Saturday, January 26, 2008

Video Startup Issues

I'm working off a hunch here, rather than any verified data, but it's my belief that with Quake 1 most people will 95% of the time run in one of two video modes:

  1. A full-screen mode that matches the resolution and colour depth of their desktop.
  2. A windowed mode that's sufficiently large enough to get a good resolution, but still with the title bar and other widgets accessible.
By this logic, forcing the startup to 640x480x16 fullscreen unless otherwise specified has no place in a modern source port. If you have a 1280x1024x32 monitor, you're going to want to use it's full capabilities, especially with an old game that's capable of going like lightning on any modern hardware. And the non-technical person doesn't want to mess with command-line options, they just want to double-click the icon and get the thing running.

MHQuake will automatically start at your monitor's full resolution and colour depth unless you specify otherwise. It doesn't even bother to do a CDS test, as you're already running your monitor in that mode. The old -width and -height options are still there, but they've been modified to allow you to attempt any resolution: there is no vid_modes list any more. Similarly, -window on it's own will pick a good-sized window that's still within the constraints of your desktop size (typically the "common resolution size" one step below what you're running at, although this can be different for widescreen laptop monitors).

I haven't implemented resolution switching as I don't believe it's worth the effort: setting resolution is a one-time-only operation for most people, and as I said above, it's virtually always to a full-screen full-sized mode. This is all about making it easier for people to run the game, rather than putting technical issues in their way. This isn't 1997 anymore, and we no longer have to wrestle with workarounds for antiquated hardware with inadequate video RAM - even a previous generation Intel Integrated chip is capable of running MHQuake at close to 60 FPS full-screen full-size.

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