BtS Main Menu Screen issue

[Chazcon]

I'm having a problem with the main screen background image that I will use for my mod. I'll track it down eventually, but maybe someone else has encountered this, knows the fix and will save me the effort.

The way that main menu background images are displayed changed from Warlords to BtS. The quick layman's explanation is that Warlords fit the image nicely to the screen and BtS does some odd stretching of the image that cuts the top off. I've included some examples in both fullscreen 1920 X 1200 and windowed 1280 X 1024. As you can see Warlords does a nice job and BtS is just plain unacceptable especially in fullscreen:

Warlords windowed:

Warlords fullscreen:

BtS windowed:

BtS fullscreen:


Any thoughts on which file controls this? Thanks

 

[Chazcon]

Hope it's OK to bump this - getting back to this issue and I can't find what has changed here between Warlords and BtS.

 

[TrentonC]

Have you tried looking at other main screen mods? That's normally how debug my errors.

 

[Chazcon]

Right, thanks but there's no error, something is different in the way these images are handled in BtS vs Warlords.

In layman's terms, in Warlords the screen was filled top to bottom or vertically and then the image sized so the width made to fit according to the height/width ratio. Any oversize was 'cut off' the left and right of the image.

In BtS the screen is filled left to right or horizontally and then the image sized per the height/width ratio. Any oversize is 'cut off' the top and bottom of the image.

They must have had a good reason to change that but I don't see why. Have to find where that was changed and I hope it's not in the hard coding.

 

[embryodead]

Warlords stretches the image while BtS keeps proportions in all aspect ratios and crops the image or adds a letterbox if needed. Same problem as with widescreen TVs and 4:3 input. I don't think there's a way to bring back stretching in BtS, at least NIF doesn't seem to control that. You can, of course, make your NIF & image in 16:9 aspect ratio (default is 4:3) so that it will fit perfectly in 1920 x 1080, but then you'll have a letterbox in more square ratios.

Neither method is perfect, but the BtS one is arguably better (to me stretching is awful, though some people don't notice it), as long as the image is prepared with different aspect ratios in mind, i.e. in your case you should move the title lower to make sure it fits both 16:9 and 5:4.

 

[Chazcon]

Thanks Em. I really like the Warlords method better, but ah well.