Camera/Perspective issues with Widescreen and Dual Monitors

Camera/Perspective issues with Widescreen and Dual Monitors

Discuss the source code and development of Spring Engine in general from a technical point of view. Patches go here too.

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kujeger
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Camera/Perspective issues with Widescreen and Dual Monitors

Post by kujeger »

We've been talking about this a bit in IRC, but NOiZE asked me to post it here as well.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. I think this should illustrate the issue somehwat:
http://kujeger.net/imgdump/taspring/tas ... roblem.jpg

In the top part, I started TASpring with a resolution of 1280x960. I cropped the image to 1280x480, keeping it centered.
In the bottom part, I started TASpring with a resolution of 1280x480, and grabbed a screenshot.

As you can see, when spring renders at a widescreen resolution you get a very noticeable fish-eye lens effect.

This works out okay enough when using a widescreen monitor, but when you use two monitors it becomes very..distracting, since the area with little distortion will be split along the middle of the two monitors.
It also makes putting the minimap on one monitor unplayable:
http://kujeger.net/imgdump/taspring/screen000.jpg


I believe Yeha mentioned it's the FoV that does this, Is it possible to "fix" this? It would be awesome to use one screen for the minimap, or just for a larger field of play.
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NOiZE
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Post by NOiZE »

Also a lot of gui elements are stretched:

Image

as shown in the above image. Perhaps this could be a easy fix.

And one final thing, the blue message box is in the middle and i can't move it so it's a bit anooying to read lines of text over 2 screens because of the border in between, so making that blue box movable will fix that.

Of course the newgui is comming, but how long will it actually take?

And if these fixes are small, i don't see any reason why someone shouldn't patch this :-)
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AF
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Post by AF »

Can you show us shots of 0.73b1? A lot fo GUI components have had their layout code rearranged and tweaked and changed.

For example I've not noticed the sidebar stretching in 0.73 unlike 0.72b1.

Aside from that everything seems fine on my 16:10 aspect ratio widescreen 21" monitor (except being unable to run at my native resolution of 1680x1050 and reverting to 1280x960).


Simply put, SDL doesnt have very good support for dual screen modes...
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NOiZE
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Post by NOiZE »

the stretching is exactly the same in .73
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AF
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Post by AF »

screenshot?

The only component I see stretched IIRC is the top resource bar, and imo I like it that way.
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NOiZE
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Post by NOiZE »

Because you ask:

Image
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AF
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Post by AF »

Well, that'll be because your at one of the extremes, the amount of space you're viewing at any one time is huge.

Although I agree that the side bar and so on would be better if they allowed for more items to be shown rather than being stretched. Afterall I'd prefer to double the nubmer of menu items than double the height of menu items.
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NOiZE
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Post by NOiZE »

it just shouldn't stretch.

and the chat box should be movable so i can move it to one screen, instead having 50 % of the chatbox on one screen and 50 % of the chat box on the second screen....
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AF
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Post by AF »

You'll ahve to wait for the CEGUI GUI for that. Right now the only feasable part is the one asking for stretching to be disabled.
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NOiZE
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Post by NOiZE »

disable it please :-)

but then again will it look okay for other resolutions?

or perhaps move the chat box to the right corner and let it stay there?
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AF
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Post by AF »

If you do that you wont be able to see the console when in debug mode.
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NOiZE
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Post by NOiZE »

put the consol somewhere else?
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Caydr
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Post by Caydr »

Holy crap, I've never heard of any kind of monitor running on a resolution like that. What sort of laptop/monitor have you got, just for curiosity sake?

My laptop's native res is 1280x800... Spring doesn't seem to distort noticably, but I mainly use it for testing while developing on my main rig.

~~~~

Oh also, did you know you can disable the screen stretching and just have the monitor run wih black bars around the picture? It's handy for some things, like to get a few extra FPS while playing a very demanding game or whatever. It's different to set up in nvidia and ati control panels, but just sorta hard to find. The option's not where you'd expect it. If you'd like to give it a try, I can find the locations for you.
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NOiZE
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Post by NOiZE »

i got 2 monitors Caydr....

anyway i found some more weird stuff:

Trees kinda disappear after 2049x900 (So basicly when the width gets bigger then 2048)

2048x900:

Image
Trees work fine!

2049x900:

Image
My trees are gone!!!

But zooming in brings them back, however they lost their leaves!!

Image

EDIT:

When i set 2560x1024 in fullscreen mode, the trees do work with the current release, however from the SVN 2052 it does not work
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AF
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Post by AF »

That sometimes happened to me at 1024x860
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Caydr
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Post by Caydr »

What are your detail settings set at?

I know my laptop has bizarre tree behaviour, but I put it down to just having all the detail settings at minimum. Basically what happens is that trees disappear when you zoom in and reappear when you zoom out.
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Peet
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Post by Peet »

Mine's like that with the trees, whether I have em on 2D or 3D
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mehere101
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Post by mehere101 »

MY trees do wierd things sometimes. IE they stretch to the far side of the screen. I think it could have something to do with the fact that they are Shader objects
Kelson
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Post by Kelson »

I use 1680x1050 on my laptop and I don't seem to have any fisheye effects or tree issues. The leafless trees are awesome though...
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