Widescreen Gaming Forum

cornbread....Why is it vomit inducing then?

Because the FOV might be tighter than you'd like. As I've said, if you don't like the FOV they've chosen, that's fine, and I very well may end up agreeing with you. Didn't really bother me in the demo, but it might for longer playsessions. We'll see.

But it's not a "widescreen is done wrong" issue, or a widescreen-vs-4:3 issue.

For example -- what if instead of their current implementation they made the 4:3 version letterboxed. Would people still be upset about the widescreen version? I suspect instead the 4:3 group would be up in arms and the widescreen folks would be talking about how that's how the game is supposed to look. And yet the widescreen version would be exactly the same as it is now. It's all a matter of perspective.

I posted about this issue on PCZone's technical site under the bioshock thread...


http://forums.dearwandy.com/viewtopic.php?id=23527

Page 3 near the bottom. Their reviewer replied with a very interesting point, namely



"This wasn't mentioned in the PC Zone review because we didn't know about it. We didn't know about it because we played through the entire game in widescreen without noticing anything wrong, or feeling that the screen was cramped in any way. It's just not an issue. Although if I owned Widescreen Gaming Forum, I'd probably take it upon myself to be outraged."

"Would you have picked up on this had you not read about it on Kotaku? I doubt it."

My reply....
Er wrong... I was at the WSGF that broke this tidbit before it even hit that site.. In fact that site nicked our pic from our thread on that forum the same as several other sites are doing including shacknews

http://www.shacknews.com/

about fourth article down now... And anyway since when do hardware concerns not get reflected in a review? Just because it's a monitor issue shouldn't relegate it to the 'not interested' bucket should it?


And so it continues on that site

so they just didnt notice the difference in screens vs what they see in game with widescreen? to deem it not an issue is pretty stupid as it clearly is. i cant play it. it makes me sick. as it has others, and other reviewers.

I had to sign up just to give my two cents on this topic:

Because the game's textures have been designed with 4:3 resolutions in mind, when you zoom in on that image, (much like STALKER did, pre patch) you end up lowering the resolution of those textures, therefore us widescreen users are unfairly getting a lower texture IQ than those on 4:3 displays, check it out for yourselves, the difference may be slight, but it's noticeable.

On my first play though I thought the backgrounds looked very blocky, and that my mouse was jumping around like mad, its all due to this zooming-in of the 4:3 native resolution of the game... Play through the demo in 4:3 and everything looks so much better (even without AA, but thats a whole different story... sigh).

With no DX10 AA and this FOV issue I may pass on this game for the moment.

Regardless, they made the decision to keep the horizontal FOV constant. It was an intentional decision, for any of a number of reasons (to establish a claustrophobic feel, to help with performance, etc).

That's a assumption, you don't know for a fact it was intentional, they might have just overlooked it.

A person might have said the STALKER developers made an intentional decision to keep the FOV the same for widescreen, but that wasn't the case. The developers said it was a mistake and that they basically just overlooked it; they later corrected it with a patch because they acknowledged it was incorrect.

How much of the environment the Bioshock devs wanted us to see is admittedly arguable. However, the one thing that says to me that the current widescreen implementation isn't "intended" is the amount of detail getting cut off on the players hands. I mean we're missing the tattoo, the shirt detail, the bottom of the wrench and other weapons. I can't believe they'd put that much work into detailing something that they "intended" to get cut off.

I posted about this issue on PCZone's technical site under the bioshock thread...


http://forums.dearwandy.com/viewtopic.php?id=23527

Page 3 near the bottom. Their reviewer replied with a very interesting point, namely



"This wasn't mentioned in the PC Zone review because we didn't know about it. We didn't know about it because we played through the entire game in widescreen without noticing anything wrong, or feeling that the screen was cramped in any way. It's just not an issue. Although if I owned Widescreen Gaming Forum, I'd probably take it upon myself to be outraged."

"Would you have picked up on this had you not read about it on Kotaku? I doubt it."

My reply....
Er wrong... I was at the WSGF that broke this tidbit before it even hit that site.. In fact that site nicked our pic from our thread on that forum the same as several other sites are doing including shacknews

http://www.shacknews.com/

about fourth article down now... And anyway since when do hardware concerns not get reflected in a review? Just because it's a monitor issue shouldn't relegate it to the 'not interested' bucket should it?


And so it continues on that site

Wow that guy is a dick.

Yeah we wait for Kotaku to tell us about widescreen implementation. Oh yeah... we are outraged so Ibrin can make money...

God... what a condescending prick.

Wow. Reading forums like that make me thankful for the WSGF. They are all pretty much clueless when it comes to widescreen gaming. It just sounds like a bunch of l33t speak teenagers.

Edit: I just typed something up for 5 minutes and then just deleted it.... why do I even bother with this stuff...

Because the game's textures have been designed with 4:3 resolutions in mind, when you zoom in on that image...you end up lowering the resolution of those textures..."

:shock:

I don't know if you're just misunderstanding the issue or what, but textures are no more "made" for widescreen or quadro-vision or whatever than standard displays. If that were true there'd really not be any support for it, not to mention the huge amount of work and storage of all the textures would consume.

But I do think I know what you're trying to say, and agree its a problem. I believe the phenomenon you're trying to describe is that when the game zooms in widescreen or surround it is greater than normal, making textures look "blurry" even though they're in fact the same resolution and texture even.

Hi all! I've been lurking here for a while, but thought I'd raise my head and offer a bit of support.

First thanks for posting on this, I think you guys have spelled things out quite well here. Secondly, I'm passing the info around to the vid card driver sites like nvNews and TweakForce, (formally TweaksrUs), with links to this thread and the thread over at 2k forums.

Hopefully, this issue can be resolved relatively easily by the devs, and I certainly hope that other Unreal 3 games don't have the same issues.

With the way Bioshock currently supports widescreen, we see almost 50% less of the game in a current screen capture than we would versus a horizontal+ screen capture. :lol: