To be fair that is also because they mostly use either Unity or Unreal Engine which both natively support ultrawide, so they dont really need to do much.
indies are made by passionate devs that are closer to the average player and tend to be sympathetic twords niches, like indies alot tend to support mods more, OSes (especially linux), and even little to no DRM. (this is a generalization of course, but it does bear fruit)
for 2d games I like the approach where camera stops at fixed point when you move to a "definitive" wall, and your characters move to the side of the screen instead of being anchored to the center
this is the standard solution and its very easy to implement. In fact, when I've written my first 2D game template in SDL, the default state was just like that. It's not a problem at all if you're writing from scratch and building tiny blocks of code one step at a time. I guess it could be a problem if you only want to use game engines that don't support such a solution and try to implement it on your own.
Halo Infinite has a HUD setting that lets you choose how widely spread your HUD elements are from the center. It's really nice for ultra wide monitors.
There was a good interview at Digital Foundry recently where they talked to the developers of the Spider-Man PC port and they mentioned that a lot of the cutscenes were specifically composed for 16:9 and expanding to ultrawide ratios made a lot of things visible that shouldn't have been, like characters t-posing, so they had to go through every cutscene and make sure there was nothing out of place at any aspect ratio.
@@Deliveredmean42 super ultrawide is 32:9. My secondary monitor has that resolution but I mainly use an ultrawide now because I got that new Alienware qd OLED. Oddly grandia 2 worked in super ultrawide without any mods. It's nice to see so much of the environment in 3d open world games.
@@clownavenger0 Yeah, there is a reason not a lot of games support it. Mainly because increasing resolution at that ratio is pretty demanding that don't use higher end GPUs, especially on newer games. And the other reason is for optimization reasons and cutscenes trickery. We did mention how changing aspect rations to an extreme degree can break cutscenes. Heck it can even break rendering optimization tricks. So the devs have to be very very verse with how PC games works, and if not the results are the countless shotty PC ports over the last few decades.
This is a huge issue that is taken into account with web development as well since there are so many screen sizes and pixel count that access the same content (phones, tablets, laptops and monitors). From our side this is usually done by validating what the screen size is before specyfing which part of the code to look at the construct the UI. Definitely the worst part about programming interfaces in my opinion :P
@@vadnegru Maybe not ultra-wide specific but with so many different resolutions coming from different types of devices you end up having to redefine the specs. This can also be worsened or improved depending on how the page is coded.
Just have relative positioning on all your elements. People resize windows. Its so common that you can’t even call it a quirk. Its just part of web development always
as a ultra wide user, I can see the end of every 16:9 overlay as it is too small for my screen vignette, black screens, flash bangs, transitions... it always too small to fill the entire screen sometimes, I even see sneaky trickery that the games do.. for example, on the skyrim menu perk list, I can see that all the item names are just stores on the sides of the screen there is a software that always help me a lot called flawless widescreen it fixes a lot of games (not overlays tho) but it actually fixes rendering and scaling problems
@@joltedjon He probably means that the other perks are just waiting at the sides of the screen, so if you scroll to them, they will just then slide into view.
ive also used that program back when I had my omen x 35in curved 3440x1440p display, was pretty useful for the games it supported, usually would get rid of the black bars, atleast for normal gameplay, tho they'd often still be present in menu screens. Overall it's much easier and better then going with other fixes that involve editting a game file to force it to run at 21:9, which often fixes the black bar issue but causes a whole host of other visual bugs. I dont use it presently, since after I broke my omen, I bought a smaller 2560×1440p 16:9 monitor (flat screen sadly, felt like morty after he experienced "true level"). I wish more games would actually let you specify aspect ratio, as usually if your resolution is even an option, its a gamble between it being fully supported and forcing you to play at 16:9 with black bars. I was pleasantly surprised when I played monster world and saw there was an option to specify a 21:9 aspect ratio, considering all the other issues it had at pc launch (came after console) and it's use of denuvo drm (a known performance hog). considering the lack of support for ultrawide, I dont even wanna know what it's like trying to game on superwide (32:9).
One extra fun thing with 2D games is that you might wanna activate enemies and other gameplay elements as they come into the camera's view. Ultrawide ratio naturally messes this up
Unless you punish the player for using a ultra wide screen, just add an enemy in your game that when it detects ultra wide is on a few mins in it will spawn, and make it as annoying to not use ultra wide screen, either that or just make thicccc rooms that ultra wide can't get too.
Maybe don't use the screen size that can vary alot to drive the game logic? We already learned to not tie physics and timers to framecount and use frametime in the math instead. You're a game dev. Be creative, it's your job
Valve recently introduced a feature to Half-Life 2 where you can set a separate aspect ratio for the HUD. This means you can set the 3D graphics to make use of your entire 16:9 display, but the edges of the HUD will be anchored to fit in a 4:3 area, allowing you to see the HUD as it was originally intended while still making full use of your modern widescreen display. One thing I like about this is how it means for video editing, I can crop footage of my gameplay to 4:3 if I wanted to for artistic reasons, and it would still look totally normal as if I was actually playing with that aspect ratio.
@@CinnamonOwO ?? It's extremely natural if you're using a triple monitor setup. It also feels nice to me to have the UI in 4:3, since it was actually designed to be played in that aspect ratio.
For 2D games, I know at least in Godot that the project settings menu lets you lock the aspect ratio but allow window resizing, so the sides of the window that don't match the aspect ratio are just black bars, and the game itself scales linearly depending on the window size
@@pacomatic9833 or for a more elegant but taxing approach, fog of war, that way you cant see behind walls regardless of distance the problem is that platform games want you to see behind certain walls, so you would have to use two kinds of walls depending on the situation
Orrrrrrrrr, make the camera stop when it hits a wall. Just code in where you think ultra screen will mess things up so that when it hits a certain wall it stops the camera but the player can still move. I might just go with it and put lore stuff behind walls, or creepy uncanny stuff so that it scares them to not use it, but then again they might just want to look at more of it, so why not, make it a feature. Who knows, mabey they make it a step further and you must use it to further the game.
My friend was always like "Ultra wide is so good! You NEED to get one" and I always would say that the performance hit wasn't worth it and I don't like the incompatibility of the majority of games and he'd always say that "It is fine, most games work" and then every few days he'd complain about X game not working properly and having to try and find work arounds that never worked properly lol.
as someone using ultrawides since 2016( when there was practically no support for them). i just acknowledged that some games will never work and i have to use a 16:9 aspect ratio with bars, which is more or less fine Mainly because getting a game that supports it correctly is a fantastic feeling, it is just so much better then buying a X larger 16:9 screen also to note there is very little performance loss, if your playing 3440x1440 if your card can support 4k its less intensive and if you have a 1080p 16:9 monitor vs a 1080p 21:9 its like a 30% increase in performance needed. which unless you have a 50w GPU you wont notice it
For me it's already almost too annoying with 4k gaming, because so many games don't have proper UI scaling. It's so annoying when a game runs absolutely fine in 4k, but then you have a ultra tiny impossible to read interface.
Would’ve loved to hear you mention the differences between projection types and how that ties into this and FOV. Most games use Rectilinear projection, while others might use Fisheye projection. Ultrawides naturally have a higher field of view and rectilinear project looks really weird when using them Probably better for it’s own video but definitely an interesting topic worth discussing!
I can confirm that some games look much wierder than others. Minecraft for example feels extremely fish-eyed no matter what FOV I set, but I just played through every halo game and they all felt pretty much natural
I've always wondered why devs don't let users put the HUD where they want. Feels like the problem spoken about in this video would stop being a problem. But having a movable HUD probably comes with its own set of issues I remember downloading addons in wow just to move bars around, it's been a thing for years and players prefer being able to customize their stuff
no. that's because people stopped using square monitors, as manufacturers wanted to only produce the "TV format" panels. Which is sad. I really want a less wide monitor as 16:9 is severely punished by any ribbon-toolbars application and it only gets worse the wider you go
@@Poldovico im pretty sure that 5:4 aspect ratio was mostly for lcd square panels and 4:3 was for CRT monitors. Both had their history but 4:3 was more common because they made more of them considering that square lcd had relatively short lifespan due to manufacturers jump to 16:10 and later to 16:9 relatively quickly
As an ultra-wide user it has been nice to see more and more games support 21:9 aspect ratios, but I can tell you from a web and game development standpoint that it truly is a pain in the ass to deal with, so any games that don't support it I do give slack to. I am just so used to 21:9 though because my School, Work, and Home computers all use it, it is just handier to have several applications on one view.
I don't give slack, because it's incredibly easy to add in games (unless there is a severe engine limitation). At most it will take a single developer a couple hours to add in all aspect ratios. Infact when developers don't add it, often the same day the game releases within hours the community adds in ultra wide support by manipulating memory values. If people that dont have 100% access to engine and game files can do it in hours with no knowledge of the game engine, why can't the developers do it?
