Forums » Bugs

view distortion

Apr 28, 2010 PolarBear link
Ever since I switched from my old crt display to this new wide screen lcd display I' seeing weird distortion as if the view is just stretched to fit the screen rather than giving me a wider viewable area.

Most noticeable when a planet moves past my nose while yawing my ship. While the planet is center hud it's nice and round but as it moves away from center it gets stretched into an oval shape.

Has anybody else noticed this? Is there a work around? Something to change in the video settings?
Apr 28, 2010 Kierky link
Have you tried using a higher screen resolution and turn your texture resolution up?
Apr 28, 2010 PolarBear link
got it all maxed. resolution is 1680 x 1050 32bit and Texture resolution is set to "Very High"
Apr 28, 2010 Kierky link
Check the box to reset your FOV and you can do this ingame too.

/set fov 80
Apr 28, 2010 PolarBear link
The box is checked by default. I'll try that in game thing.
Apr 28, 2010 PolarBear link
Okay I tried /set fov 80 and the planet got smaller indicating my field of view did increase but the effect became even more dramatic so after player around with different numbers what seems to look best so far is fov 45 which makes the planet really big in my view. The effect still happens but because the planet is so large it's less noticeable.

Is there a command to check what the current fov is set to with out messing with it? I'd be interested in hearing what other people's fov is set to and wether or not they see oval or egg shaped planets at the edges of their screens.

I really wanna figure this out because on this new display with such a high resolution VO is looking gorgeous except for that distortion effect.
Apr 28, 2010 Spedy link
I think just /set fov without a number will tell you it. The default is 75 I think, I have mine set to 60...
Apr 28, 2010 PolarBear link
hmmm, and does nobody else see planets (and everything else for that matter) being stretched near the edges of the screen?
Apr 28, 2010 zamzx zik link
try turning the resolution of the skybox up
Apr 28, 2010 roguelazer link
PolarBear, it's expected. That's what happens when you map a round perspective onto a squared screen. Corners are... hard to map to. Get a round display, and you'll be fine:

Apr 28, 2010 davejohn link
somewhere in config.ini there is a bit that looks like :

[Vendetta]
Username=xxxxxxx
AudioDriver=Mac sound driver
VideoDriver=OpenGL Reference GKGL driver
xres=1920
yres=1200
bpp=32
version=3

I seem to remember having to manually set xres and yres to get the radars round .

might be worth a go.
Apr 28, 2010 Kierky link
hmmm, and does nobody else see planets (and everything else for that matter) being stretched near the edges of the screen?

No, that shouldn't happen.
Apr 29, 2010 PolarBear link
Thank you Kierky. You're the first one in this thread to actually answer that question.

Right from the beginning I suspected what Roguelazer said to be the case but the first step in diagnosing something like this is determining if it happens to everybody or if it's unique to my set up.

On a side note: That round screen in roguelazer's post is worthy of a thread all it's own. /me wonders if it's capable of 120hz or better refresh rate. That would be sweet used with nvidea's 3d vision kit.

Oh well, now back to trying to figure out why this is happening on my screen. hmmmm..... nope. I got nothin.
Apr 29, 2010 Maalik link
It used to happen to me. I don't know if it still would. I dealt with it by turning off the background image.
Apr 29, 2010 PolarBear link
How do you turn off the background image? Is that in the config.ini file?
Apr 29, 2010 maq link
Kierky, maybe it shouldn't happen in general, but, it does happen in vo.
Certainly it's like that for me.

There's setting for quality of background in options somewhere Polar.
Apr 29, 2010 PolarBear link
Okay that makes two people that see the distortion and one that doesn't so far. Can we get a few more to chime in?
May 01, 2010 PolarBear link
hmm, I just noticed there are even a few screenshots on the screenshots page that have this distortion. Oh well.
May 02, 2010 yodaofborg link
This effect affects all of us, weather we notice it or not. The background *sky* is a box, hence the term skybox. Still not sure what I mean? Heres some FPSBANANA skybox examples

http://www.fpsbanana.com/texturecats/62

At lower resolutions, its less noticable, but when corners of the box reach the corners of the screen, there is some distortion, and obviously on a 16:10/16:9 widescreen resolution there is also more *side* to the screen, making the effect more noticable. Heres a short video showing the effect http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzOreCGxxBs .

Messing with the FOV isnt really a fix, as this will make other things (like zoom level) look different. Can GS do this a better way? Maybe, but is it worth the extra dev time? I do not personally think so.
May 03, 2010 raybondo link
Heh. It's a perspective thing. One way to not see the distortion is to change your FOV to something really small. But then you don't see much. Another way is to get a curved screen like roguelazer's post shows. A third way is to negatively distort the skybox but that's not trivial.

Think of your monitor as a window and you will see that the FOV that the game uses is way wider than what it should be, causing the distortion. Set the FOV to like 179 degrees and you can see the distortion in the extreme.