I’m having a hard time articulating this question; forgive.
I have a hard time playing these hot “third-person shooter” type games - Mass Effect, Gears of War, Ghostbusters, the upcoming Arkham Asylum - because I feel like my character is always in the way of what I’m trying to/should be seeing. I’m playing on a standard TV.
When you play these things on a widescreen HDTV, do you get a more panoramic view? Is part of your view being cropped-off when you play on a standard TV?
I’m pretty sure the ratio of how big your character is to how much screen you have stays the same no matter the size/resolution of the TV being used.
It’s not like a movie where certain parts are cut off. Even if it was, you’d have to buy the widescreen version or the full screen version. No such a thing exists for a game, you get the same ratio no matter the TV.
Or am I just talking out my ass?
Nope, you’ve got it exactly right.
You are. Some (most) games achieve widescreen aspect ratios by extending the horizontal field of view, but some games do it by cutting the vertical field of view.
For example, Gears of War on PC does widescreen by cutting off the top and bottom of the picture. Team Fortress does it by adding to the horizontal. All depends on the game.
In my experience with changing resolution on PC games and moving from standard tv to wide screen with my wii. Is that you see more stuff on the edges of the screen. Not that the scene is stretched.
Games that use your widescreen properly use a proper widescreen resolution. They dont just stretch out the square image like watching SD on HDTV, they paint a 3D landscape that fits the resolution. So there are two ways to do this:
Add more of the 3D landscape to the edges.
Cut the tops off and and fit it.
I think most games do number 1, but I wouldnt be surprised if 2 happens now and again, especially with older games.
Maybe so, but will you gain or lose anything by playing these games on a different type of TV?
Yes, if the game is designed to cut the top and bottom of the screen to draw a widescreen image than you lose the top and bottom. If you switch over to a 4:3 TV, you’d see more. If the game is hor+, then it is the opposite.
Might I suggest that if you’re having a hard time playing the game because you can’t “see” what’s right in front of your character, see if you can “zoom out” the camera at all.
I’ll put in another vote for it depends on the game. When my wife got a widescreen monitor, we tested out World of Warcraft by going to the same spot and looking at the same thing. She got more of a panoramic view than I did on my standard ratio monitor.
Many games have an options menu that lets you specify the aspect ratio of your television. I imagine this is exactly what that’s there to control.
Two words:
Bioshock widescreen
Google those terms and enjoy the vitriol that spews forth.
(The gaming community was so up in arms that a patch was eventually issued.)
You’re all wrong. The answer is potato.
You wouldn’t believe just how many 4:3 computer supporters there are out there. 16:9 for TV and movies seems to be the dominant force now, at least as long as you aren’t trying to buy a DVD at Rite Aid or Target, but just about every other person I know prefers 4:3 for their computers. The main argument I hear towards is that a shape closer to a square is more natural for regular computing, or that they don’t have enough space at the top and bottom of their screen (or that they have to do too much reading left to right…which is what windows are for!).
Infact, there was a group which I used to belong to which specialized in scanning old video game magazines for archiving purposes, and one of the reasons I was kicked out (despite being one of their best scanners, both in resources available to scan and quality of those scans) is because I combined the even and odd pages (which in some cases, especially with maps, were laid out with the pages connected in the orignal magazine) which fit a 16:10 monitor PERFECTLY with the pages side by side, but made the 4:3 users whine about how they’d have to scroll the page to read it.
My current monitor set up is a 24" 16:9 (1920x1080) monitor next to a 24" 16:10 (1920x1200) monitor, for that extra extra widescreen view. I’ve also had fun playing in desktop mode on the THREE 42" plasma screens which are being installed, side by side by side, behind teller lines at Chase banks in order to play flashy ads.
I just really wish that the Thief games were made to run in widescreen…
I dunno; Everytime I sit down at a widescreen computer monitor, I feel like someone sliced off the top and bottom of my screen. Think about it this way:
A screen at 16:9 has LESS “screen space” than a screen at 4:3 assuming the same pixel density. That’s a fact. You can’t argue it. It’s the same reason why you need a bigger widescreen TV to get the same image size on old content as you did on your old CRT. It’s just math and pythagoras.
