When 1024x768 is too much (bringing back the fullscreen thread)



  • So Poker Night at the Inventory 2 came out today. (Now with even less to do with video games!)

    Does it default to taking over my screen at the lowest common denominator of resolutions, good ol' 1024x768? Nah, this is a 2013 game. It's gotta be 16:9!

    [Default resolution is 1024x576]

    This is a game that literally came out today, and it's still doing this shit.

    It's 2013. The latest verison of Windows doesn't even support XGA anymore. (Correction: It does now.) STOP IT.

    Bonus points (off) for assuming that I'm playing with an Xbox controller.



  • Looks like it's assuming that you are actually playing on an Xbox, and trying to work with standard definition TVs (576i), albeit in a slightly retarded manner.



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    Does it default to taking over my screen at the lowest common denominator of resolutions, good ol' 1024x768? Nah, this is a 2013 game. It's gotta be 16:9!

    I'm not sure if you're saying the issue is what resolution it starts at, or that it doesn't support higher resolutions? If it's the former, it should be noted that most displays are 16:9 (or somewhere very close) these days.



  • @_gaffer said:

    Looks like it's assuming that you are actually playing on an Xbox, and trying to work with standard definition TVs (576i), albeit in a slightly retarded manner.

    Though in the USA standard definition is only 480i, AFAIK.

    PS my netbook only has 1024×600 so using 768 wouldn't fit!



  • @Soviut said:

    @MiffTheFox said:
    Does it default to taking over my screen at the lowest common denominator of resolutions, good ol' 1024x768? Nah, this is a 2013 game. It's gotta be 16:9!

    I'm not sure if you're saying the issue is what resolution it starts at, or that it doesn't support higher resolutions? If it's the former, it should be noted that most displays are 16:9 (or somewhere very close) these days.

    It supports higher resolutions, but this is the default one it uses. Nice to see it caters to the few people with 16:9 monitors while also catering to the 9% of people who have 1024x768 still.

    (Also, it's interpretation of 1024x576 is to run it at 1024x768 with letterboxes, so if you actually have a 16:9 monitor, it's stretched out too far. PC gaming, everybody!)



  • @_gaffer said:

    Looks like it's assuming that you are actually playing on an Xbox, and trying to work with standard definition TVs (576i), albeit in a slightly retarded manner.

    Old-school SD was 525 lines-ish. (Everything is analog, and the TV bezel was expected to cover much of the image, thus the "ish".) New-school SD is defined at 480. So... neither of those match your number.

    No here's the issue, idiots posting on this thread who don't get it and for once Miff is not one of those idiots shockingly:

    1) Game developers designed their game to work in 16:9 ratio (ok fine)
    2) Game developers realize there's the possibility that their default resolution could potentially not render on some of their customers' computers (think 1024x600 netbooks) (ok fine)
    3) Game developers "resolve" this issue by setting the game's default resolution to literally the tiniest possible and counting on the user to turn it up (bad)

    The obviously correct solution is to query the OS for supported resolutions and set your game to the highest resolution that matches the desired aspect ratio on first-run. That would require game developers to not be the worst fucking developers in the universe, and so it'll never happen. Instead you usually get my gigantic 1920x1200 monitor being set to 1024x768 (or, if I'm luckiy, 1280x800, correct aspect ratio but 2" large pixels).

    For a casual game like poker, you can be sure a large percentage of your audience doesn't know how to change screen resolution, or even that it's possible to change screen resolution. Or, if they are aware of it, they're unaware of the concept of "native resolution" and so turn it to something that looks like boiled ass. (Think of the secretary in your office who sets her 1920x1080 monitor to 1280x800 to "make the text bigger".) If you're a game developer, that means your laziness is leading people to think your game looks like boiled ass.

