Scumm UI modifications for non-4:3 aspect displays

General chat related to ScummVM, adventure gaming, and so on.

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Frostbyte
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Jul 30, 2008 6:06 pm

Scumm UI modifications for non-4:3 aspect displays

Post by Frostbyte »

Something that has been bugging me from using ScummVM (mainly lucasarts adventures) is that with many displays/devices today you often get black borders around the game screens because the display aspect ratio is not 4:3. This happens with the Nokia internet tablets for example (800x480), most widescreen monitors today (16:9 etc.) and propably the worst with the older Nokia communicators (640x200). To improve the situation what I'd like to have is ability to re-arrange and resize the individual game UI elements. For the Nokia Communicators for example I would have liked to be able to move the action buttons and the inventory from the bottom of the screen to the left or to the right, and then scale the actual game "view" to full height. Similarily, with the Nokia internet tablets it would be great to be able to scale the game view to full screen, leaving only that and the action text row visible and make the inventory & action buttons to some kind of popup/slide "windows" that open when tapping a certain position of the screen.

So the question is is something like this practically possible to do? I'm not very familiar with the inner workings of SCUMM, so I dont know if the UI is defined by the engine or the actual game code...
clem
Posts: 2159
Joined: Mon Oct 31, 2005 11:14 am

Re: Scumm UI modifications for non-4:3 aspect displays

Post by clem »

Frostbyte wrote: So the question is is something like this practically possible to do? I'm not very familiar with the inner workings of SCUMM, so I dont know if the UI is defined by the engine or the actual game code...
I'm not an expert on the inner workings of SCUMM, but I think the verbs are controlled by the actual game scripts.

Also consider the later games (Samnmax, Full Throttle, Dig) - they use the "full" 4:3 screen, so it wouldn't work for them.
fingolfin
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Joined: Wed Sep 21, 2005 4:12 pm

Post by fingolfin »

Clem is right on spot there.
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