Widescreen Feedback Thread

[AffectedArc07]

This thread serves as a feedback container for https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/20861

 

Making it the only screen size is an issue because people on lesser monitors get a major issue with it, so I propose a toggle to go between 15x15, and 19x15, but everyone must accept its going to be a balance issue that some players may be on a larger screen size.

 

[Coolrune206]

I'll echo my thoughts from the Discord and Git here,

I currently prefer the current implementation over the widescreen option, mostly due to my 16:10 monitor not playing as well with the Widescreen (either having large black bars if I resize the viewport or a severely squished chat/verbs tab otherwise). If the widescreen PR does get merged, I would sincerely appreciate it having a toggle back to 15x15 for folks with monitors like mine, but if I had the choice overall I'd rather just stick with the 15x15 option for everyone. There's a few reasons - tanking either a screwy UI or a vision malus doesn't feel great for a feature that doesn't really seem beneficial (at least to me), plus my bias towards the square viewport - it makes sense to see equal distance in each direction.

The consensus I've heard from folks around is that this feels satisfying for combat, but less so for RP due to the squishing of the chat box. I personally lean more towards the RP side of things, so that may also affect my opinion.

[dafrek]

I'm not a fan of widescreen.

It is admittedly neat to have the game fit computer screens better, however, I don't think it outweighs the downsides.

Having 9 tiles of vision in the horizontal directions vs 7 tiles of vision vertically is weird as it means that anyone using ranged weapons will be at an advantage if they stand in a hallway that runs in the horizontal direction since they have 2 tiles extra tiles of vision which gives them more time to react when they see someone, especially if their opponent only has melee weapons.

Its already been discussed on GitHub that some people don't have the proper screen/settings for fullscreen, since the solution to this seems to be that fullscreen will be togglable this means that those without fullscreen will be inherently disadvantaged compared to those with fullscreen due to the difference in view distance horizontally.

While I think fullscreen looks nicer the gameplay issues that it adds make me believe that fullscreen is not a good thing to add.

[Gunther]

Hi hello! I am here to give feedback.

 

SO I'm join going to say my two monitors that I have cause I'm a gamer:

Primary - Sceptre P30 (200 hz, 30 in., 21:9 2560x1080)

Second - MSI G241 (144 hz, 24~inch, 16:9 1920x1080)

 

I believe it's because I have this/these monitor(s) is why I love it so much. I'm not running on a gaming laptop anymore, so I wouldn't know what it is like for individuals who have smaller monitors. But yeah, works like a charm on my end :D

 

I am also content with how the other less-wide screen is. I honestly didn't see much of a change on my end as of performance/visual issues.

Whenever I pAI I usually dim my vision down anyways because.. RP-wise it doesn't make sense for me to just SEE so far as such a tiny individual. However I do not used ranged weapons, but I believe it would be better RP wise to implicate a wider screen for such scenarios! Just my thought.

 

Actually no, you're right. If a good portion of our players have smaller monitors anyways, then yeah I'm fine with not having wide screen for balance issues. I think it'd be lovely in cases of actual RP/Visual times (NON-Combat), but when it comes to ranged weapons yeah I don't want me/others having a better chance because of our big monitors, tis not fair.

Cheers

Edited April 22, 2023 by Gunther
change of mind

[Rurik]

I don't like having an advantage over people because of what kind of monitor I have. Either I see more than my opponent, or I have a more readable chatbox than my opponent.

A little extra screen space isn't worth the balance implications.

[Landerlow]

24 minutes ago, Rurik said:

I don't like having an advantage over people because of what kind of monitor I have. Either I see more than my opponent, or I have a more readable chatbox than my opponent.

A little extra screen space isn't worth the balance implications.

This. 

[dhu]

Awesome change, really excited about it. I run a pretty standard setup with a 1920x1080 display resolution, hopped on for a few rounds and the game just feels SO much better to play without the chat window taking up an unnecessarily large portion of my screen. I heard some people had concerns about playing on lower resolution displays, so I tried hopping on on my laptop as well, at 1366x768, again, pretty standard resolution for most modern laptops.

I gotta say I'm not really too sure what people mean when they say the chat window's too small or hard to read or whatever. Is this really too small for most people? The chat seems perfectly readable to me on modern display resolutions; and if I'm really that concerned about missing something that's what I've got chat highlights set up for, after all.



Regarding potential balance concerns; I've played on other servers which have had widescreen implemented for a few years now, and it really doesn't come up as much as one might imagine it does - or very often at all for that matter - there are very few niche cases where those extra few tiles of horizontal vision ever make or break a fight. If it were really some massive glaring balance problem I don't think so many other major SS13 servers would still be running widescreen, really.

