Retro Rendering mode for modern resolutions?

[Ralzar]

I frankly love the retro rendering 640x400 + palettization look.

However, this sets the resolution to 640, obviously, which squishes the image to fit my 3440x1440 screen.
Setting the game to actually use a 4:3 resolution is just painful in how small and square it makes the game.

Would there be some way to achieve the low-rez effect without making the image actually 640x400 ?

[Interkarma]

It doesn't sound like you have Retro Rendering configured properly, this shouldn't be small and square and already works with modern resolutions. All of the following settings are required:

1. Game resolution set to exactly 1600x1200 or 1280x960, depending on monitor capabilities
2. Fullscreen=True
3. ExclusiveFullscreen=False
4. FreeScaling=True
5. RetroRenderingMode=1 (or 2)

The key here is that classic Daggerfall was a mode13h 320x200 game (16:10) being presented to 320x240 resolution (4:3), so the render was stretched 20% vertically. To recreate this environment properly on modern displays, we need to render at one resolution and present to another at correct multiples.

A longer breakdown with settings.ini to copy paste into game are in this post.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2360&p=27550#p27550

Let me know if you come unstuck anywhere and I'll do what I can to help.

[Ralzar]

Ah right I think I slightly mis-represented my problem because my problem is the 4:3 format. What I was hoping for was a way to get the look of the settings you posted above, but for widescreen (or ultra widescreen in my case).

If I do the settings above, but use the resolution I actually want, 3440x1440, the graphics not surprisingly gets squished.

So I've got either this:

ultrawide.png (309.2 KiB) Viewed 1311 times

or this

retro.png (149.58 KiB) Viewed 1311 times

Where what I'm hoping for is this, but not squished in height.

wideretro.png (214 KiB) Viewed 1311 times

[Interkarma]

I see - you'd like ultrawide retro-like mode without pillarbox bars while retaining correct aspect of objects. Hmm. I'll try and unpack this one a bit and why this is more difficult to do.

What we have now isn't just a retro "look", but genuinely rendering the game into a classic 320x200 framebuffer then scaling to fit modern displays at correct multipliers. This paradigm is also fully compatible with classic assets. For your scenario, a different set of solutions would need to be implemented and new assets created.

To understand what I mean, consider most weapon animations. These are drawn to fit perfectly into a 320x200 area (or an exact multiple of). They are clipped on three sides (left/right/bottom) where the artist expected them to meet edges of display. These animations cannot be naively rescaled to have both perfect aspect and fit the width of a widescreen display, as they aren't complete images. They can either be drawn into the correct scale framebuffer or they can be stretched, there's no other option.

So to fully support a retro look in your environment would also require new assets to be drawn in the same style that aren't clipped to a fixed aspect, allowing them to be rescaled at various resolutions. That unfortunately lands a bit outside of the scope and conflicts with my foundation goal of using classic art assets only. But given how active this community is, I wouldn't be surprised if someone mods this capability in someday with new assets to match.

[newsorpigal]

Could the rendering option be provided by DF Unity, while widescreen modifications to art assets could be left to modders? This is what happened with Doom source ports - the widescreen (and retro rendering) options were provided by the ports, and modders who noticed the asset cutoff issue (for instance, in Doom's punching animation) corrected them. Now I think some of those mods are packaged with some ports.

I think given the choice of constant black bars or occasionally incomplete centered weapon sprites, many people would choose the latter.