Thoughts and suggestions from a new user
Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2016 18:39
Hi, I'm new here at the forums, and I registered here to share my thoughts and suggestions of the 1.9.1 Beta of Commander Genius.
Firstly, it is very pleasing to play the old Keen games at 60 fps, and the game mechanics/physics reminds me very much of those in the old dos games.
However, I have some suggestions. It seems like this engine does not support xinput, but rather use the old directinput option. Nowadays I don't suppose people use directinput gamepads that often, as the Xbox 360/Xbox One controller is the standard when it comes to PC gaming.
It's no big issue when only binding one gamepad to this engine, but as Commander Genius supports up to four players simultaneous, I would have to rebind the controls each time I'm playing with multiple friends. It is a common "bug" in all directinput games when you use multiple wireless Xbox 360/Xbox One gamepads.
One other thing that puzzles me is the video menu. As known the old Commander Keen games ran at a resolution at 320x200, and after using an aspect ratio calculator online it seems like 320x200 equals to the aspect ratio of 8:5. I did not find that aspect ratio in the video menus of Commander Genius, but rather standard aspect ratios such as 4:3, 5:4, 16:9 and such.
Thereby it is not possible to obtain square pixels with any of those pre-existing aspect ratio options, unless you disable the aspect ratio options. As I am using a 1080p monitor, I prefer to fill most of the screen area with huge square pixels, in other words without any stretched pixels. If you do the math, the closest I can get to fill the screen image on my 1080p screen would be to scale everything exactly 5x, in other words a resolution of 1600x1000. The closest I can get to fill my screen with square pixels all the way is to use a resolution of 1280x800.
Maybe there could be an option to have integer scaling in the long run, like in emulators such as retroarch?
Firstly, it is very pleasing to play the old Keen games at 60 fps, and the game mechanics/physics reminds me very much of those in the old dos games.
However, I have some suggestions. It seems like this engine does not support xinput, but rather use the old directinput option. Nowadays I don't suppose people use directinput gamepads that often, as the Xbox 360/Xbox One controller is the standard when it comes to PC gaming.
It's no big issue when only binding one gamepad to this engine, but as Commander Genius supports up to four players simultaneous, I would have to rebind the controls each time I'm playing with multiple friends. It is a common "bug" in all directinput games when you use multiple wireless Xbox 360/Xbox One gamepads.
One other thing that puzzles me is the video menu. As known the old Commander Keen games ran at a resolution at 320x200, and after using an aspect ratio calculator online it seems like 320x200 equals to the aspect ratio of 8:5. I did not find that aspect ratio in the video menus of Commander Genius, but rather standard aspect ratios such as 4:3, 5:4, 16:9 and such.
Thereby it is not possible to obtain square pixels with any of those pre-existing aspect ratio options, unless you disable the aspect ratio options. As I am using a 1080p monitor, I prefer to fill most of the screen area with huge square pixels, in other words without any stretched pixels. If you do the math, the closest I can get to fill the screen image on my 1080p screen would be to scale everything exactly 5x, in other words a resolution of 1600x1000. The closest I can get to fill my screen with square pixels all the way is to use a resolution of 1280x800.
Maybe there could be an option to have integer scaling in the long run, like in emulators such as retroarch?