I just got my new iMac today, and to celebrate 1st world problems thought I would post about my first experiences of BG at 5k.
At first, the interface looks rough and blurry, as the textures are relatively low resolution when blown up to 5k, even if the pixels are tiny. I'm not sure how real that effect is, vs. it just looks blurry after seeing other apps at 5k (mostly Apple apps already tuned for the new resolution)
So I load up a saved game that is in the first Cloakwood area, just outside Aldeth's lodge.
Naturally, the next thing I do is turned off the auto-scaled UI. This leads immediately to a crash-to-desktop - although switching suddenly to 5k on a patch predating that resolution is a mildly unfair test ;~)
So I restart BG, and change graphics options to not rescale before loading a save. This works like a charm, the load/save/options screens no longer look blurry, but are quite difficult to read as they are also the size of a postage stamp - but that is fair, that is the UI I just requited :)
Now I reload that saved game, and the *entire* area map fits onto the screen, in fact there is a small black border to spare. Now THAT is what I call a view :) Naturally I will zoom in a little to play, but it is nice to have this major zoom-out feature! The main problem is that the rest of the UI is so tiny.
Given the tiny UI problem, I switch back to scaled UI, and suddenly everything is huge and blurry again. What I had not understood with the scaled UI is that I can no longer zoom out to the full game resolution - I am constrained to play at this blurry depth of detail.
It is late so I am deferring further experiments till tomorrow, but it does not look like there is a sweet spot in the UI settings to cover 5k yet. Clearly BeamDog need to invest in a brand new iMac for Dee to help testing of the next pending games and patches ;~)
Concluding impression is that the ability to zoom out to see the whole map for any area is a lot of fun, but we really need UI elements roughly doubled in each dimension to remain playable. Alternatively, allow the game area to zoom to the limits of resolution while maintaining a fixed scaling for the other UI elements when auto-scaling is turned on.
At first, the interface looks rough and blurry, as the textures are relatively low resolution when blown up to 5k, even if the pixels are tiny. I'm not sure how real that effect is, vs. it just looks blurry after seeing other apps at 5k (mostly Apple apps already tuned for the new resolution)
So I load up a saved game that is in the first Cloakwood area, just outside Aldeth's lodge.
Naturally, the next thing I do is turned off the auto-scaled UI. This leads immediately to a crash-to-desktop - although switching suddenly to 5k on a patch predating that resolution is a mildly unfair test ;~)
So I restart BG, and change graphics options to not rescale before loading a save. This works like a charm, the load/save/options screens no longer look blurry, but are quite difficult to read as they are also the size of a postage stamp - but that is fair, that is the UI I just requited :)
Now I reload that saved game, and the *entire* area map fits onto the screen, in fact there is a small black border to spare. Now THAT is what I call a view :) Naturally I will zoom in a little to play, but it is nice to have this major zoom-out feature! The main problem is that the rest of the UI is so tiny.
Given the tiny UI problem, I switch back to scaled UI, and suddenly everything is huge and blurry again. What I had not understood with the scaled UI is that I can no longer zoom out to the full game resolution - I am constrained to play at this blurry depth of detail.
It is late so I am deferring further experiments till tomorrow, but it does not look like there is a sweet spot in the UI settings to cover 5k yet. Clearly BeamDog need to invest in a brand new iMac for Dee to help testing of the next pending games and patches ;~)
Concluding impression is that the ability to zoom out to see the whole map for any area is a lot of fun, but we really need UI elements roughly doubled in each dimension to remain playable. Alternatively, allow the game area to zoom to the limits of resolution while maintaining a fixed scaling for the other UI elements when auto-scaling is turned on.