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Big Screen Beta

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  • greg2haulgreg2haul Member Posts: 1
    Thank you thank you @TrentOster , BIG difference! :)
  • AlesthesAlesthes Member Posts: 46
    edited December 2012
    I think it's really great to have this option, but I can see the reasoning behind their default setting.
    Honestly, this way it's all just very tiny on my big screen. If in exchange what I get is the need to zoom always in and have a very small UI (including very tiny Portraits, after I so carefully searched for them...), well, I wonder if in the end it's just better to fall back to default.
    Oh, and about the crispy feel, that's true, but not so dramatically better as someone seems to suggest.
    In the end, I certainly agree that it is a great option to have, but I am not sure if I understand why people get so mad about it...
    trinit
  • WabbitTwaksWabbitTwaks Member Posts: 54
    edited December 2012
    @Alesthes
    I cannot speak for others, but it was not anger; it was disappointment at getting a blurry, high-definition interface. However, they are listening and working on things. They have my thanks and support. Not that my support and thanks means a whole heck-of-a-lot, but there it is. Hehe.
  • loganultimaloganultima Member Posts: 109
    Thank you Trent. Some of us are now waiting for a small fix to be implemented to prevent zoom reset when entering new areas. Plx pull the right strings :)
    diggerb
  • LemernisLemernis Member, Moderator Posts: 4,318
    Alesthes said:

    I think it's really great to have this option, but I can see the reasoning behind their default setting.
    Honestly, this way it's all just very tiny on my big screen. If in exchange what I get is the need to zoom always in and have a very small UI (including very tiny Portraits, after I so carefully searched for them...), well, I wonder if in the end it's just better to fall back to default.
    Oh, and about the crispy feel, that's true, but not so dramatically better as someone seems to suggest.
    In the end, I certainly agree that it is a great option to have, but I am not sure if I understand why people get so mad about it...

    Yeah, it is crisper but (for my eyes) at the cost of making everything too tiny. I was hoping things would be clearer when zoomed... but not so much really. I went back to the deafult as well because it's just aesthetically more pleasing overall. I look forward to seeing how this big screen feature gets developed though.
  • ThanaThana Member Posts: 16
    Definitely love this option, it's how I'll be playing now. It even made me appreciate the new UI, while I was previously very neutral about it. Now that it's a smaller size, it looks better and the fact that it's slightly bigger than the old UI makes it very nice to use.

    Overall, big fan of this option.
  • FoerthanFoerthan Member Posts: 23
    It looks nicer due to no upscaling, but I definitely won't be playing with it like this. Everything is simply too small for my liking. I'll stick to the upscaled default I'm afraid.
  • GrandeCGrandeC Member Posts: 26
    Looks sharp, thanks for this!
  • DarkcloudDarkcloud Member Posts: 302
    DukeGr said:

    This actually means that the actual UI is upscaled during normal launch and that's why it looks so blurry on high resolutions.

    'Graphics', 'Scale UI', '0', just removes the scaling and renders the game in a similar way bgtutu did on higher resolutions aka makes everything look very small but sharp.

    Now my question regarding this is quite simple as till now i wasnt sure of how things get loaded.
    Why didnt they make the UI elements super high resolution or even vector based for simple things such as icons etc. This way the Interface would look ultra sharp pixel perfect on any screen resolution.
    Why not downscale a high resolution UI but instead upscale a lower resolution UI.

    Keep the ingame scaling as it is now, it's ok cant do any better without the lost art assets, BUT please make a high resolution UI with proper icons that dont look crap on HD resolutions. Thank you.



    I would like that too. The unscaled UI is way to small and has way to much filler in it. Vector Based would realy be the best.
  • ZeckulZeckul Member Posts: 1,036
    @Nathan The problem most people have been noticing with the UI isn't that it scales, it's that it's low-res. So the scaling makes it look blurry. Providing an option to disable the scaling is one way to get sharpness back, but at the expense of having everything look tiny. As I noted before, the GUI could at least use the same upscaling algorithm as the rest of the game world, which is notably sharper, but the real fix is just to have those UI elements be higher-res to begin with. I can't believe that UI is designed around 1024x768 when the average monitor today is 1920x1200 and the iPad is even more than that.
    ShinExcalibur_2102moody_mageThe_New_Romance
  • Excalibur_2102Excalibur_2102 Member Posts: 351
    @Zeckul I agree. I appreciate the fact that the devs are obviously listenting to us, but I dont understand why, if the UI was totally re-designed, why they didnt do it at a higher resolution? :/
  • DukeGrDukeGr Member Posts: 43

    @Zeckul I agree. I appreciate the fact that the devs are obviously listenting to us, but I dont understand why, if the UI was totally re-designed, why they didnt do it at a higher resolution? :/

    Unfortunately it looks like the way Infinity Engine renders stuff has certain limitations. I do not know what mumbo jumbo the coders in overhaul did to make the UI upscale dynamically but my best guess is that they tried the oposite first and failed.
    Aosaw said:

    I still think higher-res elements would be better overall, although I do like the "widescreen mod" look with the upscaling turned off. Any chance it could be made an option in the Graphics Options menu?

