Widescreen Gaming Forum

I suppose this could be considered an extension of this thread:

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=124875&highlight=ffxi#124875

Using the unofficial windower program, I can choose to run the game in a windowed resolution of my choice. As I just got my TH2G, I was naturally aroused as to what kind of potential I had with FFXI. I mean, I love the game and the graphic design and art in it is bar-none, in my opinion. I could use the "Official" windowed mode that Square-Enix put in a few years too late, but it's not nearly as effcient and plugin-friendly as the unofficial windower.

A bit of quick background about the game and the unofficial windower.

The game itself is a port of the Playstation2 version with a few tweaks to take advantage of computer hardware. Unfortunately, even after 5 years of being on the PC, it is still using the CPU for the bulk of it's rendering and whatnot. However, the game's configuration program does allow you to choose overlay and background resolutions and certain ranges of weather effects. You can even edit the background resolutions higher than intended via the windows registry. As we can't use any GPU's FSAA solutions, that's the best anyone can do to clean up the game's visuals.

Initially the game was a "full-screen or nothing" game, as any alt-tab or external program opening would crash it and you would have to log in again to play. Someone came up with the idea for a program to run the game in a window which, to my understanding, most pc users use to this day as kind of a "don't talk about Fight Club" agreement.

Back on track.....

I can run the game just fine over the TH2G, but the visuals are "squishified," for a lack of better words. I could set the background resolution to 5040x1050 and leave the background resolution at 2048x2048 and all text and menus would appear just fine or maybe a little out of place, but the actual graphic layer would still make me look like a fat kid at a fat kid camp (nothing against anyone of any body size, just making an example). Based on what I've seen in other games (the hack for CoD4, for example) it *looks* like a FOV issue as changing the aspect ratio in the in-game menu does nothing significant to change things. My question is this. With Square-Enix somewhat recently FINALLY allowing their game to have trial users without a credit card, would someone be willing/able to download the trial, create a character and make a fix for this?

For what it's worth, here are some important links as it pertains to the game.

http://windower.net/

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/index.shtml

http://www.fileplanet.com/192215/190000/fileinfo/FINAL-FANTASY-XI-14-Day-Free-Trial

I know the game doesn't have the install base that WoW does. It doesn't even have the PC hardware support that WoW does. Hell, it didn't take WoW very long to dwarf FFXI's install base (which capped at 2million. We now have a strong, but steady 500k) but I do know that there are enough FFXI players out there (and even one more on this site, apparently) that would see a fix of some sort to a problem like this as nothing short of a godsend.

Here are some quick shots I made for this post. Sorry about the glare from the flash. :oops:





(The game's login window)


(squishified!!!)




(running on only the center lcd at the normal resolution)


If there's any other info about the game that's needed (if anyone can try to pick this up), I'll do my best to provide what I can.

[img]http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/9535/printscreensmall0ealv0.jpg[img]

Often doesnt work well in TripleHead ;)

Okay, here are some pictures that were taken with Fraps. Sorry about earlier, it was the first thing to come to mind. Didn't think of this method.

These First three are at 4320x900







These next 3 are at 1440x900







I'm sure the difference in visual quality is easy to see and that's what I'm hoping to get around someday. Any thoughts or suggestions as to how I can do this? It's not like I think the game is horrible as-is, but running in a surround mode would bring a whole new breath of life into the game what with it's wide open areas and stuff.