4K & UI Scaling

[dredre9987]

Even if that were true it’s long past due

This I can definitely agree with. I'm just trying to get folks to see that it is definitely not as easy as some are saying. I have done this work on a text based MMO and it took 8 of us 3 years. That game was nothing compared to the scope of DDO.

Yes it should have been done years ago. With under 100 staff members and probably quite of few of those that can't do the work they definitely need to hire more coders and art staff to get it done.

[Oxarhamar]

This I can definitely agree with. I'm just trying to get folks to see that it is definitely not as easy as some are saying. Yes it should have been done years ago. With under 100 staff members and probably quite of few of those that can't do the work they definitely need to hire more coders and art staff to get it done.

Doesn’t really matter how difficult it is it’s past time for it long past time

If they need to hire a temp art staff & coder to do it they probably should they should that’s not really on our end to worry about how they get it done thou I don’t think they need to if they prioritize

So much work went into U51 that cookies got removed & Hardcore V went out as a repeat of season 1 it’s about what do they focus their energies on

This should be a priority if they want new players to come to the game something they touted U51 as being to help new players

New players don’t want to jump into a dated non scaling UI that doesn’t work well with modern techs

I been saying for sometime since before U51 that what we need isn’t more content at the moment but a U51 style QoL update focus on fixing things this included

[dredre9987]

Doesn’t really matter how difficult it is it’s past time for it long past time

If they need to hire a temp art staff & coder to do it they probably should they should that’s not really on our end to worry about how they get it done thou I don’t think they need to if they prioritize

So much work went into U51 that cookies got removed & Hardcore V went out as a repeat of season 1 it’s about what do they focus their energies on

This should be a priority if they want new players to come to the game something they touted U51 as being to help new players

New players don’t want to jump into a dated non scaling UI that doesn’t work well with modern techs

I been saying for sometime since before that what we need isn’t more content at the moment but a U51 style QoL update focus on fixing things this included

No complaints from me on that score.

[Iwant_DiabloThree]

Sure miss my old man.
He would have said.... Because I don't wanna, now dont ask me again.

How many updates are old enough that anything "new"..... could have had hirez versions created at the same time?
Which would have left them only needing to update a very small portion of the game.
Occums Razor, the simplest answer is the best answer..........there is no intention to do anything and never was, just lip service.

[dredre9987]

Sure miss my old man.
He would have said.... Because I don't wanna, now dont ask me again.

How many updates are old enough that anything "new"..... could have had hirez versions created at the same time?
Which would have left them only needing to update a very small portion of the game.
Occums Razor, the simplest answer is the best answer..........there is no intention to do anything and never was, just lip service.

It isn't an issue of hirez but all the underlying code.

[Amorais]

Its not beyond the wit of man to develop code, when your job is developing code.

[dredre9987]

Its not beyond the wit of man to develop code, when your job is developing code.

Nothing to do with ability per se, just time and bodies doing it. If my job is digging holes I am not going to dig building foundations without time and people.

[scut207]

Yes but nothing in the UI is scalable. The whole thing would need to be recoded.. I don't get why people don't understand this/ The UI isn't just icons...it's click detection, borders, hell it is the whole overlay. That also means every single window you open in game.

You have Non-diegetic, Diegetic, Meta, and Spatial. They literally have to recode everything


https://www.toptal.com/designers/gui/game-ui

Maybe that will give some scope



Then on top o that think of everything in DDO that uses something like that.

Please read the last sentence in the post you quoted. You're preaching at the choir. I get the whole thing likely needs a rewrite.

[dredre9987]

Please read the last sentence in the post you quoted. You're preaching at the choir. I get the whole thing likely needs a rewrite.

Sorry was just putting some info out there for others ;p

[LightBear]

He would have said.... Because I don't wanna, now dont ask me again.

..........there is no intention to do anything and never was, just lip service.

That answer would have him replaced by the uppers in less then a heartbeat, that's why so much gibberish is reflected around the topic.

It's just stunning that an answer like "we have to rescale all the icons and that takes to much time" is taken for granted.
There are tons of services in the wild that can do it auto-magically.

Even I can write a script for passing every file in a dir to a service that returns some different format in its return message and fish out the what I need from the payload and that as a new file a different dir with a new name and extension.
I can probably start it up in parallel as well to save time.

In DDO most ui elements are scalable all ready, for the most part it's the hotbars that do not scale properly and to a lesser extend the menu.

Now, I do hope that what we have in game are scaled down versions of larger images as blowing them up will lead to a pixelated soup.
(As pointed out by others.)


Edit:

https://www.toptal.com/designers/gui/game-ui
.

Thx for the article, appriciated.
One of ddo's unique selling points is the customizable hotbars. Makes DDO kinda unique.
It can handle a variety of resolutions, most of which lead to some version of the UI elements.

I do wonder how many people play at 800*600 vs how many play at 4096*2160.
And what the trend is showing for each of them.
I do think on is going down and the other going up while 1920*1080 is kinda steady.