    As for everyone else liking the new "big screen", whats the point in BG:EE then if you prefer this? Just install tutu with widescreen mod it looks exactly the same if not better.

    While i am not the bitching type and this is not a deal breaker for me considering all the new problems introduced because of this enhanced edition it simply is not worth it in its current state to even compare it with vanilla+mods. All this for what? We dont even get a properly rendered UI just an upscaled tutu clone.

    Most of us have played IE games for the past 15 years and have some kind of special bond of glorification with anything IE related which renders us incapable of seeing the obvious flaws. My wife is an average gamer, has never played IE game before, her first comment when she saw BG EE was "why does the UI look so bad?"

    I tried these past days not to pay attention to the countless bugs i came across, the crashes, the wannabee new content, i almost finished the game and the one thing pissing me off the most was the Interface, it just looks really bad on 1920x1080 monitor.

    I really hope Overhaul does some UI overhaul in the near future and incorporates it in BG2 EE.
    IkonNavros
  • moody_magemoody_mage Member Posts: 2,054
    Zeckul said:

    @Nathan The problem most people have been noticing with the UI isn't that it scales, it's that it's low-res. So the scaling makes it look blurry. Providing an option to disable the scaling is one way to get sharpness back, but at the expense of having everything look tiny. As I noted before, the GUI could at least use the same upscaling algorithm as the rest of the game world, which is notably sharper, but the real fix is just to have those UI elements be higher-res to begin with. I can't believe that UI is designed around 1024x768 when the average monitor today is 1920x1200 and the iPad is even more than that.

    I'm guessing it is to keep the overall filesizes down so it didn't go over the 2gb iPad size limit.

    Which sucketh greatly.
  • LemernisLemernis Member, Moderator Posts: 4,318
    edited December 2012
    @DukeGr I think mileage may vary with respect to the UI. Some folks have reported it looking a little blurry. But at least on my computer it looks pretty darn crisp. Art style-wise, I like it a lot better than the original. A lot.

    EE's main selling points for me thus far are the zoom feature and the new NPCs.

    The zoom makes me feel like how could I play the game without this now?

    And as good as some of the best efforts of the modding community have been to create NPC mods have been, if the NPC isn't professionally voice acted it's just not up to par with the original game. What a difference professional voice acting makes. And in terms of conception and writing, the three new NPCs are all winners in my book. Anyway, I'm having a grand time playing with Rasaad, Neera, and Dorn. And that, for me, was well worth every bit of the $18 that I paid.

    I do think an enhancement that could take place down the road, hopefully (if partners sign off), is to have more NPC interaction, though. That's the sort of thing that could really improve the game in a big way.
    AlesthesExcalibur_2102Lamorack
  • FuzzyPuffinFuzzyPuffin Member Posts: 289
    decado said:



    I'm guessing it is to keep the overall filesizes down so it didn't go over the 2gb iPad size limit.

    Which sucketh greatly.

    Trent posted recently that was exactly the reason. It's an upscaled and filtered 1024x768 due to performance/ space concerns.
  • DukeGrDukeGr Member Posts: 43
    edited December 2012

    decado said:



    I'm guessing it is to keep the overall filesizes down so it didn't go over the 2gb iPad size limit.

    Which sucketh greatly.

    Trent posted recently that was exactly the reason. It's an upscaled and filtered 1024x768 due to performance/ space concerns.
    Which also means that our current pc version is a ported tablet version.

    Just for the sake of it i made a few direct comparisons of the upscaled UI and the original non upscaled version with the new .ini setting.

    First the Main game screens :

    imageimage

    Second a snapshot of the left menu buttons to see the upscaled bluriness difference :

    image

    I think that by now everyone can see the huge difference in quality and i believe that everyone would prefer to have an uber HD resolution UI and a 1GB filesize increase in their game, rather this poorly made "ipad upscaled" port.
    upi00rFredjoSpaceInvader
  • moody_magemoody_mage Member Posts: 2,054
    Something that would make me super happy is if we can alter the width of the information screen, there's a huge amount of wasted space there.

    Hopefully it'll be a Baldur.ini change.
  • Excalibur_2102Excalibur_2102 Member Posts: 351
    The thing is, I actually prefer the look of the game now, other than the fact the UI is blurry. Of course I can see the difference between the two different versions but I would prefer the look of the game as it is now, just sharp like it is in the widescreen style UI.

  • pukingdogpukingdog Member Posts: 25
    looks great. thanks
  • CerevantCerevant Member Posts: 2,314
    DukeGr said:


    As for everyone else liking the new "big screen", whats the point in BG:EE then if you prefer this? Just install tutu with widescreen mod it looks exactly the same if not better.

    For me, personally, I think BG:EE is worth every penny if it did nothing more than pull together all the standard mods & fixpacks into a single package that is compatible with modern hardware and OS's. I don't believe for a second that this is where they are going to stop.

