Finally, a high PPI desktop monitor

But those programs are all obsolete since you have Paint.net, Audacity, and pirated-sony-vegas-with-unreal-superhero-keygen-song-that-is-the-most-orgasmic-tune-ever.

 

See those black gaps look like shit and would drive me insane to watch a movie or play a video game with black bars everywhere.

 

I could dig the smaller side ones, to place a minimap there or something to the tune. But I share the senetiment. That plus having a 280 degree vision arc is blatant cheat.

 

That's how I play.

I force empires to run at a higher aspect ratio in windowed mode.

 

It kinda is, but there is a diffrence between seeing 10% more to the sides and being backstabproof.

 

I have a 16:10 monitor, but I still play things in 16:9 with the desktop showing behind, as long as the game supports windowed noborder. I don't really notice it now, but it was annoying at first.

 

It gets really wacky if you game at extreme aspect ratios. Fisheye city.

 

There's a console command to change like aspect ratio but in the same resolution. It makes you dizzy after a while, but you can make everyone look like 2d cutouts, or if you mess it up, you can see every single player on the map at one time (which is really fucking bizzare and is something I'd rather not see again). I believe it's cheats only though.

 

I don't think you can change the aspect ratio, but you change the FOV, that imaginary cone projected from your character's face that says how far to the left and right you can see in degrees. In games, it generally ranges from 60 to 90, even though human vision is 180 and goes up to 270 if you allow your eyes to move. But this is actually quite reasonable when you consider that there's a distance between your eyes and the screen which is rectangular, so it isn't a cone but a frustrum. It's also why major FOVs will cause fisheyeing, because it has to compress the sides into a smaller angle so that they'll appear on your screen.

 

No son I know what FOV is, it's not that. It was a random command I found in CSS called r_aspectratio (just looked it up). excuse the frag video, but he shows it. It seems like people only use it for frag videos, but anyway if you look at the very start he's got it changed so that everything looks much wider(therefore more uglier).

 

You can add launch commands like

Code:

-windowed -noborder -w 1280 -h 600

and it'll yield a higher FOV in Empires. I think all Source games will do that. I'm not sure about the specifics of why it works.

 

That's because FOV is scaled to the aspect ratio, and because most games nowadays use Hor+ for scaling the FOV, which means a higher aspect ratio gives a larger horizontal field of view. The other options are anamorphic, which gives those black bars; Vert-, which decreases the vertical resolution; Pixel-based, which only works well with certain types of games, and stretching, making it ugly as fuck but not changing the FOV at all.

Changing the aspect ratio is pretty much the same as changing the FOV in a Source game.

 

Except for games which have no proper 16:10 support, nigga what are you doing?

 

But you can change the aspect ratio, right? That was the original question at hand.

 

Yeah, because setting the resolution is also setting the aspect ratio, r = w/h. When you use r_aspectratio to force a given ratio with a set width and height, then it has to stretch or squeeze everything for it to fit the screen.

 

There are a lot of ways to deal with it. Candles laid out the popular ones in an earlier post.

Some ways do provide more vertical viewing space in 16:10 (and even more so in 4), but Source isn't that way.

As Eyefinity and other multimonitor gaming solutions become more accepted, I would expect more games to deal with the relationship between aspect ratio/resolution and FOV in the same way as Source.

Also, tawhl-screen gaming FTW.