Widescreen Gaming Forum

I mentioned this in my lobby rambling on "fisheye" distortion,
but I realized I never posted this here.

You might wonder what a DPI calculator has got to do with games, but a few games actually does poke the OS and ask what the DPI is.
I had a 21.5 inch 1920x1080 (0.248 mm pixel pitch) set at the OS default of 96 DPI for along time.

One day after curiosity got the better of me I calibrated my OS (in Vista and and Windows 7 this is easy to do, and you just need a ruler or measuring tape to do it right).

Turns out my screen actually is 102.46 DPI, unfortunately Windows does not take fractions so I ended up setting it to 103 DPI.
This means that text size and position related elements will be drawn/rendered 7% larger, making text and vector elements smoother and less aliased/allowing more details to be seen.
The interesting thing is that when I bought this screen, I got it intentionally because of how small the pixel pitch was.

So for those of you interested, have fun with it: http://www.emsai.net/projects/widescreen/dpicalc/

Hey Deplhium, if you wanna "steal" this for the WSGF FOV/Aspect calc, feel free to do so. If you peek at the source you'll see that some clever javascript and css is used, and it shouldn't be hard to lift that and glue into your calc. Which would make the WSGF calc pretty complete (with FOV, Aspect and DPI, (and bezels) that pretty much covers anything current engines use/need.

Interesting, cheers for the heads up Rescator :)

I could potentially add it if as you claim you have no objections, should be easy enough to utiliz the maths so thanks for the offer :)
I may however tab the different parts of the calc tool, just so its easyer to read/use each of the elements.
To have fov, ar, dpi, hud editor in their own tabs on the tool in the next revision.
Or maybe even just link to your site/page, as you have some nicely detailed description going on :)

I may however tab the different parts of the calc tool, just so its easyer to read/use each of the elements.

Hmm, maybe move or remove the "the new and improved..." text too (to below the calc maybe), as it eats up some lines that the calc could have started at instead.

Or maybe even just link to your site/page, as you have some nicely detailed description going on :)

Yeah that would be cool (for me), but having the toolbox ooh now there's and idea. rename the calc to "The WSGF Toolbox" maybe?
where was I, oh yeah, having all the tools in one place makes it easier for people, which are more likely to find it here than on my site,
besides, it'll be a long time before I take the time to make a good looking "toolbox" as you have done, and people would just think I was ripping you off anyway :P

And as for the text you like, just copy paste/rewrite whatever you might need.
I just PM'ed you the the un-cached main part of the page just to save you some hassle.

Plus when you tab out the thing in that revision, maybe get some of the forum members here to tip various game mag/sites,
just to increase the chance they notice it and that game players go "why can't my game behave like that" and start pushing the devs to improve the games,
so the DPI Calc would do more good here on WSGF than just sitting in my little corner of the net ;)

PS! In my code you'll see I actually do take non-square pixels/DPI into account, these days almost everything is square pixels so if you feel like it the code could be trimmed down some by doing that, then again the overhead is minimal so not much of an issue anyway, I just did it this way since the OS API (usually) provides x and y DPI but they are always the same so...*shrug*