AFK display

[sami1337]

It's not 2000 anymore you know. You can't even buy screens that are not widescreen i think.

[shockedfrog]

That might be the case, but many people are likely to be using older monitors from a few years ago when 4:3 was still common because it's not something that generally needs upgraded often. Also, there's a number of gamers, myself included, who still use CRT monitors because they find most reasonably priced LCD monitors are unsuitable for gaming, and those are far less likely to be widescreen.

[sami1337]

I am not ruling out noone uses old crt's, but just saying the devs of crysis didn't think about me when they made their game.
I don't think it's cheating. Full res is the standard, it's up to you to upgrade, or not and don't experience the advantages.

Life works this way. Choose to take your bicycle or buy a car. Either way you will get there. The latter just costs more but offers more comfort.

[shockedfrog]

While I haven't played Crysis, I'm reasonably sure it's designed for both 4:3/5:4 and 16:9. And the car/bicycle comparison doesn't really make sense in this situation, at least not for the reason you give.

[Vattic]

I'd say make the fullscreen mode fit widescreen resolutions when in that mode but put black bars at the sides or similar, that way we get a nice vertical resolution without having the advantage in the horizontal we would otherwise have over those with older monitors.

Then again I'd like to see the same in proper widescreen , but which type?

[loftar]

There are a few points to consider:
* First of all, there are technical reasons for my not wanting to enlarge the drawn area further, because the more the player can see, the more his client would need to be updated with, and the more bandwidth on the server side that would consume. With our current number of users, that's not a big problem, of course, but it could easily become in the future, so I'm just not thrilled about it.
* My laptop has a 1024x768 pixel monitor. 800x600 is the only lower "standard" resolution that I can use so that the window still fits with frame decorations.
* I do know a couple of other people with similarly equipped laptops.
* I don't really think that the current view distance is a very great problem in itself. The real problems lie, I would say, rather with camera control. We've tried another model at an earlier time, where the camera tried to predict where the player was going and made sure to have good view distance ahead of him. In the end, though, it caused more problems than it was worth when doing detail movements between objects fitting on one screen, so we had to scrap that. I'd really like to upgrade the camera control to something better, but I just cannot figure out what.

On the other hand, of course, it's not like I don't see the point. It is kind of a waste to have a large monitor and just being able to use 800x600 to play Haven. Rest assured, at least, that I will keep the issue with me and re-evaluate it at times. I may very well change my mind at some point.



And for the record, I'd just like to state that I really dislike widescreen monitors for computers. Whenever I try and find a monitor or a laptop, I do my utmost to find a 4:3 monitor (and yes indeed, it is hard to find them these days). In my not so humble opinion, widescreen monitors are only good for watching movies (and I could very well rant about that just being a marketing ploy foisted upon us by television manufacturers through the big movie companies; I could also mention that what I watch the most -- anime -- is usually recorded in 4:3), and suck for everything else; especially for reading web pages or coding. All the extra horizontal space either goes completely unused (the normal situation when coding) or makes the lines of text far longer than what is comfortable to read (the normal situation when reading automatically line-wrapped text, like web pages). When reading PDFs, you can basically choose to compress the document, leaving the extra horizontal space unused, or expand it, making less text fit vertically. If anything, I would rather prefer a 3:4 monitor (one which is taller than it is wide, that is) to a widescreen one.

[Vattic]

I know what you are saying loftar, I run my browser and notepad++ smaller than my resolution width for the very same reasons you describe. I do however like widescreen for graphics work, films and games.

I will say again though, I would like to see a version of the fullscreen mode that doesn't stretch the image disproportionately on the horizontal from the vertical, using black bars at the sides might work as I suggested.

[theTrav]

especially for reading web pages or coding.

I do a lot of coding on a wide screen (24" next to a 19") and find it really helps, I use the 19" for output / runtimes, the 24" is almost solely dedicated to eclipse (the IDE), which partitions the space into:
package structure view
console view
one or two windows with code editors open (more frequently two than one)
outline of the current open class structure
list of current compilation errors/warnings

I have the package structure on the left, the two code windows in the middle, and the outline on the right. The console and the errors view split the bottom 1/4 of the screen 50:50.

It's really handy once you get used to working in it.

It's even handier if you use the debugger, as you can have the full thread complete with current stack on the left, then the code, then on the right you can have your break point list, your variable inspection window, your package structure view and your outline view, all visible without messing around.

--edit--
oh yeah, this has nothing really to do with the matter at hand, I just wanted to point out that coding on a wide screen is the bomb and you shouldn't discount it until you've tried it for a while

[sami1337]

Why not have a static camera?
And what i found really annoying was the bottom UI. it could be way smaller in size. Especially considering you guys want to have the least clutter possible. I wonder why you still made that menu thing that large. Perhaps a semi transparency state would be nice.

Also, i never have my windows fullscreen. They take up 80% of my screen, which i like. I like to see my background and have access to my icons. It also kinda grew thanks to using osX which doesn't have fullscreen mode for windows.

[loftar]

And what i found really annoying was the bottom UI. it could be way smaller in size. Especially considering you guys want to have the least clutter possible. I wonder why you still made that menu thing that large.

Well, yeah. I know that it takes up quite a bit of space, but I'm just not sure what part of it could be made smaller to fix it. Just checking, though: Have you noticed that you can "fold" it, by using the arrow-button in the center of the buttons for inventory, equipment, etc.?

As for static cameras, we've tried a few of those as well, and we found all of them worse than the current camera mode. Maybe I should consider adding the various camera modes back as alternatives, though, so that people can try them out and see which they find the best.

As for the various uses of fullscreen/widescreen etc., there's a lot of material here for me to start a holy war. :) Let's just say that I myself am using StumpWM for window management and EMACS and a couple of xterms for coding.

Vattic's idea for having black bars at the sides for fullscreen modes is quite a great one, though. I'll have to try and get ahold of a widescreen monitor or laptop and see how Java's fullscreen stuff interacts with it.