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Mad Poster
Original Poster
#1 Old 17th Sep 2018 at 10:26 PM Last edited by Zarathustra : 17th Sep 2018 at 10:59 PM.
Default Windowed Mode at 1024x768?
So because I'm still trying to get things figured out before I can really start USING TS2 on my new machine, I decided to see if I could get TS1 to install. To my surprise, it actually went easier than I had expected, and thanks to a variety of threads and forums spread across the interwebz, it seems to have installed fine.

The problem I'm running into is when I try to play it in windowed mode (a dual monitor display becomes problematic when trying to run a fullscreen version of a program using a different resolution). I can run it in windowed mode fine, same as TS2, but it only ever runs in 800x600 resolution. I know you can't play with different resolutions anywhere near as much as with newer games, but I would like to at least get the other "official" resolution of 1024x768 to work. I've tried adding -r:1024x768 to the end of the Target field in the shortcut properties, and it makes the window open at that size, but the game itself still only appears within that window at 800x600. Thoughts?

ETA: It seems to just be the neighborhood view that's stuck at 800x600, when I actually open a household the resolution bumps up to the full 1024x768. Curiouser and curiouser...

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Mad Poster
Original Poster
#3 Old 18th Sep 2018 at 12:16 AM
That subreddit is actually one of the places I was getting direction from already! I don't really want to go for larger than 1024x768 (at least technically, see below) just because I don't want to have to deal with the UI getting cluttered when it's dealing with that. I just want the game to display at the full 'correct' resolution on all screens like it seems it should (though it occurs to me that perhaps the neighborhood was never at 1024x768 to begin with, it was only ever 800x600 and I didn't notice because I'd always played fullscreen before...)

What occurs to me that I'd like, and that I don't know if it's even possible, would be to play the game in a 1920x1080 window, so that it would fill the full monitor but still have the benefits of windowed mode, but have the game inside that window play as if it were fullscreen, so it would just stretch to fill the space at an official resolution 1024x768 like it does if you just go with the defaults (if that makes even the slightest bit of sense to anyone who isn't me!).

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Mad Poster
#4 Old 18th Sep 2018 at 6:56 AM Last edited by HarVee : 18th Sep 2018 at 8:03 AM.
The game doesn't have GUI scaling. The main reason for this is because the neighborhood screen isn't rendered in real time. It's made up of 10 different image files. One for the neighborhood with all lots empty/bulldozed, 6 for the water wave effects, and the remaining 3 for the Plesiosaurus. All of the files excluding the 3 Plesiosaurus images are 800x600 in size.

The image for a home is pre-rendered and saved into the lots respective housexx.iff (xx being the internal lot number) file as a .bmp image upon saving of a lot. There are actually 4 total .bmp images of a lot saved. 2 with the roof up and 2 with the roof down. The only other difference besides the roof is different image sizes. You have 1 roof up and 1 roof down that are bigger than the other essentially. However, the game only ever uses one of these sets of images. Presumably the smaller pair of them. The lot images are then programmed to specific coordinates to be layered on top of the empty lot neighborhood image screen mentioned earlier in this post.

With this method it's quite difficult to scale the neighborhood screen to anything larger than 800x600 resolution without causing interface oddities and misaligned lots.

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