So I was screwing around with some random bits of polish in the game and realised that I havn’t tried fullscreen since I got my shiny new widescreen monitor a few months back. Unfortunately since the game is always rendered at 800×600 (and therefore a 4:3 aspect ratio) it looks a bit rubish when streched over a 16:10 display.
An hour of hacky tinering and it’s running at the native res and aspect ratio, and the results are rather pretty I think:
(click for full size version)
I was surprised to find that only a few things were resolution-dependant. The HUD was the most obvious, since it used hard-coded positional values, so it now uses relative offsets from the screen edges. The menus are all borked too, since they’re hardcoded to 800×600 so end up huddled in the bottom corner, I’ll worry about them later.
The problem is that I think it breaks the gameplay – searching and exploring the map is a large part of the fun and challenge, and you don’t get that when you can see half or a third of it on screen at a time. In fact it makes some maps laughably easy. But visually it looks so good I’m not sure I want to let it go.
Decisions decisions…