(01-10-2016, 10:11 AM)eckso Wrote: [ -> ]People will keep playing with stretched graphics and broken stereo for many years to come.
Broken stereo?
You reported this a while ago, but the change has been reverted now, so the problem should be gone. Is there another problem with stereoscopic 3D that I'm missing?
Also it's not like people weren't playing with stretched graphics before Dolphin came around.
Woah, you're saying the devs are going to undo this fix? But everything looked so correct and nice...
(01-11-2016, 06:32 AM)Smashbro29 Wrote: [ -> ]Woah, you're saying the devs are going to undo this fix? But everything looked so correct and nice...
No, the aspect ratio fixes will not be reverted. There will at most be optional ways to change aspect ratios to something other than the console-correct ones.
If you're referring to what I said about broken stereoscopy, that's completely unrelated. 3D presets were reverted, not the aspect ratio fixes.
(01-11-2016, 06:58 AM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ] (01-11-2016, 06:32 AM)Smashbro29 Wrote: [ -> ]Woah, you're saying the devs are going to undo this fix? But everything looked so correct and nice...
No, the aspect ratio fixes will not be reverted. There will at most be optional ways to change aspect ratios to something other than the console-correct ones.
If you're referring to what I said about broken stereoscopy, that's completely unrelated. 3D presets were reverted, not the aspect ratio fixes.
That's a relief. I really loved these changes. Appreciate the hell out of them.
(01-10-2016, 08:45 PM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ] (01-10-2016, 10:11 AM)eckso Wrote: [ -> ]People will keep playing with stretched graphics and broken stereo for many years to come.
Broken stereo? You reported this a while ago, but the change has been reverted now, so the problem should be gone. Is there another problem with stereoscopic 3D that I'm missing?
Not that stereo issue. Trying to play in stereo to have a better 3D space sensation (depth) is fine while physics obey, if you stretch the image physics do not obey as they do in reality (or emulated game reality). You still have the pop out and wow effect but no gameplay added value, actually it worsens the gameplay experience.
The reason why AR is such a touchy subject that it's really hard to understand. It's one of those subjects where the more research you do into it the less sure you become.
I suspect a lot of the confusion comes from the two terms "Display aspect ratio" and "Pixel aspect ratio" and the fact that we want neither of those here. Take a standard 1024x768 4:3 LCD computer monitor. It quite clearly has a display aspect ratio of 4:3. It also quite clearly has a 1:1 pixel aspect monitor. Now display an image/video on that screen which has 96 pixels of padding at the top and bottom. You know, classic 16:9 letterboxing.
Now think about it, what is the DAR and PAR? The Pixel Aspect Ratio is still 1:1, it hasn't changed due to the padding. And the Display Aspect Ratio, it hasn't changed either, your monitor is still 4:3. It would be insane to think your display morphed to different physical dimensions just because you added letterboxing.
But your aspect ratio is clearly changed, because we now have a 16:9 picture on the screen. So we need a 3rd aspect ratio, the Picture Aspect Ratio, or Image Aspect Ratio (IAR to avoid confusion with Pixel Aspect Ratio)
There are two major mistakes people often make, that the PAR should always be 1:1 and that IAR should always match DAR. It was the second mistake that Dolphin used to make before these changes, assuming that the image was always 4:3 (or 16:9).
Even when you say the SNES has a DAR of 4:3, I somehow doubt most games also have an IAR of 4:3. I know that most PAL SNES have huge black bars at the top and bottom.
It's really unfortunate that such a large number of NTSC games have aspect ratios that are broken in the exact same way. I assume it's because the default resolution (or maybe it's just a common resolution) of the Gamecube SDK is 640x480, which many 3rd party developers assumed was the exact same as the 640x480 VGA display mode, which just so happens to have a 1:1 PAR, a 4:3 DAR and a 4:3 IAR. But this 640x480 NTSC video mode actually has a PAR of ~4:5 and 3px black boarders at the top and bottom and ~35px boarders at the left and right. The resulting IAR is 3.66:3, which is much narrower than it's DAR, which is still 4:3. Oh and on a regular TV it actually looks 4:3, as most TVs crop approx 36 pixels from the sides and approx 24 pixels from the top and bottom, resulting in the borders being cropped.
Therefore you have this large group of NTSC games which have the wrong aspect ratio by about 9%, which happens to be fixed if you check that 1:1 PAR checkbox you want. But there are a huge number of games which have PARs other than 1:1, including all PAL games which would break if you check that same 1:1 PAR checkbox. So we now have a checkbox which "fixes" 20% of games, doesn't effect another 20% and breaks over 60% of games that were working before (I'm just guessing for these numbers)
That is why we don't want to add that option. The last thing we want is an option which is wrong 60% of the time, users will flip it on to fix one game (or just because they are exploring the options) and forget about it.
To add to this, dolphin is already emulating the game accurately. When the developers tested their game on the dev console, they saw the wrong aspect ratio. When their QA testers played the game, they saw the wrong aspect ratio. When they sent it off to Nintendo for verification, Nintendo verified and approved the wrong aspect ratio. When the Developer signed off the disk for manufacturing, it had the wrong aspect ratio. The reviewers reviewed the game with the wrong aspect ratio. Every single person who played the game on real hardware saw the same wrong aspect ratio.
Who are we now to retroactively fix the aspect ratio to what we think the developers originally wanted?
Quote:Who are we now to retroactively fix the aspect ratio to what we think the developers originally wanted?
You could make the exact same argument for any kind of enhancement that Dolphin does to games. Who are we to retroactively increase rendering resolution, since it was verified and approved by Nintendo? Same thing with Gekko overclocking increasing framerate in games, widescreen hack, support for other controllers than the authentic GC one, etc.
Most people don't use emulators because they want 100% accurate emulation. They use emulators because they improve on real hardware.
Quote:The last thing we want is an option which is wrong 60% of the time, users will flip it on to fix one game (or just because they are exploring the options) and forget about it.
I wish we had a more dynamic backends for gameinis that would allow for crowdfunded enhancements of the sort.
Thanks for the detailed post showing why it isn't as simple as just adding a checkbox, phire.
(01-12-2016, 10:12 PM)delroth Wrote: [ -> ]You could make the exact same argument for any kind of enhancement that Dolphin does to games. Who are we to retroactively increase rendering resolution, since it was verified and approved by Nintendo? Same thing with Gekko overclocking increasing framerate in games, widescreen hack, support for other controllers than the authentic GC one, etc.
A difference is that most of the enhancements you mention wouldn't have been possible for developers to include, unlike correct aspect ratios. I do however agree that this isn't a good reason to not let people set custom aspect ratios.
I'm only arguing against a global "1:1 PAR" checkbox in the graphics options.
A per-game "1:1 PAR" checkbox would be acceptable, though there are many cases where 1:1 PAR doesn't result in the correct aspect ratio. A per-game SmartAR option would be better (works in a lot more cases)
But probably the best option is to allow for a per-game custom aspect ratio option, which would avoid any heuristic issues with SmartAR (ideally we could include the display of the current SmartAR guess and the user can lock it in) It would also allow the user to select absolutely any aspect ratio, if they decide there is a good reason for another aspect ratio.
So this is basically held up by the fact that our config system is shit, and nobody want to add another per-game option at the moment.