A complaint about lack of native 5:4 resolution support

So many months ago, a while after the original kickstarter campaign, I tried out a demo of Xenonauts.

It had it's technical flaws, biggest one for me was the fact that Geoscape was letterboxed on my 5:4 resolution, but I bought it anyway because it looked quite fun and the Battlescape did have full support for 5:4 resolutions which was acceptable for me.

When I saw that Xenonauts has finally reached it's full release I decided to fire it up again to play it in it's full glory and what do I see? You dropped the support of 5:4 resolutions so now if I want to play your game I'd have to deal with giant black bars.

What the hell?

This is a deal breaker for me. If the original Demo that I tried didn't have support for 5:4 aspect ratio then I wouldn't have bought it. You practically falsely advertised your product here.

I have never seen a game have less features after the release before.

Also, I know that someone will probably try to say that "5:4 and 4:3 aspect ratios are so archaic nobody uses them anymore, go back to 90s, blablabla."

Check Steam statistics. 10% of all Steam users have a 5:4 or a 4:3 monitor.

Is it really worth screwing over 10% of your target demographic?

I like that you got made fun of on SA so now you're complaining about this on the official forums.

There was probably a UI re-design at some point and it's scaled for 16:9 and not the aspect ratio that only 10% of the steam userbase uses. Why would you take the time and money to re-work the UI for an aspect ratio that at most 10% of people run?

Also, nice thread title.

A new 19" 16:9 monitor cost, what 80-100 euros? You can have a used one with half of that. Bring yourself to the 21st century, I'm sure you'll like it here.

At the time of the UI redesign it was found that scaling issues in the way the engine was coded meant that the game just could not support both widescreen and non widescreen resolutions without significant time and money being dedicated to investigating the issue, and even then there was no guarantee of solving it.

It wasn't a case of deciding that they didn't like 5:4 resolutions and just blocked them on a whim.

The game could be made to work well with either wide or narrow displays but not both so which makes the most sense to focus on?

If support for the Playground game engine was available from its creators then this likely could have been worked around but sadly that was never the case.

There are many different hardware configurations available and not all games work perfectly on all rigs as you have probably noticed.

This is a major downside to developing on the PC platform and reactions like yours may help to explain why many developers find console titles to be an easier path.

Their games only have to be aimed at a very specific set of criteria without needing to worry about supporting unusual or outdated configurations.

*edit* I also just edited your thread title to be more descriptive in case others are interested in reading the replies posted here.

Edited July 21, 2014 by Gauddlike

I'll leave it to others to comment on your post, Jack Trades. The only thing I would advise you is to be careful about comments like

You practically falsely advertised your product here.

Claiming false advertising is a serious charge to levy, and what you've written verges on the libellious. Please be careful in how you write, because the Internet really doesn't forget anything, no matter how much you may try to delete it.

I have never seen a game have less features after the release before.

Try Rome Total war 2 now that can be safely called misleading in what it told us it could do and what was actually sold. And Max caine is right the internet never forgets.

Did you keep up with the production updates? I doubt you can call a game misleading when you tried it during the making phase especially cosidering it`s just a monitor resolution. Surely a decent monitor is not that expensive, I see them going very cheap escially second hand now. Try places like Ubuyer or the AVforums computer classifieds (if you`re in the UK). You can get something decent for around £70 even less.

4:3 and 5:4 monitors should be letterboxed on the Geoscape but give you full-screen vision on the Battlescape. Is that not how it works?

For 4:3 monitors the ground combat is letterboxed as well.

OK, that shouldn't be happening.