution to the scale issue.

[Etinarg]

Hey Slashie. 

I'm Ray, a longtime poster on rgrd. 

Welcome to the Temple!

I lost proper news access some time ago, so I moved here. Some more of the old rgrd regulars are registered, but few are active here. Overall I think that even forums start to become outdated, and many people already moved on, elsewhere.