Resolution

Not really a "bug"

At this very moment, I am typing this post on a display device that measures almost 10 feet from left to right. I'm sitting in my lazyboy in my living room, in the middle of a 5.1 surround sound environment.

Said display device is a projector. A home-theatre projector of significant quality. It's a very handy and fun device. Being able to use a computer outside of a desk environment is a new kind of thing, and it's quite a bit of fun. Plus, games like GalCivII should be very enjoyable in such an environment, particularly because I'm not sitting in an uncomfortable chair in front of an equally uncomfortable desk. It's the console-syndrome; it feels more fun to be playing in the living room than at some desk.

But there's a downside, and it's not limited to GC2. My projector only does 720p (1280x720 for the uninitiated).

Oh, it can pretend to handle higher resolutions. But it is only a pretense. Attempting to play the game at 1024x768 creates horrible vertical distortions; the fonts weren't meant to have missing horizontal lines. In total, it's unplayable.

The bug is that the game can't run in 1280x720 mode. Because of 48 lines.

Would it really be so difficult to eliminate 48 lines from the game? I'm not asking for 800x600 or something equally unplayable. Just 48 lines. Make the playing field 48 pixels shorter from top to bottom. Maybe make it an obscure command line option.

I've already had to give up CivIV because of similar resolution problems, and I would hate to have to swear off the entire genre just because of a simple resolution problem.
9,825 views 5 replies
Reply #1 Top
Just curious, how do you use mouse in the lazyboy?

As for your problem, does your windows support the 1280x720? Are you sure that you can not find it in the resolutioin list?
Reply #2 Top
I don't know if this would help, but you can play the game in window mode. That way you can adjust the way the game screen is shaped.
Reply #3 Top
Got some good news and some bad news. I just went to my "My Games\GalCiv2\" folder and changed opend the prefs.ini file and changed the resolution to 1280x700. And the game runs fine.

Bad news, is it causes a few UI glitches. All of witch apear to just be cosmedic. So give it a try. In your prefs.ini file change the resolution setting to.

[Video]
DisplayWidth=1280
DisplayHeight=720
ColorDepth=32
Fullscreen=1

or Fullscreen=0 if you want it to be in a window. Which is what I am doing here.

This is not officaly supported but it seams to work fine.

In the future it would be a pritty small task to go through the Screens and mod them to remove the UI Glitches. But We cant do it for everyone since it would cause glitches for everyone above 768.

Anyway. Have fun let us know if it works.
Reply #4 Top
Hey, not only did that work, it also solved the problem from the other thread (where the game would get to the menu screen and stop responding). I haven't gone into the game to see how the rest of the game handles the loss of 48 lines, but it looks playable now.

Thanks, guys!
Reply #5 Top
Sorry for the double post, but MxM111 asked how I use a mouse.

I have a gyromouse.