Some aspect ratio issue

JCA

So.. a 128 tall wall look higher than 128 wide wall looks wide. Here's a picture showing it: http://koti.mbnet.fi/jeejeeje/misc/odd_aspect.jpg

Are there any plans on this? I guess it's now how Doom originally rendered stuff, but I think there should be an option to have same height as width look the same as the height.

Psychikon

I think that makes sense... After all, wasn't the reason the original Doom rendered like this because of how the 320x200 mode 13h VGA screen wasn't quite square with the pixels? That is, things looked thinner than they were, and so things were oftentimes drawn a little wider (such as the marine's face and id Software logo) to compensate? I may be mistaken, but is that right? If that were the case, then it would seem that this is a step in the opposite direction... right? I don't know... It's just a suggestion!!!!!!!

JCA

Yea, I've heard something similar about it. Still I think it should be possible the same amount of game units appear the same in both height and width... Currently if I want this to happen in someway, I have to set the resolution to 1280*960 (4:3), which my display stretches to fill 1680*1050.. then width and height appears about the same.. but the game appears blurrier. So, not exactly the way I want to do it..

DaniJ

The issue here is not something we can trivially solve. The fact is that the original games were created for 320x200 and all resources designed accordingly. In other words, the game didn't "squash" them - the monitors of the time did. This doesn't just apply to the textures. The whole game world is affected.

In Doomsday we emulate the original aspect ratio by scaling the modelview matrix in effect when drawing the world (thereby "squashing" everything).

The pragmatic me suggests it would be substantially easier for you to scale your resources (as the original game authors did), rather than us try to implement a system whereby fragments of the world could be scaled differently.

JCA

Decided to have a go at the code myself.. Actually doing it this way was & felt the simplest solution after I saw how it was done in Doomsday. Now I just searched the code for "aspect" and then for "1.2f" and "1.2" and changed the aspect related values to 1.0 (at least all the ones I could find and thought was related). I guess it could be made so that's it's a cvar that controls what value is used for the aspect correction emulation..

Now I'll get back on working some textures )

DaniJ

It sounds like you are working on an entirely new game plugin, so how about we make the "world scale" customizable through the API? A cvar for this doesn't make sense as if your mod is an extension for an existing game; you should use the same aspect as said game.

JCA

Yea, I'm working on a new game, which will need a new plugin.. I think just changing stuff in deds wouldn't be enough. So that world scale thing sounds allright.

Chuck Spears

DaniJ wrote:

The fact is that the original games were created for 320x200 and all resources designed accordingly. In other words, the game didn't "squash" them - the monitors of the time did. This doesn't just apply to the textures. The whole game world is affected

This is false, at least for the majority of textures in Doom. Take W103_2 for example, which's supposed to be a perfect circle, both the image's dimensions (128x128) and the circle painted on it are 1:1 (call it 4:3) , that means, had the aspect ratio of the target screen been taken into account, they would have squashed it down to approximately 128x106.

Anyways, given that I play JDoom at 640x400 with a CRT monitor, I need to disable JDoom's internal aspect ratio correction otherwise sprites look vertically stretched to hell. Is there a console command for this?

Thanks.

DaniJ

You misinterpreted what I said and then agreed with me. The assets were designed with a non-square pixel aspect in mind because thats the hardware that was common at the time. This can be seen very clearly on things like the titlescreen and the HUD.

There is no cvar for disabling the aspect ratio correction. What is the pixel aspect of your monitor?

Chuck Spears

When you say "the original games were created for 320x200 and all resources designed accordingly" which's basically what you confirmed with "The assets were designed with a non-square pixel aspect in mind", well, that's not true and exactly what I addressed with my previous post.

Again, how can you put a "square" pixel image (4:3) on a 320x200 (16:10) game that's going to be vertically stretched to 4:3 because of the monitor's hardware/timing and expect it to continue looking square in there? that's why I used W103_2 as an example, they drew the circle under a 4:3 resolution so it looks fine there, but put it back into a 320x200 vertically stretched resolution and it will look taller than wide. In other words, the monitor's vertically stretching something that's "already vertically stretched", if you see it from the standpoint of a pixel artist designing resources for a game like Doom.

Here's the problem in a nutshell: sprites have the right proportions for the target screen, textures don't.

Since I'm using 640x400 (double Doom's original res) on a CRT monitor (4:3, so everything get stretched to that unless you manually change the timing) the aspect ratio is exactly the same, thus JDoom's unnecessary correction makes monsters look abnormally tall.

What a shame it can't be disabled.

DaniJ

You aren't running a 4:3 aspect, that is why they look stretched to you. 640x480 would be the 4:3 aspect you are looking for, with the game automatically adjusting the scale accordingly.

Doomsday assumes that you will NOT be using a non-square pixel aspect as that is the norm today.

How is it not true that the assets were designed with a non-square pixel aspect in mind? I think you are interpreting this incorrectly - see here: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Aspect_ratio