Hi everyone,

thx for your great work on widelands! This is one of the best OS Games what i have ever seen, the graficis and sounds are "tradional" but the game is the best!

But i have one small problem, since Christmas 2009 i have a 22' TFT this is a really big device! But if i want to play widelands i have to decide "native" 1680x1050 or scale down to 836x730 (<-- i dont know the lower res).

The native res. is to small to see and the lower res. is bad cause my scaleing is extreme bad Why Widelands havent a featur to "zoom" inside the application?

Sry for my bad english i am german

Best wishes!

Mostly this is because it would be too much work to implement given the current software rendering. However, OpenGL-based rendering is in the works, and once that is in place, implementing a zoom function should be fairly easy.

The same goes for me, I am the proud owner of a 24". I rather like to play full screen with a smaller resolution instead of having a small window on my desktop. There is however a thing that concerns/bothers me: in linux (ubuntu 9.10/10.04), I can't switch between full screen and windowed, or switch to the background because of for example incoming Skype calls or msn/irc chats. In my experience, it's a linux thing, but I assume that in Windows a similar issue might occur. I also like to be able to resize my windows to fit next to other windows on the desktop. Of course, the 'zoom' suggestion is answered in above post.

Suggestions listed: switching to background; toggling between full screen and windowed; resizing windows (drag'n'drop).

semi-related 'bug'; when running on 1920x1080 in windowed mode, a part of the screen 'falls' out of view. Resizing wasn't possible and forced me to hand-kill it.

I realize the weight of these suggestions, though I am surprised that nobody (I'm aware of) did not mention these (in)conveniences earlier before. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the suggestions.

Toggling between windowed and fullscreen modes is already possible, just press 'f'. I suppose it might be a good idea to also add the shortcut Alt+Enter which is used by some other programs.

Arbitrary window sizes is something that we haven't considered because we've always been more looking towards fullscreen play. I don't remember how well SDL deals with that, but if it does, it's definitely something we could do.

SDL can handle resizing. I not sure how well this goes with opengl (We loose the OpenGL context on resize. Maybe all textures have to be reloaded after this. But I am not sure how newer SDL versions handle this). Most of this is a problem in widelands. It needs some fixes to work with resizing. The UI needs support for resizing (Perhaps simply close all open windows and set positions of buttons?).

Zooming is possible with opengl but it needs some work to implement this. These are inconveniences and have not a high priority.

once zoom is enabled, how will it work? will the hotspots get percent-values, will all of those images get re-rendered and what about the old game engine, do we still need/use it once OpenGL is enabled completely?

zooming is not even planned currently. (As far as I know) The "game engine" is the same for OpenGL and the old software rendering. The difference is that it is now possible to use hardware acceleration to draw the graphics. What will be different between OpenGL and software rendering is the terrain. The rest stays almost the same.

It just that with OpenGL we have enough power to resize the graphics on the fly. It works just like scaling the rendered image. In OpenGL this should be quite easy by manipulation the transformation matrices for the game rendering or by using the z-axis for scaling the image. There is no need to change the rendering engine or the game data.

Of course with resizing the current images are too small if you zoom in. From the graphic point of view it would be the best to rerender all game graphics in a higher resolution. But this is very much work. So it is unlikely that this will be done in near future.

[quote]Of course with resizing the current images are too small if you zoom in.[/quote] I disagree, the images are big enough when playing on a lower resolution, but are lots of times too small when playing on resolutions that are normal these days. Just a few steps of zoom would be enough to make it much more playable with a good oversight and still being able to see what is on the geologist signs. I agree it would be better to render them more HD, but if that is not going to happen in the near future because it would be a massive job to get that done, I would advice to go for the zooming option with the current images. Just limit it at a point where it would get ugly.

Another great feature would be to be able to rotate buildings before putting them down and of course the ability to rotate the screen itself, but that would also be a lot of work I can imagine.

Well, there is an old bug report about a zoom function (last activity April 2012, but a recent duplicate), maybe you can push the topic there: https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/536461

And about the rotate building feature: there was a discussion recently about that too. Without final decision so far: https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/1106181