    Think about it: they are working for the long term. They are going to use the same, newly rewritten Infinity Engine to drive BG2EE and possibly some IWD to follow. From what I've gathered, they moved most of the UI and game specific elements out of the executable to make it possible to produce BG2EE with very little change to the game engine. It makes sense for them to continue to improve and expand upon the functionality we are seeing. And unlike the original BG, this will be possible for us to see continued improvement in the BGEE game experience as they work on BG2EE. We haven't seen the best that Overhaul can give us yet, and their responsiveness to this point is in my mind unprecedented.

    Thanks Overhaul!
  • KurumiKurumi Member Posts: 520
    Definitely an improvement.
  • DeeDee Member Posts: 10,447
    Bear in mind, also, that this is a beta feature--which means that if people like the quality improvement, they'll work to make it a built-in feature that does even more to make the UI better.

    So while it looks a bit like Tutu with the widescreen mod, it's better in that it's going to get improved on a realistic timeline. This feedback is all great, though.
    JonelethIrenicusElectricMonk
  • TroikaTroika Member Posts: 36
    edited December 2012
    That's a huge improvement. The blurry interface and text really bothered me. Now both interface and text are smaller but at least no longer giving me eye cancer.

    All in all it becomes clear that they focused on the iPad port though, after all they redesigned it at the resolution best fitted for current and older gen tablets. I still feel a bit taken advantage of as a PC gamer and pre-orderer - after all it was us that made them the most money so far and trusted them to refurbish our favorite PC game.

    Be that so, I for my part will gladly forgive overhaul/beamdog any miscommunication (intended or not) if they manage to deliver the truly enhanced experience they promised us and do so before the release of BG2:EE. There isn't that much missing: Give us back the options (e.g. AI updates/FPS) and content (I heard of missing voiceovers) we had with the original, maybe adjust the interface to fit Desktop gaming a bit more, add an option to remember the level of zoom and get rid of the most glaring bugs. (and maybe give us an option to have the old CG cutscenes back)

    I would be consoled immediately. :)

    Now if on top of that and in forethought of BG2:EE they also introduced new spell effects and improved modding support and multiplayer that would be more than awesome.
    Masonguitar
  • UlroxUlrox Member Posts: 1
    I'm definately liking this beta feature a lot. This is how I'm playing from now on. Now I just want Overhaul games to make icewind daleEE - bg2EE - planescape torment EE, fallout EE, Starcraft EE, Castlevania EE, Might and magic 1-8EE, The settlersEE, ArcanumEE... Every Snes game, psx game, ps2 game, amiga game etc EE... Also overhaul should change name to EEd00dzEE :P
  • ioannismanioannisman Member Posts: 43
    The UI does not scale, it just streches after a certain resolution which creates all that blurriness in high resolutions.
    As Trent states in Tweeter:"That is why it is a Beta feature (the 'Graphics', 'Scale UI', '0',). We can't make a bunch of custom UI screens for every possible resolution. Thus the borders"
    So the problem arises because Beamdog DID NOT create from the start custom UI screens for high pc resolutions and it will be corrected when/if it does.
    I will concure with the previous members that the pc version is just ported from the tablet versions thus the fat borders and ugly big buttons on the right side of the dialog/action box.
  • DarkcloudDarkcloud Member Posts: 302
    DukeGr said:

    decado said:



    I'm guessing it is to keep the overall filesizes down so it didn't go over the 2gb iPad size limit.

    Which sucketh greatly.

    Trent posted recently that was exactly the reason. It's an upscaled and filtered 1024x768 due to performance/ space concerns.
    Which also means that our current pc version is a ported tablet version.

    Which is also pretty stupid considering that the Ipad2 has a resolution higher than most monitors.
  • agrisagris Member Posts: 581
    @DukeGr While I think you're being overly pessimistic, I agree about the UI. If @TrentOster wanted to add a higher res UI to the PC development build, why I think we would accept the lost ~100 mb gladly.

    Now, if they go the route @Nathan mentioned, a hybrid of unscaled live game window, scaled inventory / journal / menus, I think that would be the best option.
    diggerb
  • byghostlightbyghostlight Member Posts: 5
    it looks brilliant in 1680, how i expected the interface and graphics to look in this game, except for things like main menu and character sheets in which the menu is aligned top centre with so much of the screen just bare and blue... its half a win, on the side of positive
  • IkonNavrosIkonNavros Member Posts: 227
    edited December 2012
    Great feature, i hope this option will at least be added in the form of a "Scaling shut down" button in the graphics menu.

    So eveyone could decide if that option is good or not good.

    And to the topic of graphics being too small... There is still the user controlled zoom function. But with that new Beta Feature it is much more intelligent as it was before with the forced hardcoded Zoom Feature.

    People who want to have the hardcode zoom all over the place and people who want to play hardcode zoom free - all could be pleased with one single small button :)

    Let's see if i will belong in the future also again to the BG:EE Owners.. For now, this at least keeps my attention a bit on the board :)
    ElectricMonk
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