Pixel Aspect of "Read This" / Episode Complete story screens incorrect

[Former user]

The "Read This" section and the Episode Complete story text screens (paged book part) aren't being rendered with pixel aspect correction unlike the rest of the game.

Basically, the original game would render at 320*200, with a pixel aspect of 1:1.2 to fill a 4:3 ratio (compared to 320:240 with a 1:1 pixel aspect).

As those screens are aspect corrected * 1.2 vertically they currently appear vertically squashed, as the pictures in them are drawn to look correct with rectangular pixels.

This is fairly common in old dos games, although not all artists used to compensate for non-square pixels, to me it looks like Wolfenstein did (much like doom). Therefore in this case i think aspect correction of those screens is the "intended" look.

In fact, It looks like you are doing some pixel aspect correction already, since the ingame hud and graphics don't look squashed as far as i can tell (i haven't checked though).

[Braden Obrzut]

This is actually an intentional decision from ZDoom. Basically the idea is that since there's a lot of small text it is better to perform clean scaling (whole number scaling factor) in order to maximize readability. Of course this was a decision probably made back when displays had a much lower resolution, so it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have an option to aspect correct everything now. I will hold off on this suggestion until I have a console that I can tuck away more advanced options in though.

ECWolf does go the extra mile though and detect 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 and perform aspect correction since in those cases that's a whole number 5:6 scale.

[Former user]

Ah that makes sense considering what you said about having everything palletised 8bit, so you have to integer scale everything, even when aspect ratio correcting.

How do you do the hud though? That seems to look corrected (unless i didn't pay attention).

It's really annoying that monitor makers won't make 16:10 monitors any more as 3840 * 2400 would be way better for 4:3 legacy resolutions than 3840 * 2160.

[Braden Obrzut]

It doesn't need to be an integer scaling factor, the HUD and title picture have aspect ratio correction applied to them via nearest neighbor scaling. This of course means pixels are not a constant size but at higher resolutions it's under the noise floor for most people.

It is indeed arbitrary as to what 2D elements are corrected and which are clean scaled, which is kind of exacerbated by the fact that Wolf3D has more non-text 2D elements (although the read this is still predominantly small text). There is nothing technical preventing aspect correction from being applied everywhere. Another similar arbitrary decision you might notice is the background on the menus in Spear of Destiny is stretched to be full screen no matter what the resolution/aspect is.

I hear ya about monitor aspect ratios and currently dreading that 21:9 is becoming popular. I hope the retro thinkpad works out and brings back the 16:10 ratio. I heard that Apple pretty much has an exclusive on decent sized 16:10 screens these days. That said, I'm a 4:3 guy so I'm currently rocking 3x1600x1200. High PPI non-16:9/21:9 screens would be awesome.