    Of course since game developers never bother to do user testing, I'm sure they're 100% unaware of there being a problem. If we're lucky they've installed some analytics, and they've thought to tag screen resolution changes, and they'll actually bother to look at their analytics data before their next game is developed, and maybe they'll have an analyst smart enough to think of the issue I just brought up above and prove is using the data, and maybe they'll actually write in the design doc for the next game: "set the resolution correctly on first-run", and maybe they requirement won't fall by the wayside during crunch-time because in addition to being fucking terrible at software development, games developers are also fucking terrible at scheduling.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @_gaffer said:
    Looks like it's assuming that you are actually playing on an Xbox, and trying to work with standard definition TVs (576i), albeit in a slightly retarded manner.

    Old-school SD was 525 lines-ish. (Everything is analog, and the TV bezel was expected to cover much of the image, thus the "ish".) New-school SD is defined at 480. So... neither of those match your number.

    Except in the bulk of the world, that didn't use NTSC, where it was 625 lines with ~576 visible.



  • @Cian said:

    Except in the bulk of the world, that didn't use NTSC, where it was 625 lines with ~576 visible.

    Yeah it's easier to come up with a higher resolution protocol when we did all the hard work of FUCKING INVENTING IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. "We didn't have TVs at all until the late-70s because we were too busy bombing each other to shit, but hey when we got them they kind of were higher res a bit although the framerate was slower so."



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Cian said:
    Except in the bulk of the world, that didn't use NTSC, where it was 625 lines with ~576 visible.

    Yeah it's easier to come up with a higher resolution protocol when we did all the hard work of FUCKING INVENTING IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. "We didn't have TVs at all until the late-70s because we were too busy bombing each other to shit, but hey when we got them they kind of were higher res a bit although the framerate was slower so."

    Increased number of vertical lines was a side-benefit. The real reason for the invention of PAL is the fact that NTSC has fucking awful signal robustness. Europe wanted to come up with something better than that. PAL was engineered to fix a lot of the shitty shortcomings in NSTC. For instance; Where NTSC requires users to manually tweak their receivers to correct for color tone shifting (using a knob, dial or in early models of TV; a screw in the back of the system), PAL has automatic correction built into the standard. PAL's signal standards are also robust and modular enough that they could be mix-and-matched with parts of NTSC. The ubiquitious 'PAL-60' uses the increased fields per second (and lowered resolution) of NTSC, but the superior color system and signal robustness of PAL.

    Also, you act as if the USA was the only pioneer in the TV broadcasting field. Well, here's some news for you; they weren't. France and the Netherlands both had experimental systems as early as 1930. Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the USSR all had experimental systems up and going by 1932. The UK beats them all though, by having a working system as early as 1926. This system is widely regarded as the first real television broadcasting system. Look up the name "Baird" some time.

    In fact, the USA came in pretty much fucking last with their first system, in 1933. The only guys in the race to finish later were Poland, so yeah; the USA beat fucking Poland to the punch. Congratulations.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Cian said:
    Except in the bulk of the world, that didn't use NTSC, where it was 625 lines with ~576 visible.

    Yeah it's easier to come up with a higher resolution protocol when we did all the hard work of FUCKING INVENTING IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. "We didn't have TVs at all until the late-70s because we were too busy bombing each other to shit, but hey when we got them they kind of were higher res a bit although the framerate was slower so."

    Bit of an over-reaction to being told that your snotty correction was in fact wrong, no? Letting you know you're wrong is not "nationalist trolling".

    The fact that the first actual TV station that showed programming wasn't in the US anyway just makes your rant worse.



  • @Ragnax said:

    Also, you act as if the USA was the only pioneer in the TV broadcasting field.

    No, I act as if the USA is the only pioneer in every field ever. Duh. That's why it's trolling.

    @Ragnax said:

    The UK beats them all though, by having a working system as early as 1926. This system is widely regarded as the first real television broadcasting system. Look up the name "Baird" some time.

    Baird went nowhere and could not possibly have gone anywhere, it was a dead-end, a waste of time. Philo Farnsworth invented the TV, did it with no budget in a fucking barn, and demonstrated it in 19-fucking-28 and his TV was the model used for the next 80-fucking-years, and don't you forget it. Word.


