0005100: UI Scaling - DEV Arcen

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0005100	Valley 1	Suggestion		Nov 3, 2011 12:26 am	Nov 3, 2011 9:36 am

Reporter	Blahness	Assigned To	Chris_McElligottPark
Status	closed	Resolution	won't fix
Product Version	0.536

Summary	0005100: UI Scaling
Description	I would like to be able to make the UI, text and so on larger when playing in very large (1920x1200) resolutions. I don't want to have to sacrifice readability for beauty, or vice versa.
Tags	No tags attached.

Internal Weight	New

Chris_McElligottPark Nov 3, 2011 9:36 am administrator ~0017397	Sorry, as with AI War we really can't get into scaling the HUD elements. If you want them larger, I suggest lowering the resolution; if the text is too small, the other visual elements are likely to be, as well. Having dynamically-sizing GUI elements based on screen resolution is not a problem we want to tackle, particularly not with the terrible GUI system Unity currently inflicts on us. ;) But really, more than that, the game is designed at a consistent scale. If your particular screen resolution to monitor size ratio makes it hard for you to read the text, then you'll have equal problems seeing other parts of the game with any clarity if we were to increase the text itself. Can't see the text, can't see the maps, etc, etc. This is why we don't let text be resized, because it's not the text that's the problem -- it's everything. At some point we could possibly add scaling for this, but it's not high on my list because the better solution is a slightly lower screen size. And it's not even just the GUI. If you can't see the map, then you probably can't see the difference between a given kind of pickup on the actual field of play, too. "Just what _is_ that little thing over there in the grass?" Etc. So then you wind up having to scale not just the text, not just the HUD, but really the entire screen in order to get a good result where you can comfortably see everything. That can be done programmatically, but it's a real pain in the rear and it involves lots of extra load on the CPU and the GPU, because everything has to be scaled and there's lots of extra matrix math that the GPU then has to crunch. But there is good news! That's basically what the monitor resolution is for, when it comes to 2D games -- it makes the pixels larger with no performance cost whatsoever. And actually, since you are reducing the needed pixel fill rate and the viewport size and so forth, you actually get a performance _benefit_ from that approach. It's clearly the way to go, when things aren't readable. People then complain that on some LCD monitors in particular, you get a bit of blurriness when you use something other than the native screen resolution. That's true, and an unfortunate side effect of using an LCD monitor compared to a CRT. I use LCD monitors myself, so I'm familiar with what you mean. But actually, there's not a magic way for me to solve this in software -- if I were to scale up the elements on the GPU, you then get an extra performance hit, _plus_ you get the interpolation artifacts from the GPU as it scales up the textures, and that tends to look worse than the slight blurriness from the monitor running at not its native resolution. Anyway, I realized that there wasn't a full explanation of this anywhere in mantis, so I figured I go ahead and log the full explanation in this topic, since you were the most recent person to bring it up. Hope that helps!

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
Nov 3, 2011 12:26 am	Blahness	New Issue
Nov 3, 2011 9:26 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Relationship added	related to 0004129
Nov 3, 2011 9:27 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Relationship added	duplicate of 0004279
Nov 3, 2011 9:36 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Internal Weight	=> New
Nov 3, 2011 9:36 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Note Added: 0017397
Nov 3, 2011 9:36 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Status	new => closed
Nov 3, 2011 9:36 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Assigned To	=> Chris_McElligottPark
Nov 3, 2011 9:36 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Resolution	open => won't fix
Apr 14, 2014 9:28 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Category	Suggestion - General Idea => Suggestion - General
Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Category	Suggestion - General => Suggestion