Now, for content that has been formatted to fit a “wide” screen, that’s kindof okay - though its still essentially the same thing as running a 4:3 monitor and “letterboxing” the top and bottom of the screen (a widescreen that does 1280x800 would be doing 1280x1024 if it were 4:3). But for things that can dynamically resize to fit any dimensions you like (such as virtually all computer applications, and many games), you just end up with less space on the widescreen than you do on the “oldschool” 4:3 monitor.
It’s not as if we’re some weird religious cult that is just shaking our canes at “progress” or something. Widescreen is just a silly shape. You don’t really have any -choice- if you want an HDTV, but for a PC monitor, well, some of us like having the extra space.
Well then why don’t you walk us through the relevant math and geometry, professor, because I do believe you’re talking out of your ass. Aspect ratio has nothing to do with “screen space”, no matter what you think that term means.
BTW, I haven’t played a lot of FPS’s lately, so maybe this has changed, but last time I checked virtually every FPS out there had an adjustable FOV variable. I would think that on the PC at least, Bioshock players would have access to this. While it’s true that widescreen really should add to the horizontal FOV rather than detract from the vertical, they should be able to easily correct this by simply increasing the FOV. It would give the exact same result they seemed to be demanding.
It’s true. You have the classic 3-4-5 triangle with 4:3 of course. 8:5 has a hypotenuse of 9.43~ units. Scale both to a 20" screen and you’ve 16" x 12" against 16.96" x 10.60". This gives the areas as 192 in² and 180~ in² respectively.
Squares have a greater area than rectangles of the same diagonal measure.
Palooka pretty much nailed the math. I didn’t really think it needed explaining, or I would have gone into it. Anyway, by “screen space” I mean simply, number of pixels at the same resolution. Assuming the same pixel density, a screen with a larger area (i.e. a display that is closer to square) will have more pixels (“screen space”) than a more rectangular display.
While I have been known to make stuff up, I never do so with things that involve math. 
Yet entirely missed the point. Who said anything about the hypotenuse of anything? Why nobody, of course. What does the distance from one corner to another of a screen have to do with screen space? Nothing, of course. If you want to complain about the deceptive practice of labelling screens with a measurement which has little to do with the actual size of the screen, then go ahead, but don’t try to pretend that certain aspect ratios have “less screen space” because it’s bullshit.
Resolution IS the number of pixels! No aspect ratio has more or less pixels at the same resolution. You are making stuff up again.
You clearly know how to look things up on wikipedia, so why don’t you try looking up resolution, since you are obviously clueless about it. While you’re at it, try looking up area. How square something is has absolutely no bearing on how much area it has.
I don’t know why you have such a bee in your bonnet over this. What gives with the attacks and nitpicking? Look. The reason I say “at the same resolution” sir, is because, clearly, if you have a monitor that is running at 800x600, it has fewer pixels than a monitor running at 1440x900. Monitors, as a rule, have adjustable resolution, so the whole discussion goes completely out the window if you have a visual impairment and need to run everything at 640x480. I am covering my bases.
And sorry, your “no one said anything about the hypotenuse of anything” statement is pretty blatantly false when all displays on the market are measured by that number. That’s like saying “no one mentioned the number of times anyone crossed home plate” when talking about baseball scores. Monitors, for whatever reason, are measured by the hypotenuse. It’s just how the world presents the things.
Another thing that happens to factor into this is that, when we’re talking about desk space, the limiting factor for me, and, I suspect, most people, is horizontal space. Which means that if you have X inches of horizontal space on your desk, you can get more pixels into that space by taking a monitor that’s taller - i.e. not widescreen. Could you flip a larger widescreen panel on edge? Maybe. For whatever reason, I don’t see a lot of folks doing that.
It’s a minor technical point, sure, but it’s also the entirety of the message in your first post here. If it was worth you lying about, it’s worth me correcting you. Also, you probably shouldn’t say something like “That’s a fact. You can’t argue it.” when you’re 100% incorrect.
Yes, and those aren’t the same resolution.
So, by covering your bases, you mean covering one lie with more lies.
As I said, if you want to complain about the fact that monitors are labelled with a number which doesn’t represent the actual screen size, go ahead, but don’t pretend it has anything to do with particular aspect ratios having different amounts of “screen space”. The area of a screen is equal to the height multiplied by the width, and no amount of bluster and bullshit will give more to a screen just because it’s closer to a square.