    Here he is stroking his tube.



  • Like all great inventors, Philo Farnsworth spent the rest of his life regretting every second of it.



  • @blakeyrat said:


    Here he is stroking his tube.

    Wow, I didn't know he was African-American. Why don't they mention him during black history month? It's always about that dude who liked peanuts..



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    Like all great inventors, Philo Farnsworth spent the rest of his life regretting every second of it.

    What about the guy who invented a non-chafing dildo lubricant?



  • @Ragnax said:

    France and the Netherlands ... Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the USSR ... The UK

    And yet, we kicked all of their asses in WWII!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    No, I act as if the USA is the only pioneer in every field ever. Duh.

    Now hold up, America doesn't lead the world in everything; Europe is far ahead of us in the fields of genocide and currency crisis.



  •  You really do need to get a more accurate & less biased view of history.

    There is a strong argument that th UK SAVED your arse (an ass is simialr to a donkey).



  • Do you people not know what the word "trolling" means?



  •  



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    America doesn't lead the world in everything; Europe is far ahead of us in the fields of genocide and currency crisis.
    And they set the standard for trying to disguise one kind of meat as another.



  • @da Doctah said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    America doesn't lead the world in everything; Europe is far ahead of us in the fields of genocide and currency crisis.
    And they set the standard for trying to disguise one kind of meat as another.

    America leads the world in christian leaders. And male leaders. And white leaders until a few years ago.



  • @Ben L. said:

    America leads the world in christian leaders. And male leaders. And white leaders until a few years ago.
    And, I'm sorry to say, in people who pump their fists and say "YESSS!!!" when confronted with the three points you mention.

    Mind you, we've tried female leaders, but it never seems to work out:




  • @da Doctah said:

    @Ben L. said:

    America leads the world in christian leaders. And male leaders. And white leaders until a few years ago.
    And, I'm sorry to say, in people who pump their fists and say "YESSS!!!" when confronted with the three points you mention.

    Mind you, we've tried female leaders, but it never seems to work out:




  • @ip-guru said:

    There is a strong argument that th UK SAVED your arse (an ass is simialr to a donkey).

    What? No there isn't. If it hadn't been for Lend-Lease the UK would've crumbled before the US even entered the war.

    And saved the US? You mean the heavily-armed, geographically isolated country with a massive industrial base that invented the A-bomb? Hitler couldn't even finish off the goddamn Soviets, and this is a people who loved dying so much they made Stalin their leader.

    Are you actually proposing that Hitler would have sailed some U-boats over and conquered the continental US? Keep in mind, the massive Japanese Imperial Navy had the benefit of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor which inflicted massive losses on the US Pacific fleet, and within 6 months the US had rebuilt enough of the Pacific Fleet to stage a fucking rout of the Imperial Navy from which Japan never recovered.

    Now of course I'm trolling somewhat, since obviously the Russians inflicted the heaviest losses on the Wehrmacht, but all evidence suggests that even without the defeat at Stalingrad the US would have eventually obliterated the Third Reich (albeit with much heavier losses, of course.) Meanwhile, had the US not supported the UK with Lend-Lease, Britain would have fallen and the Germans could have focused all of their attention on the Eastern Front, probably conquering the Soviets and gaining access to their rich oil fields.

    You are historically illiterate.



  • @Ben L. said:

    America leads the world in christian leaders. And male leaders. And white leaders until a few years ago.

    TDEMSYR. I'm starting to suspect you are some inbred moron. Are you actually suggesting that the US has a higher percentage of white leaders than Europe, a place that has virtually no people of color?

    Ben, people like you should have the stupid beat out of them. I'm sorry your parents and school have failed the rest of us so dearly.



  • @da Doctah said:

    Mind you, we've tried female leaders, but it never seems to work out:

    What the fuck are you talking about? First off, are you one of these mouth-breathers who assumes the President is the only "leader" in the country? Second, we've never tried having a female President. And then you post a picture of Sarah Palin who, I'm sure you remember, wasn't elected to national office and who was running for the VP slot, a position with about as much authority as an MTA transit cop.

