Would it be possible to add a 2x scaling mode to this mod?

[Belanos]

I know exactly what you mean and I agree. I just got myself a monitor that runs at 2550 x 1440 and applied the 2x scaling in the Fallout games, which makes things look much cleaner but not so small that I can't see or read anything. With a vertical scale of essentially 720 it's very close to the original resolution, but in widescreen. With this mod though, I've had to settle for a setting of 1600 x 900 to make things readable, but that means the graphics aren't as clean as they could be. And some monitors, like my old Samsung 24", won't allow people to use any other widescreen resolution other than the native one. So anything beyond 1920 x 1080 is pretty much unusable as you can't really read any of the text.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Fallout... So anything beyond 1920 x 1080 is pretty much unusable as you can't really read any of the text.

The Fallout games fullscreen mod also has an odd feature, that resizes the text in a scaling factor, and if the factor is too small, the letters won't print out properly. So in effectude, there's actually two resolutions you need to setup... You'll notice this in Fallout 2 when you use the unofficial fixpack and the newer version of the fallout widescreen mod, as an old version of the widescreen mod is included in the fixpack. And their default settings conflict showing the horror (at least on my 1920x1200 default size).

 

The Infinity engine has this too, but as the text uses a standard elements that the Widescreen mod doesn't change, but the text size(font) mods do, there's no botching issues in different sizes of the gui and the letter size.

[Belanos]

The Infinity engine has this too, but as the text uses a standard elements that the Widescreen mod doesn't change, but the text size(font) mods do, there's no botching issues in different sizes of the gui and the letter size.

 

Thanks for the link, those fonts might come in handy. I'm running BG(2)EE at 2560 x 1440 and I'm finding the text a bit too small for my liking. Those might be just what I need. I also like how they're true to the originals.

 

Hmm. They don't seem to work with the EE version of the game. I tried all 3 sizes and didn't see any difference.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Hmm. They don't seem to work with the EE version of the game. I tried all 3 sizes and didn't see any difference.

Hmm, it might need you to put the files to the "movies" folder... the reason can be found here.

[Belanos]

No, it still doesn't work. Obviously Beamdog has done something different with the game fonts.

[Lorfean]

I noticed that a new version of the Widescreen Mod was released recently, and thought I'd resurrect this thread in the hopes that this request can be looked at again for a possible future version

 

I have since tried dxwnd and many other, similar tools that force Borderless Windowed Mode to scale the IE games without blurring and although I've had some degree of success with a few in terms of the scaling, ALL of them cause issues with mouse controls and most also block / disable keyboard scrolling.

 

I would still love for the Widescreen Mod to include a 2x scaling feature identical to that in the Fallout Widescreen Patches -- I believe it's the most elegant way to approach this and it would be an extremely valuable feature to have as native flat panel resolutions continue to get higher and higher in the future and we'll reach a point where our poor IE characters will start resembling ants...

[Mike1072]

I don't think there's anyone in the community currently who has the skills and inclination to fulfill your request, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

[Jarno Mikkola]

You know, it's funny today, that could fail to see the use a standard full screen resolutions that are a quarter of the native one. Say your native screen is 1920x1200(or 2560x1440), you could always set the Widescreen resolution to be 960x600(... 1280x720), and you won't have ants, good thing those were standardized to multiples ... and remove the stupid GPU scaling if that troubles you from the GPU's control panel, and use other GPU settings that remove the blurring effect.

By the way, the font size can now be selected in game in BG2:EE at least, so that's "fixed".

[Lorfean]

@ Mike1072 -- Fair enough. I had low expectations to begin with, but figured I'd at least put it back on page 1 for a bit. I do honestly believe it would be an extremely valuable addition to the mod for many IE fans.

 

@ Jarno Mikkola -- If the solution was that simple I wouldn't have had to make this thread, but it doesn't work that way. If you set the Widescreen resolution to 1/2 or 1/4 of the native resolution and then turn off GPU scaling, you'll simply end up with a tiny box in the middle of your screen surrounded by black bars.

 

If you leave the scaling settings on, even though the resolution values might be exactly 1/2 or 1/4 of the native res, the image will still be blurry because no existing GPU drivers or control panels actually do proper nearest neighbor scaling. You need 3rd party tools for that, but none exist for the IE games, hence my suggestion to add a 2x scaling feature to the Widescreen Mod. Similar solutions do exist for other games, like the Fallout Widescreen Patches offering a 2x scaling mode, a fan-made Glide Wrapper for Diablo II offering proper nearest neighbor scaling, and DosBOX allowing 2x, 4x and nearest neightbor scaling for any Dos games. I am also not aware of any "GPU settings that remove the blurring effect" but if you can point me to any I'd be very grateful. Though believe me when I say that I have been trying to tackle this issue for a few years now without success, and I think I would've found these settings by now if they existed.

 

As for font size and the EE's... Font size was never the issue. Font mods have been available for the IE games for several years now, and there is even a utility that lets people generate their own font bams. It's all the other assets -- the game world, characters and GUI -- getting smaller and smaller as monitor technology advances and native resolutions get higher, because the only we to get a clear, crisp image will be using the widescreen mod with our native resolutions. Also, for many (including myself), the EE's are just not a viable solution because 1) they change far too much compared to the original games, have absolutely horrible UI design and introduce a whole host of issues that didn't exist in the original titles, and 2) they don't do proper scaling either! It's not as blurry as GPU scaling, but it's nowhere near the crispness of the original assets either.

[lynx]

It's simple to achieve with gemrb, but there hasn't been enough interest yet, so it's undocumented. Before our opengl work we even had a *downscaler* for hand consoles.

 

Just swapping libraries could work too:

http://gibberlings3.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=26119

 

but if you're a nitpicker and not constructive, gemrb probably isn't for you.