Widescreen Gaming Forum

Julien,

I know you're not hear for an argument, and we're not looking for one. Our grading system was created back when 4:3 and 5:4 monitors were the prevalent display. If something was designed on those, and then Vert- on widescreen, it made a big difference.

We've had tons of arguments over the grading system over the years, and we've stuck with leaving it alone. I have reset the game entry to Hor+, and put a note in the game about the behavior. It's put it at a Silver grade now, and Gold for multi-mon. We've had a few games like this where the multi-mon gets a higher grade than the widescreen.

Our baseline is really that 16:9 should have a wider hFOV than 16:10. Going anamorphic for 4:3 would allow you to retain the vision you had for the game with those users. There are still some old-school guys around here who have 3x5:4 or 3x4:3 on their TH2Go rigs. If a game doesn't work in multi-mon, we want them to have the best experience possible.

Adding extra sky and floor don't really do much for them, and can take their focus away from the "center action". We've seen that with a really large vFOV, your focus can tend to drift up and down. Even those "square screen" users are a minority, we are still concerned about their experience too. In looking at the Steam Survey, they still make up about 9% of that market sample.

At the end of the day, it would be tough for us to overhaul the entire system given the paradigm shift in the market. Knocking off the penalty for Vert- would make a bunch of older game "over-graded" and have poor performance. The change would possibly do the same for some current indie or retro games which do have FOV problems in widescreen.

In thinking about this, we might be able to fix this by adding a new term of Vert+. It denote a change in vFOV, but not have a negative connotation. And it would also indicate that the baseline widescreen FOV was "correct". I'm going to point my Editors here to solicit their feedback as well.

LuckyNoS7evin wrote:In Fullscreen mode couldn't select any 21:9 res when on eyefinity and even in windowed mode couldn't select anything higher than 1920x1080, someone with 21:9 monitor may have better luck.

I had to add a custom resolution in Nvidia Surround to do this.

In response to the FOV problem, my problem with this idea is that it rewards people who own 4:3 monitors. In fact, a 16:9 monitor user is worse off than any other user. You'd be better off with 4:3 or 21:9 - doesn't matter which way you go, you see more.

It's not as bad as a Vert- game that is unplayable in 16:9 of course, but it's not as ideal as a a Hor+ game.
1. It does not reward widescreen users over narrow monitor users. You would be better off with a 4:3 monitor.
2. However, it is fully functional at 16:9, so it is not bad like a Vert- game that is unplayable at 16:9.

So the correct grade is Silver, the correct grade for 21:9 is Gold and the correct grade for multimon is Gold. Whether we need a new term for this or not is the question, I guess.

If the dev put in black bars and made it anamorphic, it would be classified as Gold. So the question is: Is allowing a non-widescreen user to see this extra space a problem? Well in a competitive FPS shooter, it would be an advantage. In a puzzle game, probably less of an advantage or no advantage. But they will never be worse off than a widescreen user who will always be worse off with FOV, and that's what we are all about here.

jbarnoin wrote:I do think it's a bit strange that the crowd of 16:9 gamers is requesting a change to the 4:3 mode that they'll never play. I don't think the game will be more playable for them if I do that, and you guys won't see any difference.

You're absolutely right for this as well. I can totally appreciate where you are coming from, especially if the game is not a competitive FPS shooter or whatever. Does the game work well and is playable in all widescreen resolutions? Yes. So why would it get penalised?

Only because the user worst off for FOV is the 16:9 user. The FOV gets worse as you head towards 16:9 and better as you head away from 16:9.

So it really brings the question back to the fundamental:
1. Are we trying to grade/reward all games to play on all resolutions, regardless of who is better off with FOV, or
2. Are we trying to grade/reward all games that reward widescreen users by giving them better FOV than narrower aspect ratios?

Aussie and I chatted about this again tonight. We have agreed the term of Vert+ is proper, and has been added to the site nomenclature. We'll be adjusting the grading to allow this setting to achieve Gold status. For more details on this and other tweaks, check out the full post here: http://www.wsgf.org/forums/viewtopic.ph ... 33#p145233

jbarnoin wrote:Like most game studios I'm sure, we work exclusively on 16:10 or 16:9 screens. We actually had have a colleague bring out an old CRT SDTV from his garage a few weeks before release so we could check that 4:3 actually worked
Try buying a 4:3 TV or monitor nowadays, it's not easy.

I do think it's a bit strange that the crowd of 16:9 gamers is requesting a change to the 4:3 mode that they'll never play. I don't think the game will be more playable for them if I do that, and you guys won't see any difference.

So, I'll think about what I should do for that, I certainly didn't come here to start an argument. I might add an option in the next build so that you guys can try it, I'll let you know if I do that.

Respectfully,
Julien

We sincerely need more developers like you, who communicate with not only the gamers, but the widescreen users as well. Kudos to you!