    And then, to further drive home the point of how dumb you are, Sarah Palin actually was a Governor (and the US has had numerous lady Governesses) and a highly-rated and successful one at that. So what remains of your argument is about as significant as whatever leaked out of your mother's nethers after the abortionist tried (and failed) to prevent your comment from being made.



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    Nice to see it caters to the few people with 16:9 monitors while also catering to the 9% of people who have 1024x768 still.

    The "few"? The majority of displays in use these days are 16:9. Every laptop is widescreen and it's actually difficult to find a new 4:3 display.

    @MiffTheFox said:

    (Also, it's interpretation of 1024x576 is to run it at 1024x768 with letterboxes, so if you actually have a 16:9 monitor, it's stretched out too far. PC gaming, everybody!)

    Not true. The game "canvas" is being fit within the bounds of your display size. If you had a wider display, the bounds would be different and the canvas would be appropriately sized, resulting in smaller letterboxes, or none at all. The weird second number is compensating for the number of lines of resolution it is able to fit into your 4:3 display, it's not a stretched ratio in this case.



  • @Soviut said:

    @MiffTheFox said:
    Nice to see it caters to the few people with 16:9 monitors while also catering to the 9% of people who have 1024x768 still.

    The "few"? The majority of displays in use these days are 16:9. Every laptop is widescreen and it's actually difficult to find a new 4:3 display.

    I use a 4:3 display, but play games at 720p. That gives me about a third of my screen where I can keep chat programs (irssi and Steam) open while still having a full view of all three windows.



  • @Ben L. said:

    I use a 4:3 display...

    Where the hell did you find a 4:3 display? The Island of Misfit Monitors? France?

    @Ben L. said:

    irssi

    Piker. You might as well use a GUI like the rest of the M$ dronez. Real men use telnet.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Ben L. said:
    I use a 4:3 display...

    Where the hell did you find a 4:3 display? The Island of Misfit Monitors? France?

    My mother's basement, right next to a broken CRT and all the computers my father has ever owned.

    Fun fact: the newest few have THREE WHOLE GIGABYTES of RAM.



  • @Ben L. said:

    My mother's basement, right next to a broken CRT and all the computers my father has ever owned.

    All I can say is: at least you cop to it, unlike most of the people here..

    @Ben L. said:

    Fun fact: the newest few have THREE WHOLE GIGABYTES of RAM.

    I think I had my first 3GB computer, like, 9 years ago. And I was really fucking poor, too. I probably went without medical care for a year just to afford that computer.

    Long story short: don't be poor.

    If it makes you feel any better, my new laptop has 16GB but it's done nothing but sit on my desk for the last 7 months because I don't have time to move all my shit over.



  • @Soviut said:

    @MiffTheFox said:
    Nice to see it caters to the few people with 16:9 monitors while also catering to the 9% of people who have 1024x768 still.

    The "few"? The majority of displays in use these days are 16:9. Every laptop is widescreen and it's actually difficult to find a new 4:3 display.

    @MiffTheFox said:

    (Also, it's interpretation of 1024x576 is to run it at 1024x768 with letterboxes, so if you actually have a 16:9 monitor, it's stretched out too far. PC gaming, everybody!)

    Not true. The game "canvas" is being fit within the bounds of your display size. If you had a wider display, the bounds would be different and the canvas would be appropriately sized, resulting in smaller letterboxes, or none at all. The weird second number is compensating for the number of lines of resolution it is able to fit into your 4:3 display, it's not a stretched ratio in this case.

    Sorry, I messed up the first part. Probably meant to say many people. And no, it still ran at 1024x768 letterboxed to 1024x756. My main monitor is 16:9 (1920x1080) and it still stretched it out. What you're seeing there is the direct screenshot via Steam.

    Maybe someday the people like Ben L. will drop their 1024x768 displays and move to something bigger so PC game developers will move on.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Long story short: don't be poor.

