Widescreen Gaming Forum

As you can see on the DR thread, author Terry "mogumbo" Welsh is looking for solutions to improve Retrobooster's support of wide displays. At the moment the game uses a fixed diagonal FOV, which although not Hor+ is okay in narrower aspects and especially for multiplayer, but not so much in UWS and multi-mon.

A new experimental demo is now available, so grab it and share your thoughts, whatever your faved aspect ratio may be !

Windows:
http://www.reallyslick.com/retrobooster ... screen.zip


Linux:
http://www.reallyslick.com/retrobooster ... bit.tar.gz

Scavvenjahh, thanks for posting those file. I just wanted to mention a few things. Those files contain a modified version of the free demo. All I did was add better widescreen support. There are just two issues I see right now:

1. The game was originally tuned for a single monitor, so now you can sometimes shoot at enemies from a much greater distance but they are so far away they cannot attack you very effectively. This will probably only happen a limited amount and won't ruin the game but it's worth mentioning.

2. The levels aren't wide enough to always fill the screen now. To add widescreen to the full game I would want to edit the levels so that they fill the screen completely.

Anyway, this demo seems like a pretty good start. I only have one monitor myseff, so it would be great to hear what people think when playing this on a triple-monitor setup.

Well it seems to be working pretty great ! The new demo is perfectly playable in both UWS and Multi-monitor.

Original FOV and multiplayer arrangement...


New demo...


The wider FOV may reveal the boundaries of level architecture or help you spot secrets here and there, but that's hardly a problem.
Enemies can't see you when they're at the far sides of the picture but they keep shooting from quite far away actually - so they don't look stupid.
Round And Around is spectacular on a triple-screen, the way the map revolves around the ship is awesome. Hopefully there are more levels like that in the full game

More pictures...




So the FOV is ok in Multi-mon. Do you think it'd be possible to center the HUD

To answer your question, yes, the full game has many more radial levels like Round And Around.

I could add some variables to game's data file that let you change the horizontal position of the left and right HUD elements. I might be able to add some slider bars to the Settings menu to help with this. It's probably best to have it only affect single player games. How do other games usually deal with this problem?

A good question. Lots of games just don't while others seem to detect the native aspect of a single monitor and scale the HUD accordingly, or constrain it to the central 16/9 portion of the picture regardless of the actual aspect of the monitors used, etc.

Slider bars would be perfect IMHO, this way you wouldn't have to worry about specific aspect ratios and "bezel compensation" settings.

I updated the demo downloads. The download links at the top of this thread now point at the new version. I added a slider bar for changing the horizontal position of the HUD elements. From the main menu just click on Settings and then Widescreen Settings.

Brilliant.



Through the magic of the slider bar, the HUD will therefore be centered, regardless of the aspect ratio or bezel compensation. You can even position it just outside the center screen if you want, or closer to the center on a 21:9 monitor. This is the kind of stuff 5x1P users must be dreaming about. This is what I want to see in each and every game !!

Any ETA for the patch that will add all of this widescreen goodness to the full game ?

Thanks for taking a look. There's no ETA at the moment. I still need to widen the geometry in some level files so you won't see the edges of levels. And, on an unrelated issue, I'm waiting on a change to SDL that will workaround a Windows bug that affects mouse button input. I'm hoping to include that new version of SDL if I release an update.

Retrobooster has been updated to version 1.1. This officially adds the widescreen support we discussed on this thread. You can read all the details here: http://www.reallyslick.com/blog/2014/04 ... rsion-1-1/

I'm removing the temporary demo that is linked to in the first post in this thread. The new 1.1 demo is more current and can be downloaded here: http://www.reallyslick.com/retrobooster/downloads.html

Great news, thanks ! I've updated the DR with new screenshots. Retrobooster 1.1 is WSGF certified