So I saw that rct3 had been released again, this time recompiled with a few widescreen resolutions added in the menu, and atari stripped from it. I only ever saw one thing relating to the whole atari/frontier thing, whatever, not the point.
The bit that saddens me with the 2020 release was that they didnt put the 5 minutes in that it would have taken to add UI scaling into the game, and thats really a shame. Even at 1080 the buttons are just way too small, and at 4k, its beyond unacceptable. Even back in 2004/5 when I first got the game I had a 1280x1024 lcd, and the UI was already not up to par.
Anyways.
I put an hour or two into reverse engineering the data structures of the UI and how buttons are created/drawn, and came up with a proof of concept showing that UI scaling is totally within reason to add to the game, especially if its still being sold instead of being degraded into freeware.
Before someone is going to say that the UI is all hardcoded, it is and isnt. All the buttons/elements start with a scale of 1 and have a max scale (default 1.46) which is actually stored WITH the element in memory. The spacing of each button is done based upon the size of the previous button in that group. In my case (I am running the game at the default max res just for show), if a button would have been spaced off the top of the screen, the group is updated, and the whole group is shifted down until it can fit entirely on the screen. Same goes for width. Each group can move the group next to it.
Basically what I'm saying is that the UI is totally dynamic. The ingame windows can be resized easily, they have the sizes of controls/spacing/etc stored with the window itself and changing them all is not out of the question.
Ignore the extra large icons on the buttons, and ignore the quit icon being moved up to the top of the screen. They were leftover from tests. The button sizing is also sorta weird but eh. I was fighting the game the whole time lol.
Come on, frontier. You're better than this, and this game deserves better.
It gets ragged on an awful lot but this game was really ahead of its time, and the handful of people that wrote it did a fantastic job, they just didnt see this coming or someone didnt care.
TLDR: why can I do this and frontier cant
end rant?
The bit that saddens me with the 2020 release was that they didnt put the 5 minutes in that it would have taken to add UI scaling into the game, and thats really a shame. Even at 1080 the buttons are just way too small, and at 4k, its beyond unacceptable. Even back in 2004/5 when I first got the game I had a 1280x1024 lcd, and the UI was already not up to par.
Anyways.
I put an hour or two into reverse engineering the data structures of the UI and how buttons are created/drawn, and came up with a proof of concept showing that UI scaling is totally within reason to add to the game, especially if its still being sold instead of being degraded into freeware.
Before someone is going to say that the UI is all hardcoded, it is and isnt. All the buttons/elements start with a scale of 1 and have a max scale (default 1.46) which is actually stored WITH the element in memory. The spacing of each button is done based upon the size of the previous button in that group. In my case (I am running the game at the default max res just for show), if a button would have been spaced off the top of the screen, the group is updated, and the whole group is shifted down until it can fit entirely on the screen. Same goes for width. Each group can move the group next to it.
Basically what I'm saying is that the UI is totally dynamic. The ingame windows can be resized easily, they have the sizes of controls/spacing/etc stored with the window itself and changing them all is not out of the question.
Ignore the extra large icons on the buttons, and ignore the quit icon being moved up to the top of the screen. They were leftover from tests. The button sizing is also sorta weird but eh. I was fighting the game the whole time lol.
Come on, frontier. You're better than this, and this game deserves better.
It gets ragged on an awful lot but this game was really ahead of its time, and the handful of people that wrote it did a fantastic job, they just didnt see this coming or someone didnt care.
TLDR: why can I do this and frontier cant
end rant?