Spring RTS Engine

Another thing that hurts all of us is the load pictures. They have issues with stretching and different aspect ratios. Would it be possible to allow us to define a background color (say for example black) and the pictures just get scaled by the y axis or x axis? This way we can resolve the issue of hideous stretch for load screens. I am sure everyone would like some kind of option to help with this.

And the option to not scale the image at all but center it on the screen at its actual resolution regardless of any clipping that may occur

I don't mean to sound too blunt, but isn't it apparent that widescreen is now the standard and you can't even get 4:3 ratio displays anymore, anywhere? You see what I'm getting at here, unless the suggestion of this thread is trivial to implement then go for it.

Edit: In cases where smoth was referring to stretching of low resolution images into higher images, not the aspect ratios, ignore what I just said.

CarRepairer wrote:I don't mean to sound too blunt, but isn't it apparent that widescreen is now the standard and you can't even get 4:3 ratio displays anymore, anywhere? You see what I'm getting at here, unless the suggestion of this thread is trivial to implement then go for it.

Edit: In cases where smoth was referring to stretching of low resolution images into higher images, not the aspect ratios, ignore what I just said.

No, he meant aspect ratios, and I'm working at a very nice 4:3 screen that is only two years old, and I expect to be working at it for another two years. So while 4:3 might be pending deprecation, it'lll still be a round for a good long time.

I think all mod makers would like our loading screens to not be distorted by stretching. Resolutions can mess with the aspect ratio, my parents have some relatively square lcds in the 20+s.

It happens.

just saying that it should probably take the smallest one IE 990 on 1440X990 and use that as the base for the scale down of the image. That way people will get non-distorted load screens. There are many gamers who do not use lcds because a really good crt has better colors and refresh rates.

CarRepairer wrote:I don't mean to sound too blunt, but isn't it apparent that widescreen is now the standard and you can't even get 4:3 ratio displays anymore, anywhere? You see what I'm getting at here, unless the suggestion of this thread is trivial to implement then go for it.

16:9, 16:10, and 5:4 are all very common for LCDs right now.

I don't see them in stores anymore. I DID see a nearly square screen in an office once, I wonder if that's the 5:4 you're talking about. It tripped me out.

Slightly offtopic, but am I the only one who hates the move away from 4:3? I mean, most of our computing task is in the metaphor of pages - web pages, documents... writing code even has line-length conventions that come from print documents.

So, let's look at the aspect ratio of the typical piece of paper compared to the aspect ratio of a typical computer screen.

Yeah, they totally look alike.

Actually, this just gave me an idea - I want to see how Spring looks on one of those sideways-rotated screens.

side-by-side work and support resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

i have 4:3 tho.

Pxtl, i hate the widescreens too, mainly for the reasons you mentioned.
The main argument pro widescreen is the same as for wide movie formats: its more natural, cuase of our eyes positions, and our natural view is just more widescreen like then 4:3.
But this is only a good argument for movies and maybe games, i sort of feel like... that the standards for papers/books beeing larger on the y-scale then on the x-scale is not just a coinsidence, but natural too. maybe the distribution of the little sensors in the eye?

If I had a farking huge screen I would love a widescreen, and then I would arrange multiple windows side-by-side... but on anything less than 22" it just seems pointless.

so you guys are in favor of this request or more in favor of the discussion?

In favour of some way to make load screens resolution friendly, of course. Either fixed aspect ratio or fixed-size with a tiled background texture.

I probably should mention I don't mind the lesser derail, it is probably helpful with information gathering for other stuff that I need to do :).

instead of just a background color, we could render something from the mods/springs RSS feed in the free space leftover by a fixed aspect ratio load screen.


am in favour of it.

CarRepairer wrote:I don't see them in stores anymore.

Not everybody buys a new monitor every week.

In fact the monitor if the computer piece that ages the more slowly.

And personaly I've met wide screen only once, a year ago, and since them everywhere I use computer there's only the regular ratio ones.

One plan that I'd discussed with tvo was to setup a lua script
that would be used to display the loadscreen. It would have
the gl/GL functionality, but limited access to the rest of the
libraries. Some information that you might want:

- mod name
- map name and specs
- player name list
- player teams / alliances
- player factions (sides)
- player colors
- current loading state (phase / percentange / pass)

This would allow you to draw your textures however you
wanted (screen space scaled, per-pixel, etc...). You could
also do a little animation, scrolling text, etc... (assuming
that it was threaded, something else you might want to
provide a query call-out for).

The loadscreen script would be housed in the mod (with a
default script being provided in springcontent).

It shouldn't be that hard to do

sounds like awesome!

A half decent widescreen will allow you to rotate it 90* thus making it far superior for viewing documents and negating all arguements to the contrary in this thread. Infact a widescreen that can be rotated this way si closer to a piece of paper than a 4:3 screen.