Overall very cool, hoping to see this fullmerged!

Edited April 22, 2023 by dhu

[peter103]

there was discussion about the title screen not fitting in widescreen so i feel like i should pitch my idea for a fix, we could have it be so players can submit their (size appropiate) art to a channel or a forum post or whatever and it being added to a dmi where the game would randomly pick one each round, i feel like this would be cool because we could showcase the talent of several players instead of always just having the same one. of course i have no idea how hard this would be to manage but i feel like it would be the coolest way to go about it, pretty sure tg did this for a while but for pretty much any kind of image.

also the welding helmet overlay is stretched as hell

[peter103]

i'd like to clarify i do not mean having it automatically put the images in the game obviously it would be moderated

[Coolrune206]

Another thing I heard from the Spriter-Man himself @McRamon was that any changes to screen size would require changes to things like cinematics, which play over the full screen - this means that if we did go for the "opt-in" wide-screen of 17x15 or 19x15, spriters would have to do thrice as much work to accommodate.

6 hours ago, dhu said:

Awesome change, really excited about it. I run a pretty standard setup with a 1920x1080 display resolution, hopped on for a few rounds and the game just feels SO much better to play without the chat window taking up an unnecessarily large portion of my screen. I heard some people had concerns about playing on lower resolution displays, so I tried hopping on on my laptop as well, at 1366x768, again, pretty standard resolution for most modern laptops.

It's less about lower resolution displays and more about aspect ratio. 1920x1080 and 1366x768 are both in 16:9 aspect ratio. This works well with the widescreen design. However, an aspect ratio of 16:10 has a slightly taller screen than a 16:9, and as such the window needs to stretch further to the side to accommodate this. With widescreen, this ends up with the chat box getting smooshed to the far right. For contrast with your images, this is how the widescreen TM appears on a 16:10 monitor:

Not much space to work with, which is inconvenient for doing things like reading mentor tickets (I can only imagine the suffering admins will be having using a small window like this), and it also cuts off half the buttons in the top right. How am I supposed to see the beautiful Donate button like this

Edited April 23, 2023 by Coolrune206
woops, let's not have mentor stuff visible in the image

[Pyxis]

Not sure if it is related to the widescreen merge, but when playing around with genetics, the colorblindness trait does not appear to change my game screen to black and white. Since I haven't play with genetics (and that specific mutations) for a while, I am not sure if it is related to the widescreen testmerge.

[CinnamonSnowball]

14 hours ago, dhu said:

I gotta say I'm not really too sure what people mean when they say the chat window's too small or hard to read or whatever. Is this really too small for most people? The chat seems perfectly readable to me on modern display resolutions; and if I'm really that concerned about missing something that's what I've got chat highlights set up for, after all.

I would like to point out that every single radio chat message in your screencaps that isn't 2-3 words gets split into two lines. Considering common chatter more often than not is longer than that, you basically only got half the usual chat view compared to before. I'm aware chat highlights exist and all, but those are for specific phrases you definitely don't want to miss. People want to pay attention to the general comms conversations, too.
While you could also argue that you can simply lower the chat font size, that's not really a solution either, only an inconvenience for those who prefer a larger font size to read stuff more easily.

In general, being able to see a couple more columns of tiles on the sides - which I personally don't really see the usefulness of outside of maybe combat, and we're not strictly a combat-oriented server - does not seem like a good tradeoff for worse UX, on top of creating some other balance/design dilemmas.

Edited April 23, 2023 by CinnamonSnowball

[AffectedArc07]

1 hour ago, CinnamonSnowball said:

I would like to point out that every single radio chat message in your screencaps that isn't 2-3 words gets split into two lines. Considering common chatter more often than not is longer than that, you basically only got half the usual chat view compared to before.

This thread is going to make me start profiling for the average length of a chat message to see how it looks.

[robveelben]

I would agree to this only if it is a made as a optional setting not as a mandotary chance as it really doesn't play well on laptop screen.

[Spacemanspark]

Paradise used to have a 17x17 viewport for all players, and I wish that hadn't been removed to this day.

That said, having played on servers with wide-screen since my leave from Para, I often feel like it's a bit much in my experience. Also, consider little Timmy using their 2gb ram mini toshiba laptop; some just aren't fortunate enough to have a large screen for such features. 

