Bad Widescreen Stretching

[vaanknight]

I'm pretty much done with my first VN, but since I learned the person I'm making it for has a 16:9 screen, I rebuilt it from a 800x600 pxls format to 960x600 pxls, so it fits without stretching while in fullscreen mode, looking like this:

Normal looking 960x600 in a 16:9 screen

So it's all working fine and dandy, but when I set the VN in fullscreen with my 4:3 1600x1280 screen, the screen stretches badly, even shows a black frame as shown here:

This is how it stretches itself in a 4:3 screen

So, is there a way within Ren'Py to tell the screen how it is supposed to show itself, so it gets carried along with every distribution, and works with both widescreen and normal screens? What I'd like to see in a 4:3 screen is the two black frames bellow and above, as you'd normally see it, something like this:

I want it to look like this in fullscreen when in 4:3 screens.

I'm in your hands.

[Jake]

So, is there a way within Ren'Py to tell the screen how it is supposed to show itself, so it gets carried along with every distribution, and works with both widescreen and normal screens?

Unfortunately, I believe the answer is 'no, not really', at least at the moment... it's something that's come up before, and I believe PyTom's complained that there's no neat OS-independent way he can check what the aspect ratio of your monitor is in order to work out how to display the screen, and even if he makes an educated guess at that, it's not necessarily easy to letterbox/pillarbox everything appropriately, and he should really be able to just get away with setting the video mode and letting your hardware sort it out.

(Technically, it's at least partly a problem with your video card drivers; some drivers will preserve the aspect ratio of the image and automatically letterbox/pillarbox when they're set to a video mode with a different aspect ratio to the display device, but some drivers won't. You should check in your display settings to see if there's a checkbox for it. That said, I know the nVidia drivers have such an option and also sometimes ignore it for no apparent reason.)


On the up side, I'm sure PyTom will correct me if I'm wrong, but I also vaguely remember hearing that the upcoming 6.11 will deal with this kind of thing better in some way, maybe due to a reorganisation of the graphics code making it easier for PyTom to write the necessary functionality?

[vaanknight]

Oh, thanks for the reply, I really don't mind much if it doesn't look the way it should with MY computer, I mean... I made it, why would I want to play and reply a story I made up myself?

So what I wanted was a way to make sure the full screen works properly no matter who plays it and with what screen, which now that you mention it, was a bit to much to ask for.

If PyTom manages to implement that in 6.11, he'll reach a higher throne in my list of programming kings.

[PyTom]

I've had this working for a while now, and you'll be able to see it in the 6.11 pre-release, which will take place this weekend (in all likelyhood).

[vaanknight]

Looking forward to it! and for what is worth, should it be useful to someone, I see now that one of my problems was that I miscalculated the width of my screen, for a 16:9 it should be 1067 x 600 pxls, not 960 x 600 = =;

The screen still stretches, but it doesn't show those pesky pan boxes now.