@@justwatch7091 there was this time that elden ring bugged out and didn't render the 16:9 black bars and it looked perfectly fine, so I have no idea why they added those in the first place.
it's literally harder for web developers than games. You'd know this by how 3d games handle the camera, it's really trivial. Most mods just change a few bits in game exe and the game runs 100% flawless in ultrawide, like elden ring
The easiest solution I could think of limits how far camera can move horizontally, as your character approaches the end of the level, the camera just stops and your character continues to move relatively to the center of the view.
That'd be a pain as you'd have to specify each and every wall that does it and from what angles it'll do it, and in addition you'll have to adjust anything that becomes active based on whether it's on-screen to have an additional MaxDistance from player variable to stop it from being activated behind the infinite wall. Basically you're having to add partial fog of war instead of just adding black bars, and that's a pain in the ass to code and can massively increase dev time in an industry already struggling with crunch. Stopping scrolling can be helpful for the ends of a level, but it does nothing if you're trying to hide something in the same level but later in the stage.
or chop the level into areas (only rendering the one you are in or that are connected to it, and carve the rooms out rather than build walls (kind of like doom did in 3d) it's simple enough and as a bonus you might get increased performance
I say that is a good one, you don't need to assume, just figure out how wide the ultra screen is and how many pixals it has, or just put a bunch of the same thing when a wall is on the left and or right, tight box? Just make that box Thicccc. I say just use it as your advantage, mabey prank them with stuff, or put lore on the otherside, make it a feature, use everything to make a good game, that's what I'm going to do to make 1 of my games, use everything if it will go great with it. It's the tiny details that gets you going, if you don't want them to see it, then cover it up until it's needed, by making a Thicccc room that even ultra screen can't get past.
i just want to mention that 21:9s are amazing for 2D map-based games, like Hearts of Iron or Crusader Kings. The extra screen space is fantastic at giving the player a more comfortable playspace where a 16:9 might end up feeling cramped when servicing menus
Well another complication is with the developer recommended system specs. Maybe an RTX 2070 would run the game fine at 1920x1080, the games intended native resolution, but it would run quite poorly at 3440x1440. Some customers may not fully understand that their system is requiring the poor graphics card to render more than double the number of pixels per frame and it just can't keep a stable framerate at that workload.
Games don't really have an intended resolution. your display will have an optimal/native resolution associated with it t games will look the best with, but the actual game itself is "intended" to look appropriate whenever you're using your native resolution. I could be wrong.
@@BigDaddyWes Games don't have the intended resolution. But recommended system reqirments do have the intended resolution. The developer basically says that the game will run at 60 FPS at 1080p monitor. Obviously on 1440p monitor the game will have a lower FPS
1920x1080 can look beautiful on a 4K screen, not always but usually. Change the native resolution to 1080, turn off those shitty internal post processing & 'smoothing' effects on your screen, but make sure super sampling is on and you have a beautiful display that runs quite well. Also I'm pretty sure 1920x1440 is the resolution to match the 21/9 aspect ratio for ultra wide screens. 3840x2160 is 4K. I'm blessed with a with a very good PC, but I often run games on lower resolutions for better performance.
32:9 user here, always disappointed when companies don't add a center HUD elements option to their game. Somehow older games did this by default like Borderlands 2 where the HUD elements are locked to a 16:9 aspect ratio while you can still see more of the world in the edges. Borderlands 3 and Wonderlands on the other hand are terrible forcing the elements to the very edges without a horizontal HUD element slider or center HUD option. Modern Warfare, Halo MCC, Halo Infinite, Battlefield games(2042 only has the HUD scale in the .ini file since they did not even bother to make a UI tool for it lol) all have the option to change the HUD positioning to your liking. Games would be better off if they just had a setting to at the very least center the HUD elements to a 16:9 aspect ratio.
@@impact224488 Bro, same. Sadly even the Anomaly mod can't escape the issues even though it's built on an updated X-Ray engine from 2011 that was meant for the original Stalker 2.
@@ampedworldgaming2266 in csgo you can see more surrounding with a 21:9 monitor. same as 16:9 vs 4:3. i believe you can't make that difference up with fov sliders
In FPS games ultra-wide can give certain advantages, the most noticeable one is that you can have a wider view of the map and surroundings and spot some enemies before they can even notice you.
this isn't the case for all games. I know that it gives you a wider view in Rainbow Six Siege, but in Overwatch the width of the camera is the same as on a 16:9 screen. I dont know how common it is or what other games work like that, but it wouldnt surprise me if there are other games that do the same thing
@@infernobandito yup, i would assume most games have a field of view value separated from the resolution, so playing in ultra wide will only distort the image, but not show anything extra
The game that made me truly fall in love with having an ultrawide screen was surprisingly World of Warcraft. The extra space meant that I could open up my inventory and character panel and still have a regular 16:9 sized view into the game world in the middle of the screen. It's great for other games too, but using it in WoW felt so freeing, and using a standard monitor in it now feels claustrophobic.
This is the main reason I switched back from ultrawide to 16:9. I love the idea of ultrawide, but the support is very lacking and for office work I find two 16:9 screen much more productive.
@@meloney metal gear solid 5 doesn't have native support, and back when I had my monitor league of legends didn't either. They updated league to have support but fighting games also tend to stick to 16:9. Visual novels also usually aren't built for 21:9 so any images are stretched or the screen isn't used. All in all, these are a bunch of edge cases but when I was running into them often enough to have to stop playing my favorite games I just gave up and switched back to 16:9.
It needs OS or driver support for virtual screens. So for games that only do 16:9 you make a virtual 16:9 screen in the middle for the game, and have two portrait monitors for chat and stuff on the side This'd be excellent for office work too, three "fullscreen" apps, a landscape one centre, and paper-style long-scroll ones on the side (I actually do this physically with real monitors atm)
The solution is pretty simple actually, for UI elements give the player a configurable safe area and for areas that are supposed to be hidden offscreen actually hide them with fog of war or a foreground overlay. This really doesn't have to be hard to solve, it's a tiny issue compared to developing a complete game.
@@advanceddarkness3 Aye I got the same monitor. It's one of the earlier ones and it was super expensive for only being 100hz. But honestly 3440x1440 isn't easy to push anyway. 100hz feels perfectly fine to me and the fact that its IPS really adds to it.
I use a 32:9 monitor, and I have this program called powertoys, and in it there's a feature called fancyzones. This allows me to have a 16:9 display in the middle where I play all my games and still have room on either side of the game, where I can have discord or youtube up next to it. That's how I play my games.
Another problem about ultrawide screen is if your FOV is too high, the camera could clip to the wall or objects if you stand too closed to it and it's gave you a legal X-ray hack
that would only be a problem if the camera in 3D game were a flat plane like in 2D games, but i think the camera in 3D games is more curved meaning you shouldn't be able to see through walls with ultrawide peripheral vision
It's not that hard.. For 3D: Anchor your hud elements to at a 16:9 ratio, ignoring extra horizontal space. For 2D: use a forground image to obscure elements outside the map or even aspect ratio.
@@Hato1992 No, I don't. Those are both perfectly acceptable solutions to me. In fact, I actually like HUD elements to be narrower than my 32:9 display.
@@chef2654 As a counter argument I can say "If you implement it right, anything looks good, so why keep it at 19:6 ratio?". So your argument is invalid.
@@GuyFromJupiter Well, it's matter of aesthetic of a person. I understand that, but I wanted to point out more about "it's not hard". As it is sometimes a valid solution, but not always.
Funny enough, this just opens new possibilities for my games, I can use this instead of haveing to fear it, like, in my 2d games, I just might create lore on the other side of walls, or just mess with them and put a door there that quits the game if they try to hack and try to see where that takes, a little prank. Horror games I might make could use this too, they might regret seeing on the otherside because it might be scary and uncanny to look at.
@@kelpsie idea, an in game item that can make your screen ultra screen even if it's not ultra screen. Basically it zooms out so you can find secrets, that's the solution for people who can't ultra screen.
One big problem that also is quite annoying is that some games get cropped in, so you actually see less than a 16:9 and think you're on ultra wide, an example of this (although a niche one) is need for speed payback, it's awfully cropped in that I cannot see half the car.
On GTA V when you open the internet on your phone you can still see the normal outside world on the edges of your screen, your character also wiggles around while you are browsing the sites.
