Dragon's Prophet preview: how to catch your dragon
Report: Respawn Entertainment co-founder left due to personal conflict
Oculus Rift secures $16 million in venture capital
Max Payne 3 slowly dives onto Mac this week
Report: Frostbite 3 games to be 'optimized exclusively' for AMD cards
BioShock Widescreen Slices Vertical View
by Nick Breckon, Aug 21, 2007 11:03am PDTIn a rapidly-expanding thread on the 2K Games forum, reports are
coming in that 2K Boston and Australia's just-released shooter BioShock (PC, X360) uses a cropping method for its widescreen display, cutting down on the vertical view rather than expanding the horizontal width (illustrated left). The problem apparently exists for both the PC and Xbox 360 versions, and cannot be fixed with an edit of the game's FOV (field of view) setting.
The issue took forum goers by surprise, as 2K Boston lead programmer Chris Kline assured fans last May that BioShock's widescreen view would show more, rather than less. "The game will render in full 16:9 aspect ratio, with no letterboxing unless your resolution is not true 16:9," Kline said in a thread on the 2K forums. "You will see more in widescreen. We use a different projection matrix; there is no squashing or stretching of the image involved." Shacknews can confirm that the problem exists in the PC demo of BioShock, and has contacted 2K Games for comment.
Comments
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 9 replies.
You basically just said "no one would have known the difference if nobody noticed the difference." Well, duh! But people did notice the difference and there's now a 70+ page thread at the 2K forums so it does seem like a big deal to enough people.
For the record I played the demo on the 360 in widescreen and the FOV did seem a little small for 16:9, and I did notice that I couldn't see very much above/below the screen and, most of all, that the weapon model seemed cut off in a strange place. I figured they were just design decisions and didn't bother trying the game in 4:3 (which would've been a PITA on the 360) but they did seem sub-optimal to me and I did notice them. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that lots of other people also noticed them and that some of those people then played with settings and worked out what was going on. (Especially on the PC demo where it's normal to try out a bunch of different resolutions at which point you notice that you can't see stuff in widescreen that you saw before in 4:3.)
You must be logged in to post.