Visual Novels on a widescreen

[Billhead]

Now that my laptop died and I'm looking for a new one, it seems that almost every laptop is wide screen now.

My question is, does onscripter, RealLive, or any of the other popular engines know how to deal with wide screen monitors in full screen mode, or am I going to be plagued by overweight characters?

[Agilis]

Most games that use full-screen mode probably switch the resolution of the graphics card? Whatever that mode is called.

At which point, it depends on whether you told your graphics card to stretch other resolutions or not.

The alternative is to just play in window mode which ignores all that.

The latest VN which I played was LB!, and on my Dell Inspiron 8600, it would stretch the image to fit the whole monitor if I switched to fullscreen mode. I dunno if there's any option to stop it doing this, so I've only ever played in windowed mode.

[jyuichi]

Originally Posted by Agilis

Most games that use full-screen mode probably switch the resolution of the graphics card? Whatever that mode is called.

At which point, it depends on whether you told your graphics card to stretch other resolutions or not.

The alternative is to just play in window mode which ignores all that.

This sounds about right. On my mother's old desktop computer she would play Planetarian (only vn I ever got her to play) in full-screen mode on a widescreen monitor and we never had to adjust anything but when that computer was replaced and I reloaded the game for her it was stretched even though it was the same monitor.

[Billhead]

Does the stretching mess up the font that much?

Does the stretching mess up the font that much?

The text is almostly-readable, but it's no good for your eyes. :(
It very depends on the hardware. For example, AMD (ATi) GPU have one nice feature - it can stretch\unstretch the screen and virtually show up to 240 Hz for screen refreshment, even if your monitor is only supports 100 Hz maximum (so, if you have ATi card or chip, you can adjust needed settings in the Catalyst Control Center).

nVidia hardware, at the other hand, is a less flexible and only uses "real" resolutions.

Because of that, i have a few problems with *widescreen* games on my 17'' CRT LG Flatron T710PH. ^_^'

Since most LCDs do a terrible job of upscaling 640x480 or 800x600 inputs, the distortion is really a small issue, at least on 16:10 monitors. The real issue is that most LCDs just use nearest-neighbor scaling, which results in really blocky images.

Ideally, when the source code for the interpreter is available, you can modify it set the monitor resolution to its native value and scale everything up (using some better scaling algorithm–even linear interpolation is much better– and maintain the proper aspect ratio) and draw the text at higher resolution. The support for this is *mostly* there in recent versions of ONScripter. It's primarily intended for scaling *down* to PDA-sized screens, though, so there are some issues with it.

[Billhead]

Well, since it is going to have an ATI GPU, I guess I have nothing to worry about.
Thanks for everyone's input.