I'm currently using a 32:9 monitor (helpful for work) and the struggle is real with a lot of games, even brand-new AAA games. While the novelty can be fun and enhance the experience, most of the time it's an inconvenience. Hats off to Subnautica though, definitely the best super-ultrawide experience I've had, next to Portal
I think it's totally fair when some games force a 16:9 ratio, mainly PvP games but also 2D games for the reason you mentioned. The black bars aren’t as bad as some people make it out to be, imo As for the HUD thing, I feel like that's just your problem if you play on a 21:9 screen. They should have thought about that before, and I don't think game devs should have to deal with it. Maybe they can give an option to toggle between the two kinds of HUD you talked about, but I don’t think they should have to do more than that
The HUD solution is to simply have a "HUD Safe Area" setting like many games already have anyway. 21:9 users can just crank the horizontal safe zone to bring it in closer to where 16:9 would have it.
It really shouldn’t be that hard to make the hud more flexible and nicer for Ultrawide users. Heck, you can just use a clamping function to prevent side hud elements from going too far to the side.
When most console games have a HUD safe area, it is just lazy PC development not to add that function to horizontally change the HUD elements for a monitor. Bad take on your part.
@@Thorhian It isn't that hard to implement it on a new engine. It is a completely different story when you're trying to use an older engine. It isn't good or even efficient in the long run but that's just how the industry is set up. It's just more practical to work less now, than potentially decreasing the amount of work done later. Although I sometimes think how revolutionary it would be for the industry if CI/CD was used for game engine development.
thanks to you garbaj, I'm learning how to use UE5 and planning to make my own game :) you're awesome at explaining stuff and make it really easy to follow
Eh depends. I have very poor and a narrow field of vision. I can't see the entire display of an ultrawide unless I'm sitting too far away to read the screen.
i'd rather go with 16:10 than ultrawide for productivity reasons. 16:9 is severely punished by any ribbon-toolbars application and it only gets worse the wider you go
@@WhatIsSanity the thing is, it's not about seeing everything at once. It's more of seeing stuff in your peripheral vision and react to it that way. It's like seeing stuff from the side of your eye when others maybe can't.
But i remember some games with the UI can add margins to the UI. so you can make the edge or corner UI get closer to the center. and the player can change that in the settings
I've recently come across your videos and as a dev havebenjoyed your insight into these topics. Hearing another perspectivebgives me more food for thought. Thsnks much!
I really like what Hades did with ultra wide, Instead of black bars they added in theme columns that are really aesthetic. Hades as a game is overall really good, if you, whoever may be reading this, haven't played it, you should try it out.
It's actually funny playing Pentiment in ultrawide. It's like a theater play but without the curtains so when actors are leaving the stage they just walk past the 16:9 area and then just stand on the edge of the 21:9 and just awkwardly stand there.
imagine if you are the art director and you overwork your team to make sure every scene looks perfect, but then some players use ultra wide and some scenes look bad
Exactly this. People with little knowledge of game design just complain without thinking about how much thought is put into the framing, the cutscenes...
That’s actually pretty interesting. Also really like that you kept it short and sweet and to the point. Very well put together and very informative. Well done
The main concern for me is actually gameplay. On an ultrawide you can see more of your environment at once than a regular ratio which can create unfair advantages in a PVP game.
This is something I've been thinking about quite a few times. What do ultrawide users expect? To see more of the gameworld in a single screen? But that would give an advantage in PvP games. In my opinion black bars are the appropriate response, there needs to be a standardized ratio, and currently that is 16:9
hey, thank you so much for this video! I have been trying to find a solution for the ultrawide hud for quite some time and you just explained the problem and gave a solution better than any other video that was dedicated to do exactly that. Thank you so so much and have a good one!
I played on a 21:9 display for years, I was awesome for fps or simulators, but there we a lot of games where ultrawide was not working at all, and it was a constant issue. Usually I had to play with a stretched resolution, which looked wierd, if I wanted to avoid the black bars on the sides. I got tired of it, and now I'm using a 16:9 1440p monitor. I miss the ultrawide on fps games, but it does look better with the resolution and 144 framerate now.
couldn't you use centered gpu scaling to force the game into 16:9? that does make lower resolution videos smaller but for gaming it works as long as the vertical resolution is the same
I always see people say "I switched to 16:9" I mean couldn't you have the best of both worlds? I have a 21:9 main monitor and 16:9 second monitor and that setup helps me play whatever I want without compromises.
not really. you can theoretically run any FOV on any aspect ratio. It will just look slightly stretched towards the edges. You can run a 360 degree FOV an a 4:3 screen. It will look absolutely horrendous and you will puke almost immediately, but you can
I've actually helped developers support ultrawide up to 32:9. I get that UW is niche but having developed a game and added proper support for it myself, it's not hard and all devs should do it.
super tangential point on the issue with huds being pulled into the far corners: some people prefer a pulled out hud, while they have to look further away firm the center of their screen to see important hud information, some of the visual clutter is out of the way, and they can see more of the game is they prefer that. I don't have an ultra wide display and I'm not looking to buy one, but as an apex player that apex gameplay looks really nice. I wish I could play a version of the game with its hud elements taking up less visual space. I think the optimal solution to this is customizable huds. being able to move hud elements to a specific point on the screen would be really helpful for many players, not just people playing on an atypical aspect ratio. for people playing on a wider aspect ratio monitor, they could move hud elements to the typical spot, the center of their display, or far in the corner if they prefer that. this is also useful for all players who want to move a hud element to be more central, or out of the way, or even put elements like helath, ammo, ability cooldowns, or killfeed in a different area of the screen (ie. both health and ammo in the bottom left, health in the bottom left, and ammo in the middle). I also think allowing players to customize the color or opacity of assits, or swapping assits like the heath bar shape, or crosshair out for new hud elements can be a good thing, allowing players to use a further tweeked hud. This can be done either through developed customization options in game, or through modding (if developers allow these types of mods in their games). This can be an issue if a more custom hud provides significant advantages, but that's also only a big problem if a default hud isn't designed well, and this is more of an issue concerned with providing various options for players to set their preferences, and not creating disadvantages for players who don't know these options exist
Another problem is in the level design department. Composition has to be readjusted for different aspect ratios, meaning a designer has to go through a lot of places multiple times to check nothing looks out of whack
you brought up the hud thing, and i think one of my favorites looks when it comes to gaming at a larger aspect ratio, is the same type of thing N64 emulators do with the Zelda games when rendered in 16:9, where all of the hud elements stay where they are and everything else gets expanded. i think that look specifically would look really nice for something like apex legends.
You understate the challenge that different resolutions cause in UI heavy games - e.g. Strategy, some RPGs, where you'd want the entire screen filled but it is not clear how much space you'll have. This can lead to menus overlapping or font sizes being tiny which can both be very frustrating. I wished anything but 16:9 would be banned. And let's not forget, there are still some people on 4:3 out there as well...
Hades had a really cool way to deal with Ultrawides while being a 2d game, they put stylized columns on each side of the screen instead of black bars, that way it's fixed aspect ratio but it's less obvious it's forcing you into 16x9 and ultrawide users get a cool bonus that most people may not even see while not impacting gameplay.
2D game developer here, ultra wide displays have never really been an issue all you need to do is set some camera boundaries so no matter how long your display is your camera will no longer move past a certain point
A lot of older games (and modern games) didn't render things that would have been off screen to increase performance. If you look away from something than it isn't drawn and ceases to exist for the most part. So when you try to put it on a wider monitor you run into a lot of problems. If the game doesn't render something than it can't appear on your screen, so if the game is rendering things at a fixed resolution, you can't increase that or make it wider. Some people make mods for some games to create a wide screen mode, but unless a talented person who has the time, know how, and motivation to create a wide screen mod for an old game without wide screen support, than you will have to deal with black bars.
Destiny 2 handles this really well. I've been playing for over a year on my 32:9 monitor. In the graphic settings, they allow you to set a threshold for where UI elements can be for things like HUDs and menus.
Not just 2D games, but any game with fixed cameras would also suffer from an ultra wide screen. Not only it would ruin the artistic aspect of the framing of the scene, it could reveal some surprise planned to be seen on the next camera or unfinished blocking/void since the player wasn't supposed to see more than what was originally planned.
4:3 is also super common and most games dont have it and you gotta do funky stuff to do it, its just easier to see people if they're wider and you dont care about how it looks
This was great and very accurate. One of the biggest issues specifically with godot I've seen is the way the anchor system works sometimes means you have to switch the stretch modes of the TextureRects depending on if your X scale ratio is bigger than your Y scale ratio. So in one case, STRETCH_KEEP_ASPECT_CENTERED is better, in the other STRETCH_KEEP_ASPECT_COVERED is better. Although once you build this system to handle everything, it's no problem.
Yeah. I ran into that issue when I started playing Stalker again around 2013-14 because it wasn't meant for 16:9 and the flaws in an engine meant for 4:3 really show these days whenever I try to play it in 21:9. Mainly it being the hud and gun models being distorted and shadows generally being fucky or just broken.
I actually was finding solutions for this issue some months ago and I simply just gave the player not only the ability to customise their hud but also dynamic UI presets according to the screens resolution.
