"Native" as a widescreen behavior
After a series of internal and public conversations, in late March we finally introduced Native as a Widescreen Behavior in our Detailed Reports.
The WSGF platform was founded before 16:9 was the norm, so the scaling system was built to lower the scores of widescreen games that were vert- compared to 4:3. Now with 16:9 as the norm and nearly every new game built for it, all a widescreen user needs to know is that the game was designed for their display, which is when Native comes into the picture.
For those curious about the technical details, the change required separating our Ultra-Wide and Multi-Monitor vocabularies from the Widescreen vocabulary containing the Behavior terms, meaning that we had to manually update hundreds of Detailed Reports to move them to the new vocabularies. We did many by hand, but then community member dirthead was a huge help in semi-automating the process with a script.
Master Games List filtering options
Also in March, Delphium revived the Master Games List Search. Beyond its native search functionality, it offers the option of filtering games by their widescreen, ultra-wide, multi-monitor and 4K grades, as well as the other characteristics like genres.
These improvements add to the Master Games List updates made last year, which overhauled the layout and allowed it to present more information on each game.
Detailed Report layout updates
In other news, skipclarke updated the layout of the Support summary and Game information boxes, which are some of the first things you see on a Detailed Report page. Some of the old types of information were removed and some added based on the earlier poll results containing your feedback.
Bronze medals and other changes to the medals
Earlier this year, we introduced the Bronze medals to offer a better visual representation of our Limited grades, which used to look quite plain. This was followed by the replacement of the 21:9 text within the medals with UW to be inclusive of the 32:9 aspect ratio, which has been an important part of WSGF reports for a while.
We also slightly tweaked the visuals of the medals to make them uniform. We are in the process of updating the images for Augmented Steam, while PCGamingWiki is working on updating their WSGF icons with some of these changes in mind.
Future updates
Over the past years, there have been discussions revolving around our definition and use of the word Anamorphic, so we have looked at the options and listened to the suggestions for renaming the term, and will continue to evaluate going forward. In the immediate future, there may be minor updates to the site icons, as well as other improvements to the overall presentation. Stay tuned!