Feb. 18th, 2009

wolfwings: (Default)
Anyone else out there with a widescreen display wish there was better two-page-layout support out there, both for webcomics and PDF readers outside of Windows?

And that's just one gripe. As a game-developer, how do you handle both widescreen, and tallscreen? Do you always lock their FOV to the vertical and short-change tall-screen (1280x1024) users? Or the horizontal and short-change wide-screen users? Or do you automatically give them the FOV that'll guarantee that non-4:3 users get an advantage over 4:3 users? And how do you include support for Triple-Head gaming, something a lot more gamers are playing with again? Now... combine Triple-Head with wide-screen or tall-screen gaming! Feel your head exploding yet? =^.^=

So, beyond the griping so there's something to discuss, how would you think it best to handle three-screen gaming? We'll assume all three screens match at least, but this re-inforces the whole 'field of view' problem.

Do you slice off the top and bottom so the middle screen can keep a 90-degree field-of-view if they're using widescreen monitors?

Do you end up providing a 318-degree or 330-degree instead of a 270-degree view?

If you supported >90 degree field-of-view before (TF2 supports up to 110 IIRC), do you cap it for triple-head view or allow them to see 363 degrees around themselves? Yes, more than a full circle.

The 'industry standard' right now appears to be 'calculate the vertical FOV from the given horizontal FOV as if the screen was a 4:3 monitor, then use that across the rendering area' which is relatively simple, but runs into the above issues when you hit triple-head-land, and admitedly short-changes the 1280x1024 users. There's just no 'good' answer, sadly, I'm afraid. :-/
wolfwings: (Default)
After trying in vain for a couple months to get the VPN to work's Cisco 5500 working under Gentoo, I had a reason to nuke-and-pave my install. So I decided to try Ubuntu since I'd heard it 'just works' there. That part was, mercifully at least, true. And yes, installing packages in seconds instead of minutes was nice to be able to just dump thirty packages.

But I've had to manually tweak and repair more files under Ubuntu 8.10 to correct fuck-ups by Ubuntu's updater, and even had it corrupt my filesystem just using the reboot menu option, that I officially don't trust it any further than I can throw it. Get back here, Gentoo! Time to just knuckle down and set up a proper CHRooted 32-bit and no-multilib 64-bit install this time... *starts backing up all the Steam games to avoid re-downloading them for once*

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