Resizing Vanilla Main Menu screen to fit 1920x1080

[draco963]

Hi all. I just bought myself a fancy-pants new screen, and have discovered that the main menu screen doesn't display well at full resolution on it.

I'm playing BtS 3.19, but I've set my preferences to use the original Vanilla main menu (the globe view over Europe), just because I liked it and "Baba Yetu" better.

Unfortunately, when setting the in-game display parameters to 1920x1080, the game stretches the background (the globe & the Civ IV title) to match the width. So, the actually dimensions of the picture wind up being 1920x1440, and so the top and bottom of the background each get 180 pixels cut off.

It's a small thing, I know, but it still irritates me.

Anybody have a solution? I had thought to simply add some black bars to the left and right of the background pic (kinda like a right-angle version of the "letterbox" format you see when you watch a widescreen movie on a 4:3 TV), but I quickly discovered that there isn't one simple "background file", the entire main menu appears to be a NIF! So, I think it would be as simple as re-sizing the NIF to a 16:9 format.

But I haven't a clue how to do that...

 

[achilleszero]

You will have to get a program like scene viewer or nifskope an resize the nif in the dimension that is coming up short in your screen. (Im not sure if you can scale only one dimension with nifskope, so you might have to go with sceneviewer). Pretty much how you are already thinking. It will take some playing around with because in any graphics program the perspective of the in-nif camera will not be present.

 

[draco963]

Thanks achilleszero.

So, I DO have NIFSkope, and had just started messing about with that idea of re-sizing the main menu NIF as described. But... I can't figure it out. Any NIFSkope experts with some ideas?

 

[achilleszero]

Thanks achilleszero.

So, I DO have NIFSkope, and had just started messing about with that idea of re-sizing the main menu NIF as described. But... I can't figure it out. Any NIFSkope experts with some ideas?

You will have to resize the individual meshes in the scene. If you just resize the scene root everything will be resized including the camera and camera distance and you will most likely be back to square one. Click on each mesh then open the node and a menu will open up. Right click on it and pick transform>scale veritces. Then scale it in whichever dimension you want.

 

[draco963]

OK, that makes sense. But I see Transform -> Scale Vertices on only one mesh, the starscape. And changing that alone didn't do the trick.

It's still ok to just have my version if the NIF in my Mod\Assets\Art\Interface\mainmenu folder, right? I don't have to do anything special to make the game recognize and load my files instead of the stock stuff, do I? The reason I ask is, I tried doing something nuts to the Title DDS file just to make sure it would show.. and it didn't. Do I have to redirect all the meshes in the NIF maybe?

 

[achilleszero]

OK, that makes sense. But I see Transform -> Scale Vertices on only one mesh, the starscape. And changing that alone didn't do the trick.

It's still ok to just have my version if the NIF in my Mod\Assets\Art\Interface\mainmenu folder, right? I don't have to do anything special to make the game recognize and load my files instead of the stock stuff, do I? The reason I ask is, I tried doing something nuts to the Title DDS file just to make sure it would show.. and it didn't. Do I have to redirect all the meshes in the NIF maybe?

Just make sure you bak up the original nif in case you foul up. As long as you keep it the same name as the original it will recognize the nif and display it.

As far as not finding the scale vertices on anything else, Im not sure what else to tell you. I dont know any other way to scale things on single axis with scene viewer. Probably just DL sceneviewer and you can scale anything regardless of what it is with it.

 

[draco963]

Is the sceneviewer you're referring to the one included in 3ds Max? 'Cause I don't have that...

I did double-check all the mesh's in the main menu NIF though, and there were a few others that offered Transform -> Scale Vertices, so I changed them also. Still didn't work though...

Would you mind taking a look, if you have time?
View attachment main menu.rar
Thanks!

 

[achilleszero]

here try this main menu. It should work, though it will looked a little compressed hieght wise. But thats the price you pay for running in a different resolution.

View attachment Main Menu.zip

 

[draco963]

OK, so, I finally figured out where to put the files (Civilization IV\Beyond the Sword\Assets\Art\Interface\Civ4 Main Menu), and thank-you achilleszero for your version of the Main Menu. I used that to come up with a change of my own that shrinks and re-positions just the Civ IV title without touching anything else, and it looks pretty good (if I do say so myself ), without looking stretched.

So, next on the list then, is to make the starscape look sharper. Right now, the NIF is trying to stretch a 512x512 DDS across a 1920x1080 screen, and the stars are all blurry... ugh.

Unfortunately, when I tried to re-size the stars.dds file to 1024x1024, the game crashes on load. As far as I can tell, the DDS file is fine. Any ideas?

View attachment new stars.rar

 

[achilleszero]

So, next on the list then, is to make the starscape look sharper. Right now, the NIF is trying to stretch a 512x512 DDS across a 1920x1080 screen, and the stars are all blurry... ugh.

Unfortunately, when I tried to re-size the stars.dds file to 1024x1024, the game crashes on load. As far as I can tell, the DDS file is fine. Any ideas?

View attachment 226031

No idea why its crashing on you. But it really doesnt mater. Unless you actually add more detail to the star dds, it is going to wind up looking exactly the same. All you will be doing is expanding detail that is already there, then the game makes it fit to the same size sqaure. So absolutely no difference will be visible.

YOu could shrink it down to 256, then place four of them together to form a new 512. It will make the stars smaller but there will be a 4x as many. Or you could just not worry about it and go play civ!

EDIT: Does the star background have built in animation like bts? I cant remember, maybe thats causing problems

 

[draco963]

What I actually did to the star background was expand the size of canvas to 1024x1024, center the original DDS, and then cut-&-paste random bits of the background stars (without catching any of the "galaxy" from the centre) all around to fill in the canvas. That way, bigger starscape, better resolution.

And yes, now that you mention it, the starscape is animated. It swings around the backdrop, to assist in the illusion created by the rising sun that the camera is in a fixed orbit over a rotating Earth. I guess I need to tell the NIF how to parse a larger scale file for the starscape then...

And I can't play Civ right now, unfortunately... my SDK mod is bogged down, so this is a side diversion since I got the new screen. Oh, and I'm just a nit-picky perfectionist.

 

[NikNaks]

How does the one from post #8 look in-game? Could you post a screen?

 

[draco963]

Thanks NikNaiks.

Original:

achilleszero:

RichMod:

 

[NikNaks]

Ah, so is the aim to extract the menu from RichMod, then?

 

[draco963]

Ya, I didn't exactly make that clear, did I? Yes, RichMod is the closest to what I'm aiming for. As you can see, the games' default is to stretch the 4:3 original to match the new width, which means we lose the top and bottom of the original image. The actual Menu box looks fine, as you can see, so it's a separate widget. What you can't see very clearly is that in my attempt, the background starfield doesn't properly fill the screen. I'll upload my files in a few hours, that way you can see exactly what I've done. But it's clear once you see it action that it doesn't work; the sun especially is really scewed...

 

[draco963]

OK, sooner then expected! One of the files in the RAR, new stars.dds is my attempt to expand the star field. It didn't work though, not quite sure why.

Although the new file is 1024x1024 instead of the original 512x512 (it's just a blown up copy, the new one is the original with lots of extra detail around the edges), it appears that the Stars.dds file "plays" against a backdrop of a set size. Oh, and the larger file causes the game to crash...