    If everyone followed this advice, the world would be a better place.



  • @Ben L. said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    Long story short: don't be poor.

    If everyone followed this advice, the world would be a better place.

    Yes, but people are dumb and refuse to listen to me, no matter how loudly I yell at them. Especially the foreigners.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @morbiuswilters said:

    If it hadn't been for Lend-Lease the UK would've crumbled before the US even entered the war.

    Hard to say for sure, as doing an amphibious assault would have been very difficult for the Germans. (I don't think they had total air superiority over the UK, and they certainly didn't have superiority at sea. Without both of those, an amphibious assault would have been a horrible massacre; like the bloodiest parts of the D-Day landings — but in reverse of course — but with a lot more dying.) Things would have got very unpleasant though, due to shortage of supplies. The biggest threat was political; a large part of the British right wing wanted to stop fighting the Germans and ally with them instead (against the Soviets, natch).
    @morbiuswilters said:
    Are you actually proposing that Hitler would have sailed some U-boats over and conquered the continental US? Keep in mind, the massive Japanese Imperial Navy had the benefit of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor which inflicted massive losses on the US Pacific fleet, and within 6 months the US had rebuilt enough of the Pacific Fleet to stage a fucking rout of the Imperial Navy from which Japan never recovered.
    Funnily enough, Pearl Harbor was a strategic failure. In particular, no aircraft carriers were damaged and the port wasn't out of action for as long as the Japanese Navy desired.
    @morbiuswilters said:
    even without the defeat at Stalingrad the US would have eventually obliterated the Third Reich
    The battle of Kursk was more decisive; before that it just looked like a bit of retrenchment in the East, but afterwards it was clear that Germany was in deep shit. Whether the US could have beaten Germany without the Russians on the eastern front is entirely speculation though. They'd have had enormous trouble without the UK though, as they would have had difficulty bringing men and materiel across the Atlantic. (It would have been at least comparable to a ground invasion of Japan in terms of difficulty, except the Germans had a lot more resources.)

    So many "what if" questions, so much speculation.



  • @Soviut said:

    I'm not sure if you're saying the issue is what resolution it starts at, or that it doesn't support higher resolutions?
     

    The issue is that it doesn't probe to find the current res then default to that.

    Many games default to the user's native res (I'm sure Unreal Tournament did), rather than dropping down to a safer lower display and let the user crank it up.

    (edit: Blakey beat me to it)



  • @da Doctah said:

    Mind you, we've tried females leaders, but it never seems to work out:
     

    FTFY.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    You mean the heavily-armed, geographically isolated country with a massive industrial base that invented the A-bomb?
     

    *cough* British patent 630,726 *ahem*



  • @blakeyrat said:

    New-school SD is defined at 480. So... neither of those match your number.

    SD as encoded on an NTSC DVD is 720x480; for a PAL DVD it's 720x576 (the bit rates come out nearly the same, since the PAL signal's 20% greater line count is offset by its 20% lower frame rate). The encoded pixels in both cases are non-square - taller than wide for 4:3 source material, wider than tall for 16:9. 1024x576 is the closest thing that exists to a native resolution for 16:9 PAL SD on a display with square pixels.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Think of the secretary in your office who sets her 1920x1080 monitor to 1280x800 to "make the text bigger".

    In fairness to our secretary, who has done this exact thing for this exact reason:

    • Her eyesight isn't good enough to make the sharpness difference between native and non-native panel resolutions troublesome.
    • The school's main admin package, which is what fills her screen for 90% of the day, has a poorly coded UI that looks like arse if it sees Windows set at anything other than 96dpi.
    • Windows 7 has a display scaling feature apparently designed to work around this exact kind of deficiency, but it does a much worse job than the panel's inbuilt scaler; even with poor eyesight the result is distractingly blurry.


  • @blakeyrat said:

    @_gaffer said:
    Looks like it's assuming that you are actually playing on an Xbox, and trying to work with standard definition TVs (576i), albeit in a slightly retarded manner.

