Warning for Ultra widescreen Mod after I disabled it

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Z3RoNightMare#7140 a écrit :

Does it look good? Sure. Can it be abused to undermine PoEs design? Absolutely.

I've already given many examples why this is not a good reason not to support widescreen.

The race events is the best example as race 1 allowed 21:9 ratio and race 2 and 3 were limited to 16:9 -- and if the hypothesis is that wider screen is a substantial advantage you would expect to see it reflected in the results.

32:9 is arguably a smaller advantage than the difference between 16 and 21 as most of the screen extension is in your peripheral view and actually looking directly at the sides of the screen is more likely to get you killed than to provide any advantage.

Meanwhile the difference in how the game looks, and thus how enjoyable it is to play, is affected substantially.

Of course it's GGG's decision how they want to design their game, but it's also my decision how I decide to spend my money.

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Chacruna#2474 a écrit :

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Z3RoNightMare#7140 a écrit :

Does it look good? Sure. Can it be abused to undermine PoEs design? Absolutely.

I've already given many examples why this is not a good reason not to support widescreen.

The race events is the best example as race 1 allowed 21:9 ratio and race 2 and 3 were limited to 16:9 -- and if the hypothesis is that wider screen is a substantial advantage you would expect to see it reflected in the results.

32:9 is arguably a smaller advantage than the difference between 16 and 21 as most of the screen extension is in your peripheral view and actually looking directly at the sides of the screen is more likely to get you killed than to provide any advantage.

Meanwhile the difference in how the game looks, and thus how enjoyable it is to play, is affected substantially.

Of course it's GGG's decision how they want to design their game, but it's also my decision how I decide to spend my money.

Your "peripheral view" is not the issue and/or the advantage you would have with a 32:9 ratio.
The game is not designed to support this high ratio. Not only is "rendering distance" a thing, but AI behaviour too. Everything in the game has a specific range, for example, "aggro radius".

So if you then use 32:9 and can technically "see" further than everyone with the allowed ratio, you can "engage" with enemies while their AI does not engage with you. You can deal with things way before you even enter their aggro range.
And this stuff is "server-side" (the same for everybody), so adjusting the behaviour based on your client-side ratio isn't a thing.
Furthermore, even if GGG would somehow implement a feature where you are on separate servers that support 32:9 with mechanical changes - I doubt you would like it because that would ultimately result in changing the game.
Instead of "normal" AI behaviour you would pull aggro (getting attacked) by far more stuff because the range would be adjusted to your ratio. You basically double the "danger".

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Chacruna#2474 a écrit :

I've already given many examples why this is not a good reason not to support widescreen.

And all of them are ultimately biased excuses that try to disregard important aspects of PoEs game design to suit only yourself.

As mentioned here and in the other thread, they would need to adjust for the bigger ratio and the only thing that would accomplish is hurt everyone else that doesn't use your niche hardware. They're not that stupid, thankfully.

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JakkerONAIR#4902 a écrit :

So if you then use 32:9 and can technically "see" further than everyone with the allowed ratio, you can "engage" with enemies while their AI does not engage with you. You can deal with things way before you even enter their aggro range.

Could you please explain, how exactly "you can deal with things way before you even enter their aggro range"?

- Cast aoe? All target-point skills should have min and max cast range, this is not D2, and if player clicks outside of range, you interpolate this to closest point within range by the line between character and clicked point. And if your aoe is so big it hits half the screen, no need to see your target.

- Shoot projectile? You can do this regardless of FOV, and since poe meta always was about spamming 100+ attacks/minute and have crazy recovery, it costs nothing to blanket area with projectiles, no need to see your target.

- Send minions? I'll admit, no idea if minions can even run this far away from character, but based on their follow distance, I doubt it. And aggressive minion skills are not numerous, and can be fixed easily, I wrote this kind of code myself in one of my projects.

- Use extra vision to dodge? You said yourself, monsters aren't attacking you yet, what is the point? There are few niche cases like sirus offscreen death beam, but this is boss design issue, no need to gut whole game for a few battles.

I am 99% sure reason behind black bars is more mundane: events at the actors event horizon (reveal radius) were never polished, mobs appearing T-posed and VFX behaving weird, so GGG just covered it. They are too lazy to fix this properly. And "competitive advantage" is a myth, as said by many other posters. There is dozen of other such "advantages" in play, from fps and latency to better controllers and color gamma.

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Echothesis#7320 a écrit :

Could you please explain, how exactly "you can deal with things way before you even enter their aggro range"?

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- Cast aoe? All target-point skills should have min and max cast range, this is not D2, and if player clicks outside of range, you interpolate this to closest point within range by the line between character and clicked point. And if your aoe is so big it hits half the screen, no need to see your target.

