Multi-monitor, mouse acceleration and subtitles

[Quaix 1]

 - For the video settings template, what does "true" for Multi-monitor mean? Very few games allow you to choose which monitor the game is on. Is that the only way the value can be "true"?

 - In the video settings template, what does "widescreen" mean? If you can select a widescreen resolution but get black bars, is that considered "true"? What if there are no black bars on 16:9 but black bars on 16:10?

 - The mouse acceleration page says that mouse smoothing is a type of mouse acceleration. From what I understand, mouse smoothing is averaging temporally averaging input over several values, which has nothing to do with mouse acceleration.

 - What is the difference between subtitles and closed captions?

 - How do I tell if vsync is on? (other than looking for tearing, which is unreliable)

 

Thanks!

[Garrett 214]

Multi-monitor in this context means combining several monitors into a spanned output resolution (e.g. Alan Wake's native support); as with regular widescreen support the game has to handle it correctly for it to be considered true/hackable (e.g. some games zoom the FOV in too close). The WSGF entries often cover the specifics of how a game works in multi-monitor. There is currently no feature on the wiki for games that support multiple non-spanned outputs.

 

Widescreen also reflects WSGF grading; horizontal black bars (letterboxing) and vertical cropping (Vert-) are considered true/hackable, since it's using at least some of the extra screen space correctly, whereas vertical black bars (pillarboxing) or stretching from 4:3 are false. There are also a few unusual cases like Castle of Illusion that list widescreen resolutions and have correct aspect ratio handling but actually upscale everything from a fixed internal resolution like on a console; these games are considered false/hackable since widescreen doesn't meet the expected standard.

 

I don't really know too much about mouse acceleration compared to smoothing. Some games make this even more confusing by using both names interchangeably. These might be separate entries in a future version of the template.

 

Subtitles are for speech whereas closed captions include non-verbal sounds, so there will be messages like [footsteps], [dog barking], etc., especially when those sounds are useful for the player to know about, with the intent that a player with limited or no hearing could be fully aware of all the relevant sounds being played; games with closed captions are very rare so this will usually be false.

 

Vsync being true depends on the setting being available in the game or its launcher, not so much whether the game uses it, so a game that always has vsync enabled would still be considered false (or hackable if it's set in a file somewhere). This also applies to other always-on settings like AA and so forth since players will also often want to be able to set their own levels of these features.

[Quaix 1]

I looked in graphics options in Alan Wake but didn't see any settings for multi monitor support. Would I need to have hydravision or eyefinity enabled to see if the game supports it? Would it look like an extra-wide widescreen resolution in the graphics settings?

 

Btw, looking at the list of steam games with closed captions, it seems that Steam does not distinguish between subtitles and closed captions and calls everything closed captions. The two games I just looked at, Outlast and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs have subtitles but not closed captions.

[Garrett 214]

Multi-monitor resolutions are listed in the normal resolution selection for games that can see those resolutions but only if you have such a setup yourself; this is also the case for ultra-widescreen and 4K resolutions. Most games don't list settings related to such resolutions (apart from maybe an aspect ratio selector) so there's no easy way of knowing how well a game supports them without having access to such a setup or a WSGF entry with the details.

 

Steam store pages often list features incorrectly so it's more of an indication of what games might have that feature rather than confirmation of the feature being implemented correctly; the game's actual support is what matters for the wiki. Like everything else this can be left at unknown if you're not certain about it.

[Quaix 1]

Hi Garrett,

 

One more thing. For the video settings template, does true mean the game gives you a way to change it, or does true mean that it's on? I'm probably not the only one confused by this -- it would be great to have a page where each of the template options is documented along with what true/false/incomplete/unknown means for each one. Here are some more I'm not sure about:

• If a game's only fullscreen mode is borderless windowed, does that count as true?
• If vsync is forced on by the game, does that count as true?

 

Sometimes I wish there was a "partial" option (yellow icon) similar to silver award on WSGF, and an additional, optional icon for whether it's hackable or not. The hackable icon could have a link to the hack below. 

 

Edit: Also, when the template option just doesn't apply, such as Anisotropic Filtering or FOV in a 2d game, should it be left blank or set to "false"?

 

Thanks,

[Garrett 214]

The correct way to use the state indicators is one of those things that hasn't really been made clear on the wiki. The intent was that the true/hackable/false state indicates how the game supports it, but many pages currently use true to indicate a feature that is always-on (e.g. forced Vsync marked as true).

 

Windowed and borderless fullscreen windowed aren't considered states of a feature for wiki purposes (since regular fullscreen isn't listed) so I'd say they should be true in cases where the game always runs that way.

 

Features that aren't applicable at all should be left blank (which hides them) whereas those that could be reasonably expected to be possible would be false.

[Andytizer 269]

Garrett, on 23 Sept 2013 - 10:58 AM, said:

The correct way to use the state indicators is one of those things that hasn't really been made clear on the wiki. The intent was that the true/hackable/false state indicates how the game supports it, but many pages currently use true to indicate a feature that is always-on (e.g. forced Vsync marked as true).

Hi yes, this hasn't been made completely clear. I had a discussion with Soeb about this as I wanted to change the 'Native' to 'Option'. This would show that even if Vsync is on by default with no option to change, it would be marked as false.

 

Any thoughts on this? I'm not sure if this is the most succinct way to show this information.

[Garrett 214]

Changing the column title makes sense. In addition to that I think the alt text could be extended like with Template:WSGF, so true would say "This setting is provided by the game or its launcher", and so forth. Unusual settings like 120Hz would use different alt text for added clarity (Template:Tickcross would need an optional parameter).