I play only on ultraide dispaly and have one tip for you all - download flawless widecreen. Its not always working, but it database is constatly updated.
as a 32:9 user there is a lot of challenges that come with using this monitor. desktop use, it's generally flawless and productivity shines, however games it's either going to be a massive hit or miss. some games require mods or hexediting if you want to force the game in native resolution, some games work out of the box, and some games refuse to work on these resolutions at all. i have ran into some issues where games i love actually completely break with my resolution, and playing windowed or bordered fullscreen isn't even a working option unless i change my desktop resolution to 16:9. i do hope developers start catering for ultrawide users more, as while yes having a monitor with an unconventional resolution is not the standard or extremely popular, it may be in the future. it offers an absolutely stunning and immersive experience in almost every game when it works right.
Remember how long AAA game cycles are, They have the next few Years of games planned along with the guesses on the tech that the machines will be able to support at launch. Its not really that they don't support or don't want to do so, but that the screens were not a thing at the time and depending on the engine it could be to hard or not worth the effort to go and add in support in a way that allows the user to use it.
the way i address this is by creating an imaginary 16:9 box for the ui that's either as wide as or as tall as the user's screen (whichever's smaller). this allows you to render the same 16:9 ui at all aspect ratios that also fills the screen for both portrait and landscape displays. this is the same as setting your windows desktop background to "fit". for 2d games you can render the game in a 16:9 box thats either as wide or as tall as the user's screen (whichever's larger), and then crop that overscanned 16:9 image down to the aspect ratio of the user's screen. this fills the screen and prevents any extra world being rendered, as the widest part of the screen is still limited to the same 16:9 as everyone else. this is the same as setting your windows desktop background to "fill". it can result in a worse experience for people with really weird aspect ratios, but frankly, they deserve it for picking a weird monitor.
I love my ultrawide panel. It's made games feel more immersive and blah blah. Some ways I counter things like hud is utilizing Godot's nodes to create a 16:9 hud or a 21:9 hud and letting the user select which one they want. This effectively just changes the root node to be 16:9 or 21:9 and keep things parented inside of the container so they change accordingly. Pixel art stuff does become more tricky, but I would utilize visibility as much as possible; in the last example having each room only be "visible" if the player is inside of it, but I find there's a drive for more "pixel perfect" development that changes the zoom based on zoom size. Lots of fun ways to dig around at problems personally.
everytime i start a new game for the first time and see it doesnt support 21:9 i always try to find a fix for the resolution online. dealing with black bars on the left and right that overall take 1/3 of the entire screen is a no-go for me especially because most games (including indie games and even games from the 2000s like morrowind, the witcher etc) do have ultrawide support and its usually just some super simple change in the game files
As someone who has made Ultrawide patches for skyrim ui mods it was harder to learn how to access the encoded files to edit them then it was to fix the ui elements themselves.
This is why Vertical FOV is nice, and having a constrained (ideally custom aspect ratio) HUD that skews towards the center of the screen. Sure, technically someone with a massive monitor can get an advantage FOV wise, but it's also relatively consistent, all things considered.
Iirc in an older game there was a hidden, intended to never be seen asset that some were able to find by hugging a wall and having a wide aspect ratio.
I love my ultrawide at work(an absolute game changer when it comes to productivity). However, I'm still hesitant about getting one at home not only because the gaming experience(at least in the games I play) is worse, but also because when you have 2 distinct monitors you can have things(such as a chat client) open while the game is full screen.
Get both UW and a second monitor. As a programmer it's a godsend. I can have a few files with code opened on the main wide monitor and then the actual application running on the second monitor in the normal 16:9. And then if you're playing a game on the wide monitor, you can have a chat application or whatever on that second monitor.
I've been using ultrawide displays for 3 years now and it's gotten a lot better nowadays, even games that don't support it natively have fixes. There's also the "Flawless Widescreen" app, a must have for whoever wants one
for the 2d problem i love terrarias solution, they usually have your character anchored in the middle but when you reach an edge of the world the character starts moving towards the edge without the character. for example, if i was at the right side of the map and i reached the edge my camera would no longer move right but still move up and down and my character would move right instead.
if you played diabotical, you will know that the game allows you to change the positions of all ui elements. I wish more games do this, like just give players the liberty to do what they want
i play gta on an ultrawide, and what they did was just keep the ui like on 16:9. it’s quite good actually, for 2d games, a good, but hard solution could be to only render in the place after you unlock it, by either making that area completely dark, or extending the texture of the wall to look like it’s just a solid wall all the way.
Its hillarious that a lot of indie games support Ultra wide better than AAA industry
To be fair that is also because they mostly use either Unity or Unreal Engine which both natively support ultrawide, so they dont really need to do much.
Yeah because triple AAA games are peformance hogs already. Putting them in ultrawide nukes performance even more
Because most indie games are cookie cutter pixel art side-scrollers
indies are made by passionate devs that are closer to the average player and tend to be sympathetic twords niches, like indies alot tend to support mods more, OSes (especially linux), and even little to no DRM.
(this is a generalization of course, but it does bear fruit)
@@astoraan6071 try ADACA, it has a demo on steam and is a halo/HL-like FPS.
not all indies are the same.
this reminds me of that funny Among Us meme where there was a person with an ultrawide screen that could see across the entire map
The hell really?
Haha yeah
Yeah and in that game it could actually give a significant advantage, since you could see vents pop and blood from kills.
He just learned "how to use eyes to see" from an indian guy's tutorial. It helped me type this comment easier too now that I can see further :))
@@WarriorOO2 your coment was so funny i almost forgot to feed my slave in basement
for 2d games I like the approach where camera stops at fixed point when you move to a "definitive" wall, and your characters move to the side of the screen instead of being anchored to the center
like in terraria
@@blvck_mvgic Yeah! Like when you get to the ocean. Pretty cool in my opinion.
this is the standard solution and its very easy to implement. In fact, when I've written my first 2D game template in SDL, the default state was just like that. It's not a problem at all if you're writing from scratch and building tiny blocks of code one step at a time. I guess it could be a problem if you only want to use game engines that don't support such a solution and try to implement it on your own.
Halo Infinite has a HUD setting that lets you choose how widely spread your HUD elements are from the center. It's really nice for ultra wide monitors.
Yep, same in Destiny 2, both are great on ultrawide
Same in Forza Horizon Games
Hud settings would be great in ALL games for ultrawide or just user preference alone
this has been a halo feature since 2001
CSGO has this aswell and its great even when playing at 16:9
There was a good interview at Digital Foundry recently where they talked to the developers of the Spider-Man PC port and they mentioned that a lot of the cutscenes were specifically composed for 16:9 and expanding to ultrawide ratios made a lot of things visible that shouldn't have been, like characters t-posing, so they had to go through every cutscene and make sure there was nothing out of place at any aspect ratio.
That's right. And we did in fact still see some of those cutscene oddities while watching the ultra wide aspect in their review.
@@Deliveredmean42 what about super ultrawide?
@@clownavenger0 I wouldn't know how to answer that. It sounds made up, but if it isn't then expect similar issues as well.
@@Deliveredmean42 super ultrawide is 32:9. My secondary monitor has that resolution but I mainly use an ultrawide now because I got that new Alienware qd OLED. Oddly grandia 2 worked in super ultrawide without any mods. It's nice to see so much of the environment in 3d open world games.
@@clownavenger0 Yeah, there is a reason not a lot of games support it. Mainly because increasing resolution at that ratio is pretty demanding that don't use higher end GPUs, especially on newer games. And the other reason is for optimization reasons and cutscenes trickery. We did mention how changing aspect rations to an extreme degree can break cutscenes. Heck it can even break rendering optimization tricks.
So the devs have to be very very verse with how PC games works, and if not the results are the countless shotty PC ports over the last few decades.
This is a huge issue that is taken into account with web development as well since there are so many screen sizes and pixel count that access the same content (phones, tablets, laptops and monitors).
From our side this is usually done by validating what the screen size is before specyfing which part of the code to look at the construct the UI. Definitely the worst part about programming interfaces in my opinion :P
I never saw ultrawide specific tweaks in frontend, but I had little time with webpage stuff and frontend in general.
@@vadnegru Maybe not ultra-wide specific but with so many different resolutions coming from different types of devices you end up having to redefine the specs. This can also be worsened or improved depending on how the page is coded.
Yes it is a pain in the butt for me Since i begin to make apps for android Around 2013
Yeah, pain, you need to plan pretty much everything and a change can't be done without doing everything again.
