Tutorial TECHNICAL TIP - FIXING the Game for Widescreen Resolutions and Correcting Aspect Ratio

[TheBlackKnight]

All,

This seems to keep coming up for new players lately who are personally messaging me, so I wanted to provide the rundown for anyone new to the game.

Old Akella "Sea Dogs" may learn a trick or two here as well.

Although the game maxes out from its default resolution settings at 1280X1024, you can go MUCH higher by changing game settings in the engine.ini file in the main game directory.
This works the same in every Akella Storm engine game such as Sea Dogs, POTC, AOP, CoAS, and POTEHO and all associated MODs.

By changing a few settings, you can dramatically change the game quality and aspect ratio.

You can easily bring this game up to modern HD resolution standards, and eliminate most of the stretching on wide screen monitors because the game uses a vert- scaling engine.

The simple way to due this is to override the resolution settings in the engine.ini, set full_screen = 0, and modify screen_y to a higher vertical value above whatever the current setting.

My recommendation for most players is the following for the first four basic settings:

full_screen = 0 (controls "windowed" mode, and allows for alternative resolutions not normally available)
NOTE: You CANNOT ALT+TAB with this game, as it always will crash

PostProcess = 0 (this controls texture dithering and blending which is a form of anti-aliasing, so leave it off for maximum clarity and better performance)
screen_x = 1920 (horizontal resolution)
screen_y = 1080 (vertical resolution)

AND one more:

max_fps = 60 (keep this at 60, unless you have graphic slowdown problems then reduce to 30-45 fps)
NOTE: It is possible to run this game at 120 fps if you have a computer that can handle it

Now the MOST important:

You actually can change the vertical setting to a resolution higher than your screen resolution by using "windowed" mode, and it straightens out the vert- quite well, say screen_y = 1280 or higher if it looks best.

The only nuance is using widescreen resolutions, will slightly cut off the bottom of the screen, as this is a result of a vert- scaling game engine, but it is a small price to pay for near proper widescreen.

Its a hidden trick based on the Storm Engine 2.8, and you can do a lot of things to override the original developers settings without causing game problems.
There are a lot of other settings you can change for improvement in the engine.ini (such as farclip plane) and other ini files but many will be specific to your system, and can cause issues if you do not understand the engine and can cause game slowdowns and graphic anomalies.

The GUI interface still has resolution limitations however without a complete overhaul as everything is scaled from baseline 800X600 resolution on the font.ini and other files.
The F2 screen will always be a little wider than tall, which is only lightly noticeable at 1920X1080.
Most people don't notice the differences, unless you start messing with the interface.
This gets progressively worse at higher resolutions.
Not recommended to mess with font settings and GUI unless you understand the game engine and its use of texture files, because it can make the game completely unplayable.
An easier solution is just to use modified "drop in" higher quality texture files, which improves clarity, fixes widescreen, and not have to adjust positions of EVERYTHING.
I will post my font files at some point, and you will be able to immediately see the difference.

Try it out!
You can always change it again to suit your tastes.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I read this last night and the post process setting has my attention.

In battle after battle the only sounds playing were the music and sometimes the rigging creaking. Nothing else. So I tried this and suddenly all the other sounds started working! But it seems to have taken an fps hit. Still looking into this.

 

[TheBlackKnight]

I read this last night and the post process setting has my attention.

In battle after battle the only sounds playing were the music and sometimes the rigging creaking. Nothing else. So I tried this and suddenly all the other sounds started working! But it seems to have taken an fps hit. Still looking into this.

Disabling post processing does reduce computer resource requirements and graphic usuage, but does not directly affects sounds.
I can only surmise that perhaps it is freeing up additional CPU cycles for sound processing.
Disabling post processing will increase frame rate by the nature of less CPU/GPU work.
I never recommend using the post processing in this game to improve image quality because the implementation is complete garbage with DirectX 9 as coded, unless overridden with additional files such as SweetFX or ENB mod.
Even then, its not really worth the performance hit, just override the default game settings by turning on external anti-aliasing through your graphics card, if you want smooth lines and eliminate the "jaggies".