[Sadhorizon]

I, as a non-combat role player, don't really see many issues
Sure, a visual bug here and there but that's about it. Chat, usually, isn't THAT terrible either. In fact, I barely notice something has changed. It took me fifteen minutes today to even realize my screen got bugged by a mech.
But at the same time... I just don't really get what seeing four more columns gives you. I just don't see a point.

I also often hear about two issues players present:
1) they don't have a screen that'd support a widescreen
2) they get motion sickness from playing the game on wider screen (I'm not an expert with diseases, I am just mirroring what I heard)
Then also come people who just lack that chat space or simply don't like the larger screen
I believe a good chunk of playerbase would refuse to play with widescreen, and as rurik said, adding a toggle sounds kinda pointless.

Either fully commit to it, or don't at all. 

Edited April 25, 2023 by Sadhorizon

[Groudonmaster]

On my 2560x1440 monitor the widescreen just makes the chat difficult to decipher once I've resized the area. I'm mostly a drone player so that's not a huge issue but everytime I went to check what engineering was talking about to fix something it was difficult.

I know change is good and all but I don't think this change is one of them. I might not be able to play with widescreen for long periods of time which honestly might push me away from the server as a whole.

[Cress67]

Right, I do have a widescreen monitor but this doesn't really involve the resolution. The two generated tiles on the horizontals don't work for the purposes of Borg/AI interaction with machines. I'm not sure if this is something that'd ever get fixed or if it's intended behavior (because hey, that's a massive advantage by giving them 4 more horizontal tiles in total to have dominion over), but it did cause me multiple long seconds of frustration while wondering why Reload UI Resources wasn't working to fix the issue.

[Rythen]

Having to decide between wide screen game and reasonably sized chat area is an annoying trade to have to make.  I personally find the chat window size too small with the widescreen resolution but if I were to opt out of widescreen I don't like the idea that I'm putting myself at a disadvantage in vision.  I personally feel the old resolution should just be kept as the only option.

[pismorizzo]

I have a 16:10 monitor and the fact my chat is squished and to fix it I have to create black bars is awful. I can hardly focus on the game when I am being forced to either look at terribly squished text or these large ugly black bars at the top and bottom of my viewport. Adding it as an option would not be a fix seeing as being shot off screen by people would make any kind of fight I am in very annoying. Please do not merge this I do not understand why this is needed.

Edited April 24, 2023 by pismorizzo

[Medster]

I've enjoyed what I've seen of Wide screen so far. its got a few issues that I've seen, Donation button being pushed off screen in my case, and the old graphics for the old ratio being a little scuffed for the new wide screen set up. But otherwise it seems fine, I'm sure that the Pictures like the Paradise Lobby screen and the Nuke going off will be fixed in time.

Finding it hard to disagree with some of the balance concerns, There could be cause for concern.
though Ranged weapons have Bullet travel time, making it harder to aim at those extra two tiles of Vision range.
And it might be a little harder to run away from people to the East or West depending on the Screen the chaser has.
We'll see, that's what the test merge is for anyway, If we find there's a uptick in Nukie wins because the Nukies happen to have Widescreen or whatever, we can figure it out now rather than later

[Contra]

I love the look of wide-screen, I do not love how it feels in game. I agree with the general sentiment that the chat-box feels very squished and you can get long messages like this:

 
It also feels like it is going to cause so many issues code-wise, I've already run into about 20-30 things that will need to be changed if widescreen is full merged

[RatNut]

I know I am in the minority, but as someone who plays this game on a 55 inch TV, widescreen is nothing short of incredible. The views are amazing. Would it be possible to maybe have a non widescreen option that still includes more horizontal tiles like widescreen does by making the whole picture a bit smaller? It would make non widescreen a bit worse since everything you are looking at would be a bit smaller but it would also allow them to see the same number of tiles as widescreen users which would gradually increase

[Nerfection]

My overall take is while it looks a lot nicer, making the most important area of the screen (the chatbox) smaller means that the improved look just isn't quite worth it for me. On my desktop it's not quite such an issue with a big monitor, but on my laptop it squishes the chatbox into a 6cm wide space, causing almost everything there to loop, and in the verb box only leaving enough room for two columns of verbs. 

I think with the fact that our playerbase will be playing SS13 on a huge range of screens, from the tiny surface pro of a Nerf, to the gargantuan 55inch TV of a RatNut, we should focus to make it playable on all of them, rather than optimising it for only the bigger ones.

Edit: I guess on smaller screens you can drag the chat window larger if you're happy with having black bars, so perhaps it's okay. I don't have a strong opinion either way.

Edited April 24, 2023 by Nerfection

[ID404NotFound]

I dont like it