"What happened to resolutions?" repost

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"What happened to resolutions?" repost

Postby Rachael » Sat Jul 21, 2018 5:43 pm

I think dpJudas had the best explanation in the previous thread, so to prevent this from getting lost, I am reposting it here:
dpJudas wrote:
Sgt. Shivers wrote:Just wondering, why can't the screen be scaled with the options menu anymore? Is there something stopping the window being set for size with the new system or is it just temporarily being taken away while the resolutions are put back in?

The old video list was removed for several reasons:

1) The list was queried from the display driver. A concept utterly obsolete and in practice a hard-coded list in the display driver. Legacy resolutions like 1024x768, 800x600, which all were incorrect as the hardware doesn't actually support any of those resolutions. Modern display technology only supports one resolution as they aren't CRT displays.

2) Asking the typical user about the full screen resolution is bad UI as the answer in 99.95% of all cases is.. the actual monitor resolution. Why do you think modern newer games just ask you if it should be fullscreen + a scale factor. Apparently not only are we idiots based on the feedback, the entire gaming industry seems to be so!

3) The code was very old, included broken obsolete concepts like the LB modes that no longer made sense (the general scaling system in GZDoom handles this via other settings for a while now). It also conflicted with #2 as it required the user to make a pointless obscure decision for the majority of users.

4) The newer scaling code actually supports selecting specific resolutions. This made the old video selection code redundant. The list of options currently is pretty small, but it is trivialto add more to that list.

5) OpenGL doesn't support exclusive full screen mode changes. What we had was always a hack. Due to #3 it meant any user that selected full screen would get their desktop icons rearranged. That really sucked!

Half the feedback currently seems to come from people that have no idea what scaling features GZDoom actually has, nor puts much consideration into why we are trying to adjust the menu in the first place.

It seems like we could use some way to specify specific windowed geometry sizes, as apparently some used that feature in the old video list. That's more or less the only useful conclusions I've been able to draw from this so far.

It should be noted that plans are in place to have vid_setmode make a comeback in the newer devbuilds, but it is yet to be fully implemented on Mac and Linux.
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