The question is, is there really nothing can be done about this? I know that changes of the UI have been described as out of scope by several different devs over the years, but I don't really understand where
the problem lies. Downscaling the UI seems to be a non-issue - changing from 720p to 1080p for example doesn't lead to any display bugs.
It is like the UI elements just hit a fixed limit when going beyond 1080p resulution, which is curious, since the UI is just a bunch of textures projected on a mesh which both can be (in theory) stretched to any size.
Some aspects of the UI can be upscaled without any trouble, while others can not. I poked around in the UI files a bit and made the following observations:
- the UI is projected onto simple rectangular meshes
- the meshes are positioned on screen using fixed points
- the meshes can be moved around by changing their origin point within the mesh
- any UI scale change breaks mouse support, as the clickable UI elements remain fixed in size
- clickables don't scale upwards of 1080p, but they will scale downwards
- also, since X² can upscale without any issues at all I believe that mouse funtionality is at the core of the problem (X² screenshot for nostalgia's sake) - the following UI elements can be upscaled without any issues (example):
- gravidar, hud icons, weapon display and ship info
- sector map, galaxy map, information windows and subtitles
- loading screen quotes
- animated NPC faces
- however, it is possible to go over board (example) - the monitors can both be upscaled too, both using different models as projection surface
- the zoomed view uses a different mesh, which is the same for both monitors
- this means it cannot easily be upscaled, since at least on monitor will be cut off when zoomed in
- the video display resists any attempts of upscaling (example) - the sidebar and its submenus can be upscaled, but wile the submenus work the sidebar icons will not adjust to the screen borders
- changing the size of tooltips crashes the game
- fonts can be changed by just replacing them (as seen here)
- this can lead to some issues, since many of the text displays are formated around the specifickerningkeming of the Tahoma13 font
Anyway, I will continue to dream of a universe were EGOSOFT releases the source code