Just have relative positioning on all your elements. People resize windows. Its so common that you can’t even call it a quirk. Its just part of web development always
as a ultra wide user, I can see the end of every 16:9 overlay as it is too small for my screen
vignette, black screens, flash bangs, transitions... it always too small to fill the entire screen
sometimes, I even see sneaky trickery that the games do.. for example, on the skyrim menu perk list, I can see that all the item names are just stores on the sides of the screen
there is a software that always help me a lot called flawless widescreen
it fixes a lot of games (not overlays tho) but it actually fixes rendering and scaling problems
Wait what do you mean for the skyrim menu perk list? Am a bit confused about this one and now am really interested
life is hard for the ultrawider it seems
@@joltedjon He probably means that the other perks are just waiting at the sides of the screen, so if you scroll to them, they will just then slide into view.
Oh really? 😃
Letting you peer behind the veil a little
ive also used that program back when I had my omen x 35in curved 3440x1440p display, was pretty useful for the games it supported, usually would get rid of the black bars, atleast for normal gameplay, tho they'd often still be present in menu screens. Overall it's much easier and better then going with other fixes that involve editting a game file to force it to run at 21:9, which often fixes the black bar issue but causes a whole host of other visual bugs. I dont use it presently, since after I broke my omen, I bought a smaller 2560×1440p 16:9 monitor (flat screen sadly, felt like morty after he experienced "true level").
I wish more games would actually let you specify aspect ratio, as usually if your resolution is even an option, its a gamble between it being fully supported and forcing you to play at 16:9 with black bars. I was pleasantly surprised when I played monster world and saw there was an option to specify a 21:9 aspect ratio, considering all the other issues it had at pc launch (came after console) and it's use of denuvo drm (a known performance hog).
considering the lack of support for ultrawide, I dont even wanna know what it's like trying to game on superwide (32:9).
One extra fun thing with 2D games is that you might wanna activate enemies and other gameplay elements as they come into the camera's view. Ultrawide ratio naturally messes this up
Unless you punish the player for using a ultra wide screen, just add an enemy in your game that when it detects ultra wide is on a few mins in it will spawn, and make it as annoying to not use ultra wide screen, either that or just make thicccc rooms that ultra wide can't get too.
@@kagemushashien8394 or just make black bars that force the screen into 16:9 ratio for the game
@@kagemushashien8394 thats way too hostile and really unecessary
Just force the aspect ration to 16:9 and you are good to go
It's been an issue with Terraria since you can see mobs popping in
Maybe don't use the screen size that can vary alot to drive the game logic? We already learned to not tie physics and timers to framecount and use frametime in the math instead. You're a game dev. Be creative, it's your job
Valve recently introduced a feature to Half-Life 2 where you can set a separate aspect ratio for the HUD. This means you can set the 3D graphics to make use of your entire 16:9 display, but the edges of the HUD will be anchored to fit in a 4:3 area, allowing you to see the HUD as it was originally intended while still making full use of your modern widescreen display.
One thing I like about this is how it means for video editing, I can crop footage of my gameplay to 4:3 if I wanted to for artistic reasons, and it would still look totally normal as if I was actually playing with that aspect ratio.
I really hate that, it's unnatural
@@CinnamonOwO ?? It's extremely natural if you're using a triple monitor setup. It also feels nice to me to have the UI in 4:3, since it was actually designed to be played in that aspect ratio.
@@LieutenantVague I'm guessing it's the way that option looks that they don't like, not the actual option TO have it
@@CinnamonOwO and no one cares if you dont like it???
For 2D games, I know at least in Godot that the project settings menu lets you lock the aspect ratio but allow window resizing, so the sides of the window that don't match the aspect ratio are just black bars, and the game itself scales linearly depending on the window size
in 2d games the dev could maximize the vision to a certain distance so wider aspect ratios will give a more zoomed in view/less height
terraria does this
Although they may lose important info
imo black bars are easy and work with the least flaws
Uncustomizeable defaults that could be problematic, and most devs are lazy beyond making something work for typical users.
@@pacomatic9833 or for a more elegant but taxing approach, fog of war, that way you cant see behind walls regardless of distance
the problem is that platform games want you to see behind certain walls, so you would have to use two kinds of walls depending on the situation
Orrrrrrrrr, make the camera stop when it hits a wall. Just code in where you think ultra screen will mess things up so that when it hits a certain wall it stops the camera but the player can still move.
I might just go with it and put lore stuff behind walls, or creepy uncanny stuff so that it scares them to not use it, but then again they might just want to look at more of it, so why not, make it a feature. Who knows, mabey they make it a step further and you must use it to further the game.
My friend was always like "Ultra wide is so good! You NEED to get one" and I always would say that the performance hit wasn't worth it and I don't like the incompatibility of the majority of games and he'd always say that "It is fine, most games work" and then every few days he'd complain about X game not working properly and having to try and find work arounds that never worked properly lol.
as someone using ultrawides since 2016( when there was practically no support for them).
i just acknowledged that some games will never work and i have to use a 16:9 aspect ratio with bars, which is more or less fine
Mainly because getting a game that supports it correctly is a fantastic feeling, it is just so much better then buying a X larger 16:9 screen
also to note there is very little performance loss, if your playing 3440x1440 if your card can support 4k its less intensive
and if you have a 1080p 16:9 monitor vs a 1080p 21:9 its like a 30% increase in performance needed. which unless you have a 50w GPU you wont notice it
For me it's already almost too annoying with 4k gaming, because so many games don't have proper UI scaling. It's so annoying when a game runs absolutely fine in 4k, but then you have a ultra tiny impossible to read interface.
it's annoying when games refuse ultrawide aspect ratio, especially at 32:9, but it's totally worth it for those that do.
Would’ve loved to hear you mention the differences between projection types and how that ties into this and FOV. Most games use Rectilinear projection, while others might use Fisheye projection. Ultrawides naturally have a higher field of view and rectilinear project looks really weird when using them
Probably better for it’s own video but definitely an interesting topic worth discussing!
I can confirm that some games look much wierder than others. Minecraft for example feels extremely fish-eyed no matter what FOV I set, but I just played through every halo game and they all felt pretty much natural
I've always wondered why devs don't let users put the HUD where they want. Feels like the problem spoken about in this video would stop being a problem. But having a movable HUD probably comes with its own set of issues
I remember downloading addons in wow just to move bars around, it's been a thing for years and players prefer being able to customize their stuff
I feel like they hate square monitors more tho. I've seen quite a lot of games that don't even have 5:4 as an option.
no. that's because people stopped using square monitors, as manufacturers wanted to only produce the "TV format" panels.
Which is sad. I really want a less wide monitor as 16:9 is severely punished by any ribbon-toolbars application and it only gets worse the wider you go
Wasn't 5:4 already very rare to start with? I thought the typical "square" was 4:3.
@@TheExileFox you've said the same thing under aloost every comment here
@@TheExileFox use 16:10
@@Poldovico im pretty sure that 5:4 aspect ratio was mostly for lcd square panels and 4:3 was for CRT monitors. Both had their history but 4:3 was more common because they made more of them considering that square lcd had relatively short lifespan due to manufacturers jump to 16:10 and later to 16:9 relatively quickly
As an ultra-wide user it has been nice to see more and more games support 21:9 aspect ratios, but I can tell you from a web and game development standpoint that it truly is a pain in the ass to deal with, so any games that don't support it I do give slack to. I am just so used to 21:9 though because my School, Work, and Home computers all use it, it is just handier to have several applications on one view.
I don't give slack, because it's incredibly easy to add in games (unless there is a severe engine limitation). At most it will take a single developer a couple hours to add in all aspect ratios. Infact when developers don't add it, often the same day the game releases within hours the community adds in ultra wide support by manipulating memory values. If people that dont have 100% access to engine and game files can do it in hours with no knowledge of the game engine, why can't the developers do it?
@@Nib_Nob-t7x Yeah, I remember Elden Ring modding community creating an Ultrawide Support mod on day one.
@@justwatch7091 there was this time that elden ring bugged out and didn't render the 16:9 black bars and it looked perfectly fine, so I have no idea why they added those in the first place.
it's literally harder for web developers than games. You'd know this by how 3d games handle the camera, it's really trivial. Most mods just change a few bits in game exe and the game runs 100% flawless in ultrawide, like elden ring
it's easy for most games bro
I think for 2D games you could look on what side of the wall the character is and just infinitely expand the wall texture over the other side
but there could be something important like a new area on the other side of the wall that ur not supposed to see yet
The easiest solution I could think of limits how far camera can move horizontally, as your character approaches the end of the level, the camera just stops and your character continues to move relatively to the center of the view.
That'd be a pain as you'd have to specify each and every wall that does it and from what angles it'll do it, and in addition you'll have to adjust anything that becomes active based on whether it's on-screen to have an additional MaxDistance from player variable to stop it from being activated behind the infinite wall.
Basically you're having to add partial fog of war instead of just adding black bars, and that's a pain in the ass to code and can massively increase dev time in an industry already struggling with crunch.
