Why no warcraft 2 widescreen/hi res

[Mechanical Man]

While other games at that period like cnc franchise, kknd, outpost, age of empires got their patches for today resolution monitors, warcraft 2 is nowhere to be found. There is one hack even for starcraft, called Insectloader, although is buggy, but better than nothing. Since it's quite famous game, it's hard to believe, no one was able to patch it. Are there some technical limitations with non adaptable engine, is blizzard somehow interfering or what? Because all such games were 2d and all these patches use pixel based system which enlarge your view depending on a resolution. Some may say the current resolution is better for balance reasons, but I don't intend to play it multiplayer, maybe only casually.

 

[Eagle XI]

Keyword: Activision

 

[Dr Super Good]

Because it changes the field of view. As such playing at a higher resolution will give you no extra image information.

The only advantage for higher resolution support is that many of todays displays no longer support old lower resolution so that by outputting at a higher resolution with up scaling you can run at the monitor native rate even if no extra visual information is displayed.

 

[Mechanical Man]

Yes, but it's not 3d like warcraft 3, pure 2d like games I mentioned and field of view has little to do with it.

 

[Dr Super Good]

and field of view has little to do with it.

It has everything to do with it as seeing more will give you more of an advantage (or less of an advantage, will explain).

If you have a big screen with sufficient DPI you can see more area unless you scale the pixels. This gives you an unfair advantage as you do not need to move your view as much as you have more field area on screen at any time. If you have a very high DPI screen then the other extreme occurs where you see so much on screen that you cannot resolve any of it because it is so small (is that a peon or a grunt or a dragon?).

For a combination of fairness and usability you need to define the display area as a fixed size and then use scaling to obtain higher resolutions. Since the sprites are low resolution this will result in blurry graphics as you cannot show information that does not exist.

Age of Empires 2, if I recall, was not a simple remake. Instead they also re-drew many of the sprites at 2-4 times resolution since they had the originals. The reason people complained they looked poorer than the originals is that the hand-painted parts were gone and that was heavily abused for fine detail as they have limited pixels to go with. Otherwise if you played AoE2 on a high density display you would barely see your cursor let alone your army.

Once a scaling layer is added it works both ways. You can also downsize the sprites so that lower resolution displays can see more at once at the cost of losing high frequency visual information.

I do agree that in this day and age the field of view used by such maps could be raised easily. It would work with most modern displays very well. However I disagree that the field of view should be resolution based and instead recommend making it independent, possibly selectable for some hard-coded options. Making it single player only is not an option as people do run competitive events such as time trials in single player and it would not be fair to make it particularly hardware coupled. As such I would recommend for single player some kind of view area parameter which users can choose not coupled to their monitor but not restricted like in multiplayer.

 

[Mechanical Man]

You missed the point. It's not about advantages and disadvantages, I'm talking if there are some limitations, I can understand that in 90s developers didn't have in mind such big resolutions, however in some games 3rd party hack managed to achieve it. Emphasizing 3rd party hacks, which means no battle.net or any official tournament servers, but most of these games I'm talking about are very old anyway. And warcraft 2 has no such hacks.

However I found something similar of what I was searching for, it's called Wargus http://wargus.sourceforge.net/index.shtml

 

[Dr Super Good]

Depending how they coded the graphics it could be as easy as changing some hard-coded constants to as difficult as having to re-write the entire graphics assembly.

Sadly back then people did not think to the future as much as they should. Now days all graphics should be considered vectors to some extent.