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Things do look sharper but there is a frame rate hit. 24X AA too.

 

[TheBlackKnight]

Things do look sharper but there is a frame rate hit. 24X AA too.

Here are a few additional quality tips for higher frame rates but improved overall image quality at 1920X1080.

Set anisotropic filtering to 16X.
Do not set basic anti-aliasing to more than 4X and override the game settings to enhance application.
Keep the anti-aliasing transparency set to OFF.
Frame rate should stabilize to at least 60 fps on a solid gaming system, except during massive ship battles.

Also, try setting your max_fps = 120 instead of 60, and compare changes, however their will be variances in frame rate at different sections of the game based on poly count during scenes.
I personally get much better results at 120 fps setting.

This is all about your individual components in your gaming system, and I can only offer suggestions based on my experience with the game engine.

For example, I always run my planes within the engine.ini at:
NearClipPlane = 0.1
FarClipPlane = 160000.0

This allows me to have extreme viewing distances consistently, but sometimes results in graphic anomalies based in the game engine and weather.
This does reduce frame rate.

When I run this game at 3840X2160 for purposes of game testing ONLY, I cannot hold on my system any more than 35 fps anywhere.
Ship models look incredible however.
Massive ship battles of more than 10 ships drop the game to less than 15 fps, and borderline crash the game.
Also, without font.ini changes the text becomes nigh unreadable due to size.
This game was never designed to run at such extreme resolutions because the engine does not quality reduce scale anything, and everything is rendered based purely on distance alone.
An example where is the scale is not even changed at all is when storms are raging outside a town and cities are underwater in "sailing mode".
GUI is a fixed resolution without modification.
This is the poor optimization I have referred to before in other posts.
Most modern AAA titles do not use these very old techniques, such as AC IV Black Flag.
The engine remain unchanged in POTEHO, although there were some very small shader changes and other tweaks (fire and smoke), but not much.
Modders here did a better job, period.

CoAS is still a much better game than AC IV anyway, due to game depth and complexity.
Not too many sailing games can you capture a Caribbean city for your own, turn it into a "free" town and then make it your home port.
I own Port Royale with its over 200+ gun 92-lb cannon fort, and my pirating adventures still continue...

At some point in the near future, computers will exceed the requirements for rendering which simply will allow the higher resolutions with this game engine such as was done with standard HD.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

This rig must have had some things running in the background the other day because fps came back up again last night.

I set the max_fps to 120 but the most I ever see is 65 even on land. I have a 5 ship fleet and am always in battles with 10-16 ships involved plus a fort, and fps does drop a bunch. Also most battles end in ctd so I save often.

What about "safe render"? 0 or 1?

There is no LOD in this game? Even POTC has some LOD. I would like to see some fog or something to hide those floating islands in the distance.

 

[TheBlackKnight]

The game engine starts barking at 10 ships, no way around it, unless you reduce graphic detail, which defeats the purpose in the first place.
Sound engine usage just makes the situation worse.

LOD is not well implemented in CoAS.
It really does not exist and shader management is really poor.
Mipmapping is also not utilized properly.

The easy example is just looking through your spyglass, you never see a change in detail in the ships as its always the same level at whatever detail the model has in the game, hence no change in LOD.
Hence the prevalence of graphic anomalies (floating islands, ship texture tearing, etc) as a result of memory swapping usage.

At least ships are not magically popping up in the distance....so there is somewhat of a tradeoff.
As I have stated previously, the only way to fix this is to overhaul the game engine which did not even happen for POTEHO.
That is the bad part of increasing working texture size from say 512X512 to 2048X2048 as it compounds the problem.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Egad! When looking through a spyglass one can see the LOD changes in POTC. Why did Akella delete such a basic function?

Ships don't magically pop up in POTC unless one considers 7,000 yards too close. Even at 2,000 yards they are hard to see and are often invisible. I would like something like that for ERAS but guess it will not happen.

So it sounds like I will need to lose a ship, but which one? The VOC Escort or the 60 gunner?