Stopping scrolling can be helpful for the ends of a level, but it does nothing if you're trying to hide something in the same level but later in the stage.
or chop the level into areas (only rendering the one you are in or that are connected to it, and carve the rooms out rather than build walls (kind of like doom did in 3d)
it's simple enough and as a bonus you might get increased performance
I say that is a good one, you don't need to assume, just figure out how wide the ultra screen is and how many pixals it has, or just put a bunch of the same thing when a wall is on the left and or right, tight box? Just make that box Thicccc.
I say just use it as your advantage, mabey prank them with stuff, or put lore on the otherside, make it a feature, use everything to make a good game, that's what I'm going to do to make 1 of my games, use everything if it will go great with it. It's the tiny details that gets you going, if you don't want them to see it, then cover it up until it's needed, by making a Thicccc room that even ultra screen can't get past.
i just want to mention that 21:9s are amazing for 2D map-based games, like Hearts of Iron or Crusader Kings. The extra screen space is fantastic at giving the player a more comfortable playspace where a 16:9 might end up feeling cramped when servicing menus
Well another complication is with the developer recommended system specs. Maybe an RTX 2070 would run the game fine at 1920x1080, the games intended native resolution, but it would run quite poorly at 3440x1440. Some customers may not fully understand that their system is requiring the poor graphics card to render more than double the number of pixels per frame and it just can't keep a stable framerate at that workload.
Games don't really have an intended resolution. your display will have an optimal/native resolution associated with it t games will look the best with, but the actual game itself is "intended" to look appropriate whenever you're using your native resolution. I could be wrong.
@@BigDaddyWes Games don't have the intended resolution. But recommended system reqirments do have the intended resolution. The developer basically says that the game will run at 60 FPS at 1080p monitor. Obviously on 1440p monitor the game will have a lower FPS
Well that's an obvious thing with any monitor that has a higher resolution. Not an exclusive ultrawide issue
@@MaxBabilunga Right. I think that's an important distinction to make.
1920x1080 can look beautiful on a 4K screen, not always but usually. Change the native resolution to 1080, turn off those shitty internal post processing & 'smoothing' effects on your screen, but make sure super sampling is on and you have a beautiful display that runs quite well. Also I'm pretty sure 1920x1440 is the resolution to match the 21/9 aspect ratio for ultra wide screens. 3840x2160 is 4K. I'm blessed with a with a very good PC, but I often run games on lower resolutions for better performance.
32:9 user here, always disappointed when companies don't add a center HUD elements option to their game. Somehow older games did this by default like Borderlands 2 where the HUD elements are locked to a 16:9 aspect ratio while you can still see more of the world in the edges. Borderlands 3 and Wonderlands on the other hand are terrible forcing the elements to the very edges without a horizontal HUD element slider or center HUD option.
Modern Warfare, Halo MCC, Halo Infinite, Battlefield games(2042 only has the HUD scale in the .ini file since they did not even bother to make a UI tool for it lol) all have the option to change the HUD positioning to your liking.
Games would be better off if they just had a setting to at the very least center the HUD elements to a 16:9 aspect ratio.
Worst one I played yet was stalker.
Yeah this stuff kinda sucks, but i find it to be a minor headache that I’m willing to deal with for the awesomeness of 32:9
@@impact224488 Bro, same. Sadly even the Anomaly mod can't escape the issues even though it's built on an updated X-Ray engine from 2011 that was meant for the original Stalker 2.
I feel like you should have mentioned the competitive advantages in FPS, where you might see a little bit more than your average enemy.
Yes and no, generally the max FoV would be the same, it would just spread things out more which could allow you to use a higher FoV more effectively
@@ampedworldgaming2266 in csgo you can see more surrounding with a 21:9 monitor. same as 16:9 vs 4:3.
i believe you can't make that difference up with fov sliders
@@D1.y 21:9 with 1080x1920 res is like 4:3 on a 16:9 monitor but with 16:9 fov, so you have stretched models with a high fov
@@einleith yeah but 21:9 native resolutions see more
@@ampedworldgaming2266 in r6 you can see much more, especially on cameras
It’s nice seeing garbaj get better at cs:go in the background footage.
In FPS games ultra-wide can give certain advantages, the most noticeable one is that you can have a wider view of the map and surroundings and spot some enemies before they can even notice you.
On the other hand it can also reduce your FPS. Personally, i think 16:9 is good enough when some people stick to 4:3 ratio anyway.
this isn't the case for all games.
I know that it gives you a wider view in Rainbow Six Siege, but in Overwatch the width of the camera is the same as on a 16:9 screen.
I dont know how common it is or what other games work like that, but it wouldnt surprise me if there are other games that do the same thing
@@infernobandito yup, i would assume most games have a field of view value separated from the resolution, so playing in ultra wide will only distort the image, but not show anything extra
So? People without ultra-wides have been changing their aspect ratio and resolution for advantages for literally decades. Thats not new
@@GomulDart When did I say it was an old or new fact? I just wanted to make this known
The game that made me truly fall in love with having an ultrawide screen was surprisingly World of Warcraft. The extra space meant that I could open up my inventory and character panel and still have a regular 16:9 sized view into the game world in the middle of the screen. It's great for other games too, but using it in WoW felt so freeing, and using a standard monitor in it now feels claustrophobic.
This is the main reason I switched back from ultrawide to 16:9. I love the idea of ultrawide, but the support is very lacking and for office work I find two 16:9 screen much more productive.
May I ask where you didn't have support? I'm using 21:9 for about 5 years now and abrely had any issues
@@meloney metal gear solid 5 doesn't have native support, and back when I had my monitor league of legends didn't either. They updated league to have support but fighting games also tend to stick to 16:9. Visual novels also usually aren't built for 21:9 so any images are stretched or the screen isn't used. All in all, these are a bunch of edge cases but when I was running into them often enough to have to stop playing my favorite games I just gave up and switched back to 16:9.
@@matthewwalewangko1995 I had issues first, but most were completely gone as soon as I used flawless wide-screen. Thanks for ya answer!
It needs OS or driver support for virtual screens. So for games that only do 16:9 you make a virtual 16:9 screen in the middle for the game, and have two portrait monitors for chat and stuff on the side
This'd be excellent for office work too, three "fullscreen" apps, a landscape one centre, and paper-style long-scroll ones on the side (I actually do this physically with real monitors atm)
I legit thought this was moist critical because of the thumbnail. Outstanding work right there champ
The solution is pretty simple actually, for UI elements give the player a configurable safe area and for areas that are supposed to be hidden offscreen actually hide them with fog of war or a foreground overlay. This really doesn't have to be hard to solve, it's a tiny issue compared to developing a complete game.
I've seen the safe area one used in LEGO videogames
This stuff has been figured out decades ago. Some PS2 games already did this, so there is no excuse.
Once you go 3440x1440, you can’t go back.
It just feels so cinematic and immersive.
Truth.
I tried going from my ROG 34" 3440X1440 @ 100HZ to a 27" ROG 2560 x 1440 @ 165hz and it felt way to cramped, went right back to the 21:9.
@@advanceddarkness3 Aye I got the same monitor. It's one of the earlier ones and it was super expensive for only being 100hz. But honestly 3440x1440 isn't easy to push anyway. 100hz feels perfectly fine to me and the fact that its IPS really adds to it.
When 2D games include borders with art for 21:9 i love it.
I love these videos bro. Short, to the point, and always an interesting perspective that I’ve never thought of before. Appreciate your work, my bro.
I use a 32:9 monitor, and I have this program called powertoys, and in it there's a feature called fancyzones. This allows me to have a 16:9 display in the middle where I play all my games and still have room on either side of the game, where I can have discord or youtube up next to it. That's how I play my games.
What kind of monitor do you have?
@@neildees1761 I have the samsung CHG90. I got it for $700
games that say they have ultrawide but just ZOOM into the screen
Another problem about ultrawide screen is if your FOV is too high, the camera could clip to the wall or objects if you stand too closed to it and it's gave you a legal X-ray hack
In what games lol. Never had that happen to me.
that would only be a problem if the camera in 3D game were a flat plane like in 2D games, but i think the camera in 3D games is more curved meaning you shouldn't be able to see through walls with ultrawide peripheral vision
On a movie, I would prefer to see a black bar than cutting out part of the movie to fit entire screen. Same for games.
It's not that hard..
For 3D: Anchor your hud elements to at a 16:9 ratio, ignoring extra horizontal space.
For 2D: use a forground image to obscure elements outside the map or even aspect ratio.
For 3D: It looks like shit.
For 2D: It looks like shit.
Do you see the point?
@@Hato1992 sure if you implement it poorly anything will look like shit.
@@Hato1992 No, I don't. Those are both perfectly acceptable solutions to me. In fact, I actually like HUD elements to be narrower than my 32:9 display.
@@chef2654 As a counter argument I can say "If you implement it right, anything looks good, so why keep it at 19:6 ratio?". So your argument is invalid.
