Tilesets fail to use full available screen area

Game Talk The Garage
1

I have a widescreen monitor, so I like to give cata lots of space, adjusting the size of the viewport in the interface screen (90x32 is large enough to completely fill my screen). Using ASCII graphics, I found that a widescreen monitor provides far more space than you need to either side; the maximum displayable screen size is enough to completely display your horizontal field of vision; if you look to either side, you’re ‘looking’ beyond your maximum vision. Vertical, of course, is another story… but having blackspace to either side is fine, given that the maximum possible viewspace is already displayed.

A look out the window using ASCII, for reference (note the blackspace to the left and right)

CextQpP.png1904×1078

Unfortunately, when playing with tiles, the same limit on maximum displayable space exists; the game won’t make use of any more of that space, despite the fact that the tiles are bigger… this means that you’re unable to see some things that you could’ve seen when using ASCII, for no particular reason, given that you’ve got the space to display it.

Same view, using Hoder’s (note that the exact same amount of blackspace exists)

XvEGydE.png1904×1078

The problem is even more noticeable when using Deon’s tileset, which REALLY needs the extra space

4vdpDtC.png1904×1078

How hard would it be to fix this? Obviously, you’ll always lose a little bit of visibility to a tileset, since the tiles take up more space… but it’d be nice if the rest of the display window were better optimized, giving you more visibility to either side (up to the maximum you can actually see, of course) instead of filling the edges with useless blackspace.

2

Using the “Narrow” option for the sidebar will help a bit, but still there’s empty space

3

Not really, no. Using narrowactually shrinks the screen itself (if you use the same settings, you get a larger window when using standard as opposed to narrow), so on a smaller monitor, you might turn around and allocate some extra space to the display area as a result… but since the problem is that the space allocated to the display area doesn’t get used beyond the maximum amount that ASCII could display, that doesn’t do a thing to fix the problem, provided that you run cata big enough to encounter the problem in the first place.

4

There were plans of swapping the viewport width and height settings for resolution, and it’d adjust the port accordingly.