Warzone 2100 Forums

I'm seeking a comprehensive templates.ini
One that has every conceivable vehicle in it.

My rationale is that at 1080p the icons are virtually indistinguishable, and needing to mouse over every one to identify it's text description is tedious. This tediousness is compounded by the naming schema not being conducive to ordering vehicles in a useful hierarchy...that appeals to my personal logic.
I have found that by using a naming scheme it helps me to categorise and group vehicles together, so when they are developed they simply appear in the correct sequence and proximity to other types of vehicles.

If someone had one to give me it would be much better than trying to click the thousands of sequences in order to make one.
Then renaming them would be relatively trivial.

That doesn't exist, in fact, I don't think it is possible to have them all, you would run out of GUI space.
Why don't you play in a lower resolution for the time being?
What do you mean by the icons are virtually indistinguishable? Do you mean you can't tell the difference in bodies, and weapons?

Yeah the gui slots run out, but as you delete some the others cascade in to fill the gaps. The idea is that as soon as a vehicle combination is possible it will be automatically available, then all I need to do is cull the superseded vehicles off the list.

The icons being so visually similar at higher resolutions makes it very difficult to identify anything quickly, so every time I re-design a new vehicle and remove older ones the time i spend mousing over things to see what they are is costing me dearly. Even more it's tedious because the relevant menus we need to click on are on opposite sides of the screen.

Lower res, pshaw.
My eyesight isn't perfect, but it's very good for my age, and despite the fact that I am sitting a metre and a half away from a 55" TV I still can't distinguish between the vehicle icons.
Lower res wouldn't help at all.

vexed wrote:Why don't you play in a lower resolution for the time being?
[...] Do you mean you can't tell the difference in bodies, and weapons?

I can't tell the difference either - they're miniscule on my monitor (1440p), sadly. I can answer the res question as well! It's because (through no fault of the game's) playing in a lower res looks like blurry garbage, imho . And the more I think about it, the more it baffles me that so simple a problem hasn't been solved in our video card drivers today. (So simple in fact that there are already long threads on GPU forums begging for this very feature).

Basically, why can't we enable pixel-doubling for our displays?! For instance, I want to play Warzone at 1280x720 - a perfect 1/2 resolution of my 2560x1440p monitor. Running at that res, the game should be razor sharp and fill the screen, but it's a blurry mess. Fiddling with the scaling in the GPU drivers yields no benefit; whether the monitor or the GPU does the scaling, it seems to apply some kind of bilinear blurring to the final image.

All they need to do is let us use, say, nearest-neighbour scaling instead and it would be crystal clear. It would look awesome. And it really annoys me that so simple a solution to the problem has not been implemented after all these years.

Sorry, not to hijack this thread or anything... but if anyone knew of a way to force such scaling to take place, I would be overjoyed to hear about it. I'm sure BETLOG would as well, sounds like it would solve his problem too.

Any relevant reply is welcome. Thanks for the insight, and yeah, some things do seem unusual.
I was considering mods. It's been a long time since I modded the quake engine, and I imagine wz is similar in complexity and arcana, but I'm slightly surprised there isnt a mod entirely to fix some of the graphics and layout foibles.

The small menu's in 1080 are the exact reason why I play warzone in 1280x720 because it seems to be the perfect balance between a quality graphical display with decent size menu's. Because the menu sizes scale with the resolution settings, the menu's are too small in 1080. In a multiplayer game it's too difficult and time consuming to click the small menu's. If there were a way to lock the menu size and make them independent of the resolution I would switch to 1080, otherwise the menu's are too small.

but I'm slightly surprised there isnt a mod entirely to fix some of the graphics and layout foibles.

Because a mod would not do it. Mods change the game data - maps, models, stats. the GUI is code. Very old code, from before the days of UI toolkits.

At the risk of over-simplifying, our UI is pixel based. That means it does not scale with display size and if you run WZ on a high rez display, you get little tiny pixels and things become hard to see.

We looked at using the Qt toolkit for our UI, but Qt does not work well with OpenGL games.

MIH-XTC wrote:why I play warzone in 1280x720

I might have to consider this, but last time I did it locked up the primary display and munched the desktops around, so I'm hesitant. Similarly WZ fullscreen is far less preferable than KDE fullscreen. The latter lets me keep using global hotkeys etc.

stiv wrote:the GUI is code.

Sigh.
But none the less; code that is in the source, presumably.
Hopefully someone with the degree in arcana and masochism will eventually get around to making this a little more manageable.

Also back a little closer to topic: I started writing a bash script to automatically click all the buttons to make all available vehicles and save them to template.... but it's pretty gruelling. And not at all operational yet.

You also have to remember, Warzone 2100 is a pretty old game.
Back when 640x480 was the norm.
The textures haven't been redone, besides some slight modifications, but, low res data still looks like low res data, there is no magic fix besides redoing everything by hand again.
If you want to tackle that job, be my guest.

As for doing a script to automatically click buttons, that is overkill IMO.
The game's data is right there, you can easily make a script read all available items, then make every single combination possible.

vexed wrote:You also have to remember

Yeah, I know. Still, with enough hinting and winking and nudging we might get lucky with the icon visibility one day.
For now I just have to build bigger vehicles earlier so that I can see them.
... not that having the biggest tank before anyone else is a bad thing either.

vexed wrote:The game's data is right there, you can easily make a script read all available items, then make every single combination possible.

Just the other night I realised that templates.ini data was being stored in the savegame folder.
What source would you recommend?
The savegame templates.ini seems to contain a bunch of other data. I'm not entirely sure if that hurts what would be the best source to work from.

Still, with enough hinting and winking and nudging we might get lucky with the icon visibility one day

No, It is not a matter of hints and nudges. It is a matter of people doing the work. The GUI has been a thorn in our paw for a long time. (to re-iterate, it was written by hand before modern UI toolkits and lacks their features)

If it were easy, it would already be done.

vexed wrote:The game's data is right there.

What particular data file would you suggest?

Data file(s).
http://developer.wz2100.net/wiki/TxtEditing

thanks