    Old-school SD was 525 lines-ish. (Everything is analog, and the TV bezel was expected to cover much of the image, thus the "ish".) New-school SD is defined at 480. So... neither of those match your number.

    Everyone's already piled in on this, but I just have to say sorry you're an insular fuck up who doesn't understand the difference between PAL and NTSC even with the huge 576i clue. There there.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Where the hell did you find a 4:3 display? The Island of Misfit Monitors? France?
     

    I found mine in 2007.

    And no, I can't lend you my delorean.



  • @Cassidy said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    You mean the heavily-armed, geographically isolated country with a massive industrial base that invented the A-bomb?
     

    cough British patent 630,726 ahem

    So obviously the UK has standing to sue the US, demanding to be retroactively named the winner of WWII and given Japan in reparations.



  • @Mcoder said:

    I found mine in 2007.
     

    I still got the same CRT from 2003. Or something. I forget.



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    Bonus points (off) for assuming that I'm playing with an Xbox controller.

    From that pic: "left trigger Decrease & Increase bet"

    How does that work? You press the trigger and it decreases or increases the bet depending on how it feels like? A game where you need to manage your avatar's emotional state in order to have it increase or decrease the bet on command sounds like something Molyneux would dream up.

    Also, why are they called triggers? They're buttons or, if you want to be pedantic, levers, but definitely not triggers - triggers are digital, you either fire or don't fire a gun, you can't fire half a bullet or something.



  • @_gaffer said:

    Everyone's already piled in on this,

    Well then by all means post again! You gigantic dick!

    @_gaffer said:

    but I just have to say sorry you're an insular fuck up who doesn't understand the difference between PAL and NTSC even with the huge 576i clue.

    There's a difference between "don't understand" and "don't give a shit about".

    Here's how many PAL devices I've had to deal with in my entire lifetime: 0.



  • @Mo6eB said:

    Also, why are they called triggers? They're buttons or, if you want to be pedantic, levers, but definitely not triggers - triggers are digital, you either fire or don't fire a gun, you can't fire half a bullet or something.

    Some guns have half-pulls. So you're wrong there.

    The real reason is, "they used to be digital", but with modern controllers it's just as cheap to make the triggers and buttons read out a analog range than not, so why not? On the Xbox 360 controller, even the face buttons are analog.



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    So obviously the UK has standing to sue the US, demanding to be retroactively named the winner of WWII and given Japan in reparations.
     

    No, that's Merican behaviour.

    Blitish is to pat them on the head with a "there, there" and let them believe they came first.

    It's impolite to interrupt the baboon whoops and high-fives with actual truth. Spoils the atmosphere somewhat.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @_gaffer said:
    Everyone's already piled in on this,

    Well then by all means post again! You gigantic dick!

    No problem at all! Glad to be of service!

    @blakeyrat said:

    @_gaffer said:
    but I just have to say sorry you're an insular fuck up who doesn't understand the difference between PAL and NTSC even with the huge 576i clue.

    There's a difference between "don't understand" and "don't give a shit about".

    Here's how many PAL devices I've had to deal with in my entire lifetime: 0.

    "My apathy makes my poor research skills OK!"



  • @_gaffer said:

    "My apathy makes my poor research skills OK!"

    Name ONE thing you did this month that matters "in the scheme of things".

    I haven't even had any THOUGHTS about that kind of thing. Because everything you see as your world was a mistake.

    A mistake many billions of years in the making that forms the foundation for life, but just an accidental blip on the timeline of the multiverse.



  • @Ben L. said:

    Name ONE thing you did this month that matters "in the scheme of things".

    I haven't even had any THOUGHTS about that kind of thing. Because everything you see as your world was a mistake.

    A mistake many billions of years in the making that forms the foundation for life, but just an accidental blip on the timeline of the multiverse.

    Is Tumblr leaking into the forum or are you having a particularly sub-par acid trip?


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