@@GuyFromJupiter Well, it's matter of aesthetic of a person. I understand that, but I wanted to point out more about "it's not hard". As it is sometimes a valid solution, but not always.
I subscribed because I finally found some good and well structured videos that aren't 29 fckin minutes... Thank you, Garbaj
Funny enough, this just opens new possibilities for my games, I can use this instead of haveing to fear it, like, in my 2d games, I just might create lore on the other side of walls, or just mess with them and put a door there that quits the game if they try to hack and try to see where that takes, a little prank. Horror games I might make could use this too, they might regret seeing on the otherside because it might be scary and uncanny to look at.
Sounds cool but as a 16:9 pleb I would feel left out if I learned a game has those easter eggs and there's no way for me to see them :-(
@@DarthLeopard TH-cam, baby, not the same as personal experience, but still cool ideas for easter eggs
@@banilo1022 Yeesss. Normalize ultrawide content on TH-cam, and make the 16:9 users deal with the dreaded black bars instead.
@@kelpsie idea, an in game item that can make your screen ultra screen even if it's not ultra screen.
Basically it zooms out so you can find secrets, that's the solution for people who can't ultra screen.
One big problem that also is quite annoying is that some games get cropped in, so you actually see less than a 16:9 and think you're on ultra wide, an example of this (although a niche one) is need for speed payback, it's awfully cropped in that I cannot see half the car.
I tried to make a 2D animation, and I hate even 16:9 now
Hahahaha skill issue
lmaoo
@@antidreams, kinda
On GTA V when you open the internet on your phone you can still see the normal outside world on the edges of your screen, your character also wiggles around while you are browsing the sites.
I'm currently using a 32:9 monitor (helpful for work) and the struggle is real with a lot of games, even brand-new AAA games. While the novelty can be fun and enhance the experience, most of the time it's an inconvenience. Hats off to Subnautica though, definitely the best super-ultrawide experience I've had, next to Portal
I've had an ultrawide for 6 years, it's WAY better supported now than it was then
I think it's totally fair when some games force a 16:9 ratio, mainly PvP games but also 2D games for the reason you mentioned. The black bars aren’t as bad as some people make it out to be, imo
As for the HUD thing, I feel like that's just your problem if you play on a 21:9 screen. They should have thought about that before, and I don't think game devs should have to deal with it. Maybe they can give an option to toggle between the two kinds of HUD you talked about, but I don’t think they should have to do more than that
The HUD solution is to simply have a "HUD Safe Area" setting like many games already have anyway. 21:9 users can just crank the horizontal safe zone to bring it in closer to where 16:9 would have it.
It really shouldn’t be that hard to make the hud more flexible and nicer for Ultrawide users. Heck, you can just use a clamping function to prevent side hud elements from going too far to the side.
When most console games have a HUD safe area, it is just lazy PC development not to add that function to horizontally change the HUD elements for a monitor. Bad take on your part.
Do you think that the 21:9 is the resolution of the future? Or will it be a fad, or perhaps always a thing of luxury?
@@Thorhian It isn't that hard to implement it on a new engine. It is a completely different story when you're trying to use an older engine. It isn't good or even efficient in the long run but that's just how the industry is set up. It's just more practical to work less now, than potentially decreasing the amount of work done later.
Although I sometimes think how revolutionary it would be for the industry if CI/CD was used for game engine development.
thanks to you garbaj, I'm learning how to use UE5 and planning to make my own game :) you're awesome at explaining stuff and make it really easy to follow
Ultrawide is a game changer. Once you've tried it going back to 16:9 will feel like looking through a window instead of being immersed in the game.
Eh depends. I have very poor and a narrow field of vision. I can't see the entire display of an ultrawide unless I'm sitting too far away to read the screen.
It feels the same way a 16:9 user feels when looking at 4:3
i'd rather go with 16:10 than ultrawide for productivity reasons.
16:9 is severely punished by any ribbon-toolbars application and it only gets worse the wider you go
@@WhatIsSanity the thing is, it's not about seeing everything at once. It's more of seeing stuff in your peripheral vision and react to it that way. It's like seeing stuff from the side of your eye when others maybe can't.
@@meloney
Yeah I don't have peripheral vision that wide, it's literally gone and probably never coming back.
if i was a game developer, i would pretend that i didnt know ultrawide gamers exist
But i remember some games with the UI can add margins to the UI. so you can make the edge or corner UI get closer to the center. and the player can change that in the settings
you can also make all the elements anchored in the center, so they stay the same distance in every resolution
I've recently come across your videos and as a dev havebenjoyed your insight into these topics. Hearing another perspectivebgives me more food for thought. Thsnks much!
I really like what Hades did with ultra wide, Instead of black bars they added in theme columns that are really aesthetic. Hades as a game is overall really good, if you, whoever may be reading this, haven't played it, you should try it out.
played Hades on widescreen for 2weeks didn't think much of it and you just blown my mind
@@frogfichtrlustr369 Hades basically wasted your screen out of laziness
It's actually funny playing Pentiment in ultrawide. It's like a theater play but without the curtains so when actors are leaving the stage they just walk past the 16:9 area and then just stand on the edge of the 21:9 and just awkwardly stand there.
imagine if you are the art director and you overwork your team to make sure every scene looks perfect, but then some players use ultra wide and some scenes look bad
Exactly this. People with little knowledge of game design just complain without thinking about how much thought is put into the framing, the cutscenes...
I honestly thought the problem with ultrawide displays were being able to see more with it therefore giving advantage to the player.
There's also an issue of balancing too, since ultra wide gives FOV advantages where they can see what normal 16:9 cant.
That’s actually pretty interesting. Also really like that you kept it short and sweet and to the point. Very well put together and very informative. Well done
The main concern for me is actually gameplay. On an ultrawide you can see more of your environment at once than a regular ratio which can create unfair advantages in a PVP game.
Seeing the other side of the wall in 2D games hurts my soul as a 2D game developer
This is something I've been thinking about quite a few times. What do ultrawide users expect? To see more of the gameworld in a single screen?
But that would give an advantage in PvP games. In my opinion black bars are the appropriate response, there needs to be a standardized ratio, and currently that is 16:9
More immersion and multitasking. Also there is a thing called FOV slider.
hey, thank you so much for this video! I have been trying to find a solution for the ultrawide hud for quite some time and you just explained the problem and gave a solution better than any other video that was dedicated to do exactly that. Thank you so so much and have a good one!
I played on a 21:9 display for years, I was awesome for fps or simulators, but there we a lot of games where ultrawide was not working at all, and it was a constant issue. Usually I had to play with a stretched resolution, which looked wierd, if I wanted to avoid the black bars on the sides. I got tired of it, and now I'm using a 16:9 1440p monitor. I miss the ultrawide on fps games, but it does look better with the resolution and 144 framerate now.
couldn't you use centered gpu scaling to force the game into 16:9? that does make lower resolution videos smaller but for gaming it works as long as the vertical resolution is the same
I always see people say "I switched to 16:9" I mean couldn't you have the best of both worlds? I have a 21:9 main monitor and 16:9 second monitor and that setup helps me play whatever I want without compromises.
Missed a big point: Ultra Wide monitors offer a larger FoV which allows you to spot enemies that you wouldn't normally see.
not really. you can theoretically run any FOV on any aspect ratio. It will just look slightly stretched towards the edges. You can run a 360 degree FOV an a 4:3 screen. It will look absolutely horrendous and you will puke almost immediately, but you can
I've actually helped developers support ultrawide up to 32:9. I get that UW is niche but having developed a game and added proper support for it myself, it's not hard and all devs should do it.
super tangential point on the issue with huds being pulled into the far corners:
some people prefer a pulled out hud, while they have to look further away firm the center of their screen to see important hud information, some of the visual clutter is out of the way, and they can see more of the game is they prefer that. I don't have an ultra wide display and I'm not looking to buy one, but as an apex player that apex gameplay looks really nice. I wish I could play a version of the game with its hud elements taking up less visual space.
I think the optimal solution to this is customizable huds. being able to move hud elements to a specific point on the screen would be really helpful for many players, not just people playing on an atypical aspect ratio. for people playing on a wider aspect ratio monitor, they could move hud elements to the typical spot, the center of their display, or far in the corner if they prefer that.
this is also useful for all players who want to move a hud element to be more central, or out of the way, or even put elements like helath, ammo, ability cooldowns, or killfeed in a different area of the screen (ie. both health and ammo in the bottom left, health in the bottom left, and ammo in the middle).
