Black bars in widescreen modules

[aorin1]

I've been playing some newer OpenBOR games, specially the widescreen ones, like the Streets of Rage 2X



I noticed most of the others have black bars either on bottom or both top and bottom.
Are those bars locked to the PAK and overall creator choice?
Is there any way to get rid of them, or if done so, would it have any content there to show, I mean, does the background exist behind it?

Examples of black bars:

 

[DCurrent]

Welcome to Chronocrash aorin1.

Those are creator choices. There isn't anything you can do about it without without making major modifications to the game. As for there being more background behind the black - technically possible, but extremely unlikely. Most backgrounds creators use are 224px vertical, whereas widescreen is 280px vertical. It's a lot easier to design the HUD to cover that space than hand draw more background area.

DC

 

[aorin1]

I thought so, since I can't move the character down there.
There's this hack for Genesis to remove a black border at the top, so I thought, why not ask it about the OpenBOR games as well?
https://www.romhacking.net/reviews/3620/#review

In any case, thanks for clarifying that!

 

[Kratus]

I thought so, since I can't move the character down there.
There's this hack for Genesis to remove a black border at the top, so I thought, why not ask it about the OpenBOR games as well?
https://www.romhacking.net/reviews/3620/#review

In any case, thanks for clarifying that!

aorin1
DC is right buddy. In case of SOR2X, I edited every level asset to match 280px but the original have 224px. In fact I had some luck in SOR sprites because they are easier to edit and haven't too many details, but other games are better to let them with black borders and use as a HUD.

 

[aorin1]

Sure, I totally get it, I tried Knights & Dragons and the black bar doesn't bother that much, and it's a game which actually uses that space for Experience etc.
Streets of Rage 2X is an exception, and one of the most exciting to play, I noticed while playing your module that Beat-em-ups really benefit from being widescreen and it has the best gameplay I tried so far in OpenBOR.

 

[oldyz]

I've been playing some newer OpenBOR games, specially the widescreen ones, like the Streets of Rage 2X



I noticed most of the others have black bars either on bottom or both top and bottom.
Are those bars locked to the PAK and overall creator choice?
Is there any way to get rid of them, or if done so, would it have any content there to show, I mean, does the background exist behind it?

Examples of black bars:

Hello, you can try & edit the modules & see if they look correct in your computer:

here is what you do, you unpak (paxplode) the module you want to fix & there will be this video.txt

in this file you can actually edit the resolution you want - for a truly correct wide-screen & removal of the black bars you put his in:

video 426x240
ColourDepth 16bit.

this works with some previous versions of OpenBOR, & i was actually going to edit NIghtSlashers with this resolution in mind, unfortunately - i found that some machines are not friendly to this resolution when you activate full screen.

you will have to experiment & see how it goes in your machine.

Existing resolutions are these
    0 = 320x240 (default)
    1 = 480x272
    2 = 640x480
    3 = 720x480
    4 = 800x480
    5 = 800x600
    6 = 960x540

the one resolution that may work given these choices is 720 480 - lets see what happens 

well that's not going to work - so let's go with option 1: (480 by 272)

still no good - there is no top black bar , but the bottom is "naked"

finally this is what had to be done with NIghtslashers - video 480x240

windowed result:

you might say "Oldyz, this looks good" but here is what happens when you stretch it to full screen mode & with the aspect ratio preserved:

The dreaded black bars are back, & with some modules you get black bars on top of back bars... because you want to preserve the aspect ratio.
& you will want to preserve the aspect ratio, otherwise circles will look like Ovals if you tell openbor to "stretch to screen"

Finally this is the solution  - if you machine can actually support it: video 426x240

& here is how it looks full screen with "preserve aspect ratio"

the only flaw is the wierd pixely artifacts on the right corner (on my machine)- here is full screen with "stretch to screen"

unfortunately, 246 by 240 does not work in some androids, nor the wii
(you get scrambled images)

so the other existing option would be to use drawmethod on every single element to make the horizontal & vertical adjustments of how the sprites & backgrounds look so you can achieve a good 16 by 9 image ratio - this also would involve modifying all hitboxes.

the third option is to create a script that would override all default & used drawmethod values (lets say that the script adds 20 pixels to all existing horizontals) & another script that rezises all hit boxes.....



Now, call me weird  , but i really hate the way 480x240 makes NIghtslashers look, those black  bars in full screen mode make the sprites seem smaller when compared to the OG arcade in full screen.

another solution would be for the video options to have a "Horizontal zoom option" or "crop factor" option,  where the graphics fill up the screen horizontally while in full screen mode (windows), sure the screen eats away some pixels on the sides, but at least the sprites will look big & proper - example:
here is again the full screen - "preserve aspect ratio"

& here is full screen with "Horizontal zoom" or " Horizontal crop"

Versus full screen "stretch to screen"

 

[DCurrent]

oldyz,

I've already asked you once to stop quoting large posts. Please learn to scrub contents: Quoting Guidelines

DC