That's not how the game works. If you use a ranged skill, the "ranged attack" or "spell" (projectile) travels until it hits something (mostly enemies) or the "duration" runs out. Take "Spark", for example. If you invest in "projectile speed", the projectiles can travel as far as the server can calculate.

If you exceed the normal "aggro range" these mobs will be "idle" on your screen while you can damage them before they take an action and/or their AI does not respond how it should.

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- Shoot projectile? You can do this regardless of FOV, and since poe meta always was about spamming 100+ attacks/minute and have crazy recovery, it costs nothing to blanket area with projectiles, no need to see your target.

The point is, that the game is designed around a specific interaction range, somewhere around the edge of your screen.
While "off-screening" exists, in the current game it's accounted for (rendering distance).
View it as this:
With a normal ratio of 16:9, you can clear stuff that would be 21:9 (+5),
but if they would change the game to work properly with a 32:9 ratio you would be able to clear 37:9.
Sure, you could say "Well, someone with a ratio of 16:9 could clear stuff off-screen too", but the difference is - he would do it "blind" while you can see everything up until the cap or your 32:9 ratio.
And the difference between 16:9 and 32:9 is massive.

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- Use extra vision to dodge? You said yourself, monsters aren't attacking you yet, what is the point? There are few niche cases like sirus offscreen death beam, but this is boss design issue, no need to gut whole game for a few battles.

Having more information than others is always an advantage, no matter the information and what you are doing with it.
And on the flip side, we could say the same...
"Because of some dudes who use a niche monitor with an absurd ratio, we should not change how the entire game is programmed.".

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I am 99% sure reason behind black bars is more mundane: events at the actors event horizon (reveal radius) were never polished, mobs appearing T-posed and VFX behaving weird, so GGG just covered it. They are too lazy to fix this properly. And "competitive advantage" is a myth, as said by many other posters. There is dozen of other such "advantages" in play, from fps and latency to better controllers and color gamma.

There are many reasons for this. AI behaviour problems, performance-related issues, server and client-side issues and so on.
Obviously, stuff beyond the "event horizon" is not polished because it doesn't need to. You have your "render distance" and your "view distance" and you only need to make sure that everything that enters your "view distance" works properly. Extending the "view distance" to 32:9 and the "render distance" even beyond that is probably nothing they planning to do when the outstanding majority of players don't use the 32:9 ratio.
That a few ppl use an "UltraWide" monitor when the standard is way below is a personal choice.
And GGG probably won't change everything to account for this rare ratio, especially not when it would draw even more server performance.

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Astroyka#4388 a écrit :

Keeping this thread alive, because there are "some" of us who have huge monitors and shouldn't be penalised for our purchases!

You aren't being penalized, it's simply having to play the game like everyone else. I could have some special hardware that allows me to read portions of my game memory, and it'd be just as much of a cheat.

So yeah, simply stop your cheating and there's no problem. No one cares that you're a wallet gamer and it doesn't give you any special right to see more of the map. If you don't like empty parts of your screen, well no one forced you to buy that useless piece of crap except your midlife crisis. Get a normal monitor or deal with the empty part.

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JakkerONAIR#4902 a écrit :

That's not how the game works. If you use a ranged skill, the "ranged attack" or "spell" (projectile) travels until it hits something (mostly enemies) or the "duration" runs out. Take "Spark", for example. If you invest in "projectile speed", the projectiles can travel as far as the server can calculate.

If you exceed the normal "aggro range" these mobs will be "idle" on your screen while you can damage them before they take an action and/or their AI does not respond how it should.

I've written AI for arpg mobs, and trust me, you don't want to have them rely only on active surveillance to detect targets, this is tremendous waste of server resources, especially in poe with its buffed monster density and league mechanics like breach or delirium or beyond. Only bosses/rares need truly fast and responsive AI, while grunts can do with relatively small detection radius, even smaller than 16:9 FOV.

Instead, most often used aggro trigger is being attacked by player, mobs should respond to being hit regardless of range to the threat origin, as long as threat is valid and targetable, or has valid owner in case of hazards and minions.

If GGG engineers are competent, they did the same. It doesn't matter if you can see what you hit or not, a hit on mob can be processed same way. So AI will always "respond how it should". And you didn't deny poe offers vast offsreening capabilites as it is. No one maps with projectile skill shooting only 1 projectile, it is de-facto a large cone aoe, longer than 16:9 FOV.

Now, how to prevent offscreening was described in above post, every player skill should have cast range limitations, and they are trivial to implement. GGG allowing to boost effective projectile range via boosting their flight speed and boosting aoe radius to half screen is the problem here, not player's monitors.

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With a normal ratio of 16:9, you can clear stuff that would be 21:9 (+5),
but if they would change the game to work properly with a 32:9 ratio you would be able to clear 37:9

Nope, because FOV doesn't affect your projectile range and aoe radius. You may save mana on less attacks per minute due to seeing farther, but we both know mana is always infinite, every crappy build accounts for that, at the very least.

