increase minimum screen resolution

[raymond]

Hello,

increase the minimum resolution to 1366x768 or 1280x1024 (currently 1024x768).

Why: Some alignment problems with lower resolution in some translations, see http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/2866

Pro:

- better translations (long translations possible!) for some languages

- more option to design UI

- expand summary page

- more detailed descriptions possible

- easier to program than dynamic realignment of the GUI elements and font style/size

Cons:

- some users with small resolution could not play the game (I think this is a decreasing group)

Links:

used screen resolution in 0 A.D.:

http://zaynar.co.uk/0ad-pub/resolutions-20140313.html (data from 2013-03-13 - 2014-03-13)

worldwide used screen resolutions:

https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=17

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

Edited November 10, 2014 by raymond

[niektb]

I think the current minimum resolution is good. Increasing it would mean that people with a 1366x768 (including me) can't play the game in windowed mode anymore (as that wouldn't fit on the screen).

[raymond]

I think the current minimum resolution is good. Increasing it would mean that people with a 1366x768 (including me) can't play the game in windowed mode anymore (as that wouldn't fit on the screen).

I also suggest 1366x768

[Stan`]

For a long time 0ad was designed to play on most computers. I think doing that will go against this idea cause we have a lot of integrated graphics players who would'nt be able to run the game. If we do thatthings like suppor only opengl4.3 would appear making 0ad unplayable for most people for little to no benefit.

A Three 1280x1024 screen user.

Edited November 6, 2014 by stanislas69

[niektb]

I also suggest 1366x768

You don't get it, 1366x768 is the window without borders. In windowed mode you need to add the borders to the resolution which would mean it wouldn't fit on my screen.

[raymond]

Do you think, that many users play in window mode in this low resolution? I don't think so. Maybe a poll could help?! Or another stat (window/fullscreen mode) on http://feedback.wildfiregames.com/.

Edited November 6, 2014 by raymond

[greenknight32]

My screen resolution is 1024x768. I can't afford a new monitor. I think there are plenty of others like me.

[niektb]

I made a quick calculation on what it would mean if you would push the resolution to 1366 x 768:

According to http://zaynar.co.uk/0ad-pub/resolutions-20140313.html you would exclude 24.6% of the players as they don't have sufficient horizontal space (<1366). That is really ridiculous!

Setting the minumum resolution to 1280x1024 would be even worse as that would exclude resolutions like 1366x768, 1600x900, 1440x900 (and more) also (not enough vertical space: 768<1024 and 900<1024)

Edited November 6, 2014 by niektb

[dvangennip]

Increasing the total width of the game window isn't going to fix column spacing and such, although it would give more space to play with. But I would opt for changing the parts that don't fit well with many languages, if there are such parts of the GUI. On the other hand, trying to fit German words into small spaces will always give some tension, given the propensity of this language to produce long, compound words

It's one of the reasons I never used Dutch as the language on my mobile phones. Similar to German, long words are common and don't fit, so typically abbrevations are used. Those abbrevations often weren't obvious to me, so it was more confusing than just setting the phone to English. Still, abbrevations could be considered if those are clear to German speakers.

On the resolution debate: please also consider that the numbers may lie about the useful resolution. A new MacBook Pro 15" may give a 2880x1800 resolution and seemingly be very safe for any cutoff, but it's simply 1440x900 with higher resolution imagery. It still fits the same amount of elements on screen, so for GUI design this 2x multiplier doesn't change much. It's a bit odd to exclude high-end machines like that (I also assume Windows-based laptops have similar display resolutions).

Edited November 6, 2014 by dvangennip

[niektb]

The reason why I never use Dutch on my devices is mostly because I do understand English well enough to read it and the possible occurence of poor translations

[Lion.Kanzen]

You can set in default config your custom config, i don't the problem there, but change minimum res. not im opposing to that

[GunChleoc]

Do you think, that many users play in window mode in this low resolution? I don't think so. Maybe a poll could help?! Or another stat (window/fullscreen mode) on http://feedback.wildfiregames.com/.

This translator does, because I don't have a bigger screen. It would make it harder to work on tweaking translations if I was forced to use full screen mode.

The best way to deal with translations that are too long is to have dynamic realignment of the GUI elements, however, that's not easy to program.

So, the best we can do is to make bug reports where we can't make our translations fit, so that the devs can see about changing the width of the element that's causing the problem.

[FeXoR]

IMO there are some things thrown into this thread that are not really connected.

Just to name some examples:

Problem: Different languages have different word length thus the space needed differs, too, thus the spacing of the GUI elements are hard to set sainly.

Solution: Use dynamically sized GUI elements and make font (and maybe icon) size a setting.

Not a solution: Change the minimum screen resolution to make things fit for all languages.

(This would be like moving into a bigger house because the table you bought didn't fit in your old one IMO)

Problem: Gui elements are not distributed well on all resolutions.

Solution: Let the user drag the GUI elements (mainly minimap, formation/stance widget, unit widget and build widget) where he wants them in a "GUI setting mode". Use dynamically sized GUI elements and make font (and maybe icon) size a setting.

Not a solution: Make the GUI elements fit better on a higher, specific resolution and with it make the game unusable for lower resolution screens.

(This would be like excluding 1/4th of earths human population from food supplies to slightly raise the standard of living for about the same amount of people IMO)

Another solution would be to generally decrease the space needed, e.g.:

Make formation/stance a button (showing the actual formation/stance) that, when clicked, opens a selection for the formation/stance.

Something similar could be done with the build widget (Not so sure here, though).

Edited November 7, 2014 by FeXoR

[Stan`]

+1 =)

[DanCar]

I'm hoping someday it will work on android devices so I'm against the proposed solution. Perhaps an alternate solution is to decrease aspects of the UI's size such as font size? Can this be done automatically if it doesn't fit a translation? Would scroll bars help?

Edited November 8, 2014 by DanCar

[dvangennip]

Making the font smaller has other issues, and it's not exactly a large font at the moment, so there isn't much room to make it smaller. For long words where an English translation did fit an abbrevation may work better, perhaps with the full word in a tooltip on hovering the mouse over. I wonder how many instances there are where words do not fit? Perhaps it's good to get an idea of that, before considering alternatives.

[raymond]

Dynamic realignment of the GUI elements and font style/size would be very nice (many users use a small resolution but there are also many users with a resolution >= 1920x1080).

@DanCar: Android devices is not the problem: many (more and more) android devices uses a resolution more than 1024x768.

Edited November 10, 2014 by raymond

[raymond]

Any progress for support dynamically sized GUI elements?

I still prefer to set a new higher minimum resolution. http://zaynar.co.uk/0ad-pub/resolutions-20140313.html is over 1 year old (anybody can trigger him to update these statistics?). You can avoid problems like that: trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/2926

Current world wide screen resolutions: https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=17

Edited May 19, 2015 by raymond

[niektb]

Did you see that 10% has a screen resolution of 1024x768 (or 768x1024) in your last link (not counting the people that would be affected with your proposal, that have a higher res than 1024x768 but lower than your suggestion)? (even though that is not representative data for the 0 A.D. player base)

Edited May 19, 2015 by niektb

[mifritscher]

At least it should be raised only to 1280x768 - so both the 1280x800 and 1366x768 gets covered. But "normal" XGA is still widely used And I think that a GUI which can be used at any resolution (and any dpi!) would be more usefull. Perhaps slightly different arrangements für 5:4 (1280x1024), 4:3 (the "classic"), 16:10 (1280x800 and the lie) and 16:9 (1366x768) would be usefull, but I think it would work without it as well.