On the other hand, maybe all the wales are sitting behind a 4k screen.
And if that's where the money is...

Second edit:
I do know that we all have our preferences on what we want to work on and that if one came on board to design content or make it easier to make that content, that being a hardcore user interface coder might not be ones thing to work on.
I also get it that when you're told that there are a whole lot of icons to rescale while its the first time you run into such a problem to tackle in your project you might think it's time consuming and you'd rather spend that at something else and more fun. Like a 64bit engine and reducing lag.

[storm357]

I was forced to stop playing DDO when my monitor died and I was given a 4k monitor as a gift to replace it. I am old. Old enough to remember a time before D&D existed and my eyes and general hand control are not good enough to see or click on hot buttons that are smaller than my mouse pointer. I miss the game but till UI scaling is a thing, I am forced out.

[gravisrs]

It is on our wish list but it will be a big effort to do and just resizing/rescaling icons alone is...a thing. Something like 10,000+ icons?

You may want to switch to vector graphics in the process, so you won't have to worry about scaling issue ever after.

But for now the only solution for 4k users is to... switch screen resolution to FullHD (game only or both, windows and game).

Or go buy that steam-deck, it's awesome

[GeneralDiomedes]

I was forced to stop playing DDO when my monitor died and I was given a 4k monitor as a gift to replace it. I am old. Old enough to remember a time before D&D existed and my eyes and general hand control are not good enough to see or click on hot buttons that are smaller than my mouse pointer. I miss the game but till UI scaling is a thing, I am forced out.

why can't you run your 4K monitor at a lower resolution? doesn't 1080p divide equally into 4K?

[ekaterina]

Lucky me - I don't have the issue because my eyes are old enough to be 3K or maybe 2K so a 4k monitor would do me no good at all.

[PaddyMaxson]

why can't you run your 4K monitor at a lower resolution? doesn't 1080p divide equally into 4K?

Most modern monitors look very bad when run at their non-native resolutions.
Also if you have multiple monitors it messes with your screen layout when you change resolution
Also most people probably prefer playing borderless windowed which means changing the resolution outside of the game

Funnily enough it was actually totally possible in Windows 8.1 to scale DDO using Windows' scaling options, it stopped working in Windows 10.

I am genuinely amazed there isn't some modern tool that just lets you take a window, render it at a certain resolution then upscale what's being rendered to stretch it to a higher resolution. Considering modern graphics cards let you dynamically scale the rendering resolution of games you'd think there'd be a way to ask them to do this.

But more importantly, this shouldn't be something you need a hacky fix for. LOTRO has it, it's the same engine. It doesn't seem that functionally impossible. Obviously there's dev timne involved and it's not as quick/easy as many people would say but DDO had a bunch of issues that discourage new players and this is one of them. But I suspect that DDO is probably fairly happy not seeing major growth from new users, it has a very devoted fanbase who are probably happy to cover the costs.

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

Most modern monitors look very bad when run at their non-native resolutions.

If monitor builders just decide that you just shouldn't use lower resolutions, then you are out of luck.
You should complain at the monitor builders, then. The DDO staff is not reponsible for that happening.

LOTRO has it, it's the same engine.

Personally, I very much doubt that LOTRO has the same engine, as it came out much later than DDO.

Quoted from Wikipedia :

DDO :

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach was developed by Turbine over two years.

On August 1, 2005, Turbine sent invitations to people interested in participating in the public alpha test. On November 1, 2005, Turbine announced that the public beta test was open.[23]

LOTRO :

A closed beta was announced on September 8, 2006. An open beta began on March 30, 2007, and was open to all who pre-ordered the game's Founders Club edition. On April 6, 2007, the beta opened to the public.

Considering how fast things evolve in the computer industry, even 2 years can make a huge difference.

[Eantarus]

I play on a 43" 4k monitor and have for many years. While UI scaling "would be nice" I really only need 3 things from the dev team to fix it:

*Make the buffs bar free-floating.
*Text scaling on the chat window
*Fix whatever god **** nonsense makes the game think the center of the screen is the upper-left quadrant.

And even #3 up there is definitely a "would be nice".

For those out there trying to figure it out: move all your hot bars, map icon, etc in the middle bottom of the screen. Its plenty easy to see everything as-is(in fact I'm not sure I'd want to scale up my hotbars if I could). Though my experience is on a 43" screen, not sure how fun it would be to play like this on 58"s.

[Eantarus]

Personally, I very much doubt that LOTRO has the same engine, as it came out much later than DDO.

Both LOTRO and DDO are based heavily on the engine from Asheron's Call. Even today the two games share a shocking amount of code for how different they are. Its all in the directory structure, you can even find references to AC in the modern updates.

[Manchild]

It is on our wish list but it will be a big effort to do and just resizing/rescaling icons alone is...a thing. Something like 10,000+ icons?

Hey Cordo, why not get the fan base to do it, look at all the awesome stuff they have already done for free. The ddo audit, population website. The github auto follow addon, with a shroud crafter. So many gifted fans that would be willing to help, I'm sure. It's just a small picture right?