I also think allowing players to customize the color or opacity of assits, or swapping assits like the heath bar shape, or crosshair out for new hud elements can be a good thing, allowing players to use a further tweeked hud. This can be done either through developed customization options in game, or through modding (if developers allow these types of mods in their games). This can be an issue if a more custom hud provides significant advantages, but that's also only a big problem if a default hud isn't designed well, and this is more of an issue concerned with providing various options for players to set their preferences, and not creating disadvantages for players who don't know these options exist
Another problem is in the level design department. Composition has to be readjusted for different aspect ratios, meaning a designer has to go through a lot of places multiple times to check nothing looks out of whack
you brought up the hud thing, and i think one of my favorites looks when it comes to gaming at a larger aspect ratio, is the same type of thing N64 emulators do with the Zelda games when rendered in 16:9, where all of the hud elements stay where they are and everything else gets expanded. i think that look specifically would look really nice for something like apex legends.
Nice video. Short, quick and to the point.
You understate the challenge that different resolutions cause in UI heavy games - e.g. Strategy, some RPGs, where you'd want the entire screen filled but it is not clear how much space you'll have. This can lead to menus overlapping or font sizes being tiny which can both be very frustrating. I wished anything but 16:9 would be banned. And let's not forget, there are still some people on 4:3 out there as well...
Hades had a really cool way to deal with Ultrawides while being a 2d game, they put stylized columns on each side of the screen instead of black bars, that way it's fixed aspect ratio but it's less obvious it's forcing you into 16x9 and ultrawide users get a cool bonus that most people may not even see while not impacting gameplay.
The strategy i was going for was to cover undiscovered areas with invisible walls that disappear when the player enters them. Worked pretty well
i swear everytime im thinking of something you come out with a video of it or something related to it
2D game developer here, ultra wide displays have never really been an issue all you need to do is set some camera boundaries so no matter how long your display is your camera will no longer move past a certain point
A lot of older games (and modern games) didn't render things that would have been off screen to increase performance. If you look away from something than it isn't drawn and ceases to exist for the most part. So when you try to put it on a wider monitor you run into a lot of problems. If the game doesn't render something than it can't appear on your screen, so if the game is rendering things at a fixed resolution, you can't increase that or make it wider. Some people make mods for some games to create a wide screen mode, but unless a talented person who has the time, know how, and motivation to create a wide screen mod for an old game without wide screen support, than you will have to deal with black bars.
Destiny 2 handles this really well. I've been playing for over a year on my 32:9 monitor. In the graphic settings, they allow you to set a threshold for where UI elements can be for things like HUDs and menus.
Not just 2D games, but any game with fixed cameras would also suffer from an ultra wide screen. Not only it would ruin the artistic aspect of the framing of the scene, it could reveal some surprise planned to be seen on the next camera or unfinished blocking/void since the player wasn't supposed to see more than what was originally planned.
Also the fact that it provides a competitive advantage over 16:9 aspect ratio players through FOV
4:3 is also super common and most games dont have it and you gotta do funky stuff to do it, its just easier to see people if they're wider and you dont care about how it looks
This was great and very accurate. One of the biggest issues specifically with godot I've seen is the way the anchor system works sometimes means you have to switch the stretch modes of the TextureRects depending on if your X scale ratio is bigger than your Y scale ratio. So in one case, STRETCH_KEEP_ASPECT_CENTERED is better, in the other STRETCH_KEEP_ASPECT_COVERED is better. Although once you build this system to handle everything, it's no problem.
This has always been a thing. There are a lot of old games which support only 4:3 ratio because it was the most common back then.
Yeah. I ran into that issue when I started playing Stalker again around 2013-14 because it wasn't meant for 16:9 and the flaws in an engine meant for 4:3 really show these days whenever I try to play it in 21:9. Mainly it being the hud and gun models being distorted and shadows generally being fucky or just broken.
I actually was finding solutions for this issue some months ago and I simply just gave the player not only the ability to customise their hud but also dynamic UI presets according to the screens resolution.
I play only on ultraide dispaly and have one tip for you all - download flawless widecreen. Its not always working, but it database is constatly updated.
as a 32:9 user there is a lot of challenges that come with using this monitor.
desktop use, it's generally flawless and productivity shines, however games it's either going to be a massive hit or miss.
some games require mods or hexediting if you want to force the game in native resolution, some games work out of the box, and some games refuse to work on these resolutions at all.
i have ran into some issues where games i love actually completely break with my resolution, and playing windowed or bordered fullscreen isn't even a working option unless i change my desktop resolution to 16:9.
i do hope developers start catering for ultrawide users more, as while yes having a monitor with an unconventional resolution is not the standard or extremely popular, it may be in the future. it offers an absolutely stunning and immersive experience in almost every game when it works right.
It’s overpowered when you use it with max fov settings. You can see everything. It’s almost like a 360 view.
Remember how long AAA game cycles are, They have the next few Years of games planned along with the guesses on the tech that the machines will be able to support at launch. Its not really that they don't support or don't want to do so, but that the screens were not a thing at the time and depending on the engine it could be to hard or not worth the effort to go and add in support in a way that allows the user to use it.
One of common method used, like ubisoft have done on their games it's to force UI to render in 16:9 while the game is at 21:9
It took me so damn long to figure out the anchoring part
the way i address this is by creating an imaginary 16:9 box for the ui that's either as wide as or as tall as the user's screen (whichever's smaller). this allows you to render the same 16:9 ui at all aspect ratios that also fills the screen for both portrait and landscape displays. this is the same as setting your windows desktop background to "fit".
for 2d games you can render the game in a 16:9 box thats either as wide or as tall as the user's screen (whichever's larger), and then crop that overscanned 16:9 image down to the aspect ratio of the user's screen. this fills the screen and prevents any extra world being rendered, as the widest part of the screen is still limited to the same 16:9 as everyone else. this is the same as setting your windows desktop background to "fill".
it can result in a worse experience for people with really weird aspect ratios, but frankly, they deserve it for picking a weird monitor.
I love my ultrawide panel. It's made games feel more immersive and blah blah. Some ways I counter things like hud is utilizing Godot's nodes to create a 16:9 hud or a 21:9 hud and letting the user select which one they want. This effectively just changes the root node to be 16:9 or 21:9 and keep things parented inside of the container so they change accordingly.
Pixel art stuff does become more tricky, but I would utilize visibility as much as possible; in the last example having each room only be "visible" if the player is inside of it, but I find there's a drive for more "pixel perfect" development that changes the zoom based on zoom size.
Lots of fun ways to dig around at problems personally.
everytime i start a new game for the first time and see it doesnt support 21:9 i always try to find a fix for the resolution online. dealing with black bars on the left and right that overall take 1/3 of the entire screen is a no-go for me especially because most games (including indie games and even games from the 2000s like morrowind, the witcher etc) do have ultrawide support and its usually just some super simple change in the game files
As someone who has made Ultrawide patches for skyrim ui mods it was harder to learn how to access the encoded files to edit them then it was to fix the ui elements themselves.
This is why Vertical FOV is nice, and having a constrained (ideally custom aspect ratio) HUD that skews towards the center of the screen. Sure, technically someone with a massive monitor can get an advantage FOV wise, but it's also relatively consistent, all things considered.
for me this is a Joy to deal with as I love doing this type of stuff, all my website designs accomodate for the most absurd like of the resolutions
Iirc in an older game there was a hidden, intended to never be seen asset that some were able to find by hugging a wall and having a wide aspect ratio.
I love my ultrawide at work(an absolute game changer when it comes to productivity). However, I'm still hesitant about getting one at home not only because the gaming experience(at least in the games I play) is worse, but also because when you have 2 distinct monitors you can have things(such as a chat client) open while the game is full screen.
Get both UW and a second monitor.
As a programmer it's a godsend. I can have a few files with code opened on the main wide monitor and then the actual application running on the second monitor in the normal 16:9.
And then if you're playing a game on the wide monitor, you can have a chat application or whatever on that second monitor.
I've been using ultrawide displays for 3 years now and it's gotten a lot better nowadays, even games that don't support it natively have fixes. There's also the "Flawless Widescreen" app, a must have for whoever wants one
Just bought ultrawide monitor a few days ago, great experience.
Half a year and my previous statement holds up.
for the 2d problem i love terrarias solution, they usually have your character anchored in the middle but when you reach an edge of the world the character starts moving towards the edge without the character. for example, if i was at the right side of the map and i reached the edge my camera would no longer move right but still move up and down and my character would move right instead.
Have a nice day Garbaj!
if you played diabotical, you will know that the game allows you to change the positions of all ui elements.
I wish more games do this, like just give players the liberty to do what they want
Garbaj: "Some people are using 21:9 displays, and it's hard for them."
Sabaton: "Baptized in fire, 40:1
Spirit of Spartans, death and glory"
i play gta on an ultrawide, and what they did was just keep the ui like on 16:9. it’s quite good actually, for 2d games, a good, but hard solution could be to only render in the place after you unlock it, by either making that area completely dark, or extending the texture of the wall to look like it’s just a solid wall all the way.
In my game I started to plan the ultrawide support and then realized that I would need to update all the camera system. The pain...