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Having more information than others is always an advantage, no matter the information and what you are doing with it.

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Obviously, stuff beyond the "event horizon" is not polished because it doesn't need to.

Possible, which is why I never said mobs and VFX should be shown all the way. By proper fix I always meant fog of war, just not repeated it in this particular post among many rants on this topic:) Point of UW monitors was always immersion by vast landscape panorama, as UW users here said already. No one ever complained about not seeing enough monsters.

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Echothesis#7320 a écrit :

Now, how to prevent offscreening was described in above post, every player skill should have cast range limitations, and they are trivial to implement. GGG allowing to boost effective projectile range via boosting their flight speed and boosting aoe radius to half screen is the problem here, not player's monitors.

Yeah... change how the game works because a handful of ppl have a "problem".
Imagine instead of cucking everyone else with a "range limitation" that ppl with 32:9 would accept black borders left and right because they are off the norm.

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JakkerONAIR#4902 a écrit :

With a normal ratio of 16:9, you can clear stuff that would be 21:9 (+5),
but if they would change the game to work properly with a 32:9 ratio you would be able to clear 37:9

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Nope, because FOV doesn't affect your projectile range and aoe radius. You may save mana on less attacks per minute due to seeing farther, but we both know mana is always infinite, every crappy build accounts for that, at the very least.

That's not the point. The point is that ppl who want the 32:9 ratio normally want the game in these spaces (above 21:9) not to be empty, thus the game had to load in stuff and provide interactions. Furthermore, that would become the "baseline" because this stuff is server-sided, so everyone with a 16:9 setup would "load" the 32:9 version, hence - increasing the load on his system yadda yadda.

If these 32:9 players would accept that the space beyond 21:9 is empty (only environment without any enemies or anything important regarding information like league mechanic locations etc., like actual "fog of war" - sure, then it could be a possible solution.

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Possible, which is why I never said mobs and VFX should be shown all the way. By proper fix I always meant fog of war, just not repeated it in this particular post among many rants on this topic:) Point of UW monitors was always immersion by vast landscape panorama, as UW users here said already. No one ever complained about not seeing enough monsters.

Could be that GGG thinks this solution would be ok, but I highly doubt it.
The more you render in - the more work the system has to do; and while I don't suffer these problems, many ppl don't have super strong systems and rely on performance increases everywhere GGG can squish them in, instead of decreasing performance.

And don't forget, PoE is an isometric game, so how the game would have to produce the higher ratio differs completely from a game where you have an ego or even 3rd person perspective.

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JakkerONAIR#4902 a écrit :

Yeah... change how the game works because a handful of ppl have a "problem".
Imagine instead of cucking everyone else with a "range limitation" that ppl with 32:9 would accept black borders left and right because they are off the norm.

Cast range limits existence is not some luxury accessory, it is as basic requirement as reveal (replication, render) limits, lol. Original D2 had player cast ranges limited only by 2D viewport size, and only later blizz discovered they cannot increase screen resolution without completely breaking all combat, great perspective for any project:)

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JakkerONAIR#4902 a écrit :

so everyone with a 16:9 setup would "load" the 32:9 version, hence - increasing the load on his system yadda yadda.

Actual reveal radius in poe was always bigger than 16:9 FOV, this is the whole reason offscreen combat works to begin with. And they attempted to boost it even more in blighted maps, leading to notorious server loads if you spam seismic towers all over the map:) So no, the "load on system" won't change if you mean server. And what happens on client is player machine's problem.

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JakkerONAIR#4902 a écrit :

Could be that GGG thinks this solution would be ok, but I highly doubt it.
The more you render in - the more work the system has to do; and while I don't suffer these problems, many ppl don't have super strong systems and rely on performance increases everywhere GGG can squish them in, instead of decreasing performance.

All render work is client side, and UW owners do figure out they need videocards to run those resolutions. If you have performance issues you fiddle with DLSS or lower other settings. Poe performance is whole other topic and it shouldn't be solved with black bars either.

First of all, I have experienced the game in UW as there is a mod that fixes this, and it looks amazing and plays well with none of the alleged issues mentioned here.

Secondly, if you don't have a UW monitor you are not affected by this at all, so why have such a strong opinion about it?

Somewhat related it's very weird that GGG decided to limit the aspect ratio of their racing events even further than what is supported in their game, but at least it gives a very clear proof of how the "advantage" is none-existent.
Even the thought experiment of shooting things off-screen, presumably at endgame, is bizarre as that would mean playing the game in a very suboptimal manner and therefore also not an advantage at all.

Allowing UW users to experience the game in a more visually appealing manner doesn't affect anyone else, and the advantage doesn't exist.