Trying to understand resolutions

I'm really having a tough time fixing my game resolution to make a nice reasonable sized window in my 1440 x 900 laptop display that doesn't have blocky graphics, fat macro menu, and fat windows.

From what I can see:

• Overlay Graphics Resolution determines the size of the window itself
• Background Resolution appears to affect the resolution of the playfield (higher resolution means more sharper images while lower resolution results in blocky images like when you zoom in too much into a picture)
• Menu Resolution appears to affect the size of windows such as the chat box, menu, player window, and the macro menu (lower resolution means fatter windows and larger text)

So what I've set up for myself is a 1280 x 800 window (only small size that fits suitably in a 1440 x 900 resolution, 740 x 480 just seems way too small) with a 1440 x 900 background resolution and 1024 x 768 menu resolution (yeah it doesn't quite scale with 1440 x 900 but SE didn't give us widescreen users much choice other than big window or tiny window.) While this results in a fairly large moveable window with crisp graphics, long chat window, and small player window and menu that doesn't take up half the playfield, the big problem I got is the macro menu. It's massive and stretches out almost all of the top of the window instead of the nice snug little blocks that took up only 1/2 of the top of the window. I honestly dunno what to do here, I've tried messing with resolutions all night and of the occassional times I've gotten the macro menu to fit in nicely the other windows have been supersized. It's very awkward to read the macro menu when it's this big, I'm used to seeing what I need to hit at a glance, not trying to read across the entire screen which button to press, having to read it like this is giving me severe eyestrain.

Edit:
Just pulled up FFXI Config againand was scrolling through---keep going past the square resolutions...should see 1440 x 900 down towards the end, or you can do custom sizes in the registry as detailed in the wiki guide.

In the past, you could just manually edit the registry keys to actually render the window/background to your display size (1440/900). Don't know just how the new options are going to affect everything just yet, but the 001/002 and 003/004 settings should still be the same. Details here:

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Graphics

And yeah...don't much care for the new macro width. Like the look of them and all, just not how freaking wide they are now. Never needed 8 characters displayed in the past... don't need them now--can easily identify my Penta Thrust macro with just "Penta". Now allmy buttons are half empty and I feel like I'm turning my head or something now to read the fraking things.

Need the option to shorten them that doesn't require setting resolution below 1024. Hopefully, I've just overlooked the option so far.


Edit 2:
If you want to manually set your menu resolution via registry also, it looks like it added it at keys 0037/0038--same rules for the values was with the foreground/background settings.

pasting this from a post I just made under feedback in case some haven't seen that thread yet...might be something to tinker with a bit:

Quote:

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Something some of you might be able to tolerate...maybe not, as it distorts the interface a bit.

The Menu Resolutions are stored at 0037/0038 in the registry--follow the same rules as 0001/0002 and 0003/0004 for the fore/background settings. You can set your horizontal (0037) higher to kind of narrow them a little and push them back to the left a little. The catch is it skews the entire interface, so all your text and other buttons get compressed horizontally as well. As it used to be in the past, it may not work with just any number--might have to use one of the standard values or even multiple of one (2048, 2560, 2880, etc).

Gonna tinker with the settings some more to see if I can find a setting I can tolerate. 2560 against a 1920 width seems to put it to what felt more like the width of them before, but the text was compressed a bit much and looked kinda funky....

---

Yeah, shrinking the menu resolutions shrinks all windows, so the result is a more compressed macro menu, but a disproportioned chat box, menu, equipment screen, search window, etc with near unreadable text and the macro menu still looks fat.

Using the registry I've edited the resolution so that the window itself is 1024 x 640 (nice size that isn't too big or too small), background resolution 1280 x 800 (doesn't really need it much higher than this), and menu resolution 1280 x 800. The text is smaller than I'm used to at this resolution though, I maybe need to reduce the menu resolution down to 1024 x 640 or even 1152 x 720 to make it more comfortable on the eyes. The macro menu at this resolution however only takes up 2/3 of the screen. It's still way too big though but I can't shrink it any more than this without making the rest of the menus unreadable.

it isn't too bad if you don't go too far with it. Just going a couple hundred points higher on the horizontal (leave the vertical the same) can shift them about an inch or so on a larger HD screen. Font's don't change too drastically that way. I finally settled on 2304/1080 for the menus in a 1920/1080 screen, tweeked RGB and gama for a little more contrast and stopped using a transparent window theme to make the text stand out a little more. By no means a great solution, but I can deal with text and icons being stretched vertically a little more than those wide macro buttons stretching all the way to the middle of my screen.

Hmm, I'll try stretching horizontal some then.

Edit: No joy, all it did was make the text more blurry and the macro menu more bigger.

lol...must have made it go the wrong way. A few times I forgot to change it from hex to decimal when I was playing with it and the full 1920 size buttons came back (if it's too far out there, guess it defaults to screen resolution).

It's not going to be a big enough change to take them back to the old size (that would have to be about 2880 on a 1920 screen, which is unusable), but you may be able to keep them from running over into the middle of the screen, depending on what your settings are.

The only alternative is to put a lower menu setting (like 1022 x 576 to keep it about 16:9), Setting the horizontal under 1024 makes it use the old style buttons again. But...then your menus are HUGE. The text on the macro buttons is easier to read that way though. Another gripe I have with the new buttons--the text is a bit harder to read on them even when at the normal 1920/1080 setting.

Has anyone had issue where all the characters (NPCs and PCs are disappearing when u change the menu resolution to something different than overlay graphics resolution?

I actually have a 1440x900 screen.

Overlay: 720 x 576 (I think... I set it something around here, the important part is to get an aspect ratio close to 16:9.)
Background 1440x900

This will have the window take up about less then half of the screen while retaining the old macro look. You can also maximize it now without it looking like the rear end of a Galka who had a run in with a Rusty Tail Cutter.

Go to the config once you've started up and change the aspect ratio to match that over your new setup. It might not be perfect, but this setup worked for me.

The key thing behind all this is mainly to have your background resolution be larger then your overlay... it simply makes things look better.

All this information is quite confusing. For those of us who aren't registry competant, is there any way to just "fix" the macro line without dealing with the registry issues? Both my wife and I play, and we have the same complaint, the macros look as if we do have to read across rather than just glance at them.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by erevan

All this information is quite confusing. For those of us who aren't registry competant, is there any way to just "fix" the macro line without dealing with the registry issues? Both my wife and I play, and we have the same complaint, the macros look as if we do have to read across rather than just glance at them.

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Just use the config tool, set your background resolution as the resolution your window will normally be sized at, and the overlay resolution at a size lower then 1000 wide that matches the aspect ratio of what it will normally be sized at. Leave your menu at the default setting of "---" or whatever it says. This is basically what I suggested in my previous comment.

Personally, I have it sized lower then 1000 for reasons other then the macro changes, but it makes the old macro style appear.

yeah...setting the main or menu resolutions BELOW 1024 x <anything> will bring back the old macros. Note that is BELOW 1024, not AT 1024.....when you are on a large widescreen monitor--o m f g. After ~2 yrs at HD resolution on a 23" screen....ewe. It results in the same problem (actually worse)--the macro bar is still about 10 inches long, and runs all the way to right of center---not compacted in the left-hand side like it was before, and you loose a large chunk of your view because EVERYTHING in the UI is much larger also.

Think of it like this:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
<HP/MP>

vs

<HP/MP>__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

That may seem exaggerated...but that is pretty much the before and after at 1920. It literally is twice as long, if not more because of both the increased width of each button coupled with how it gets bumped over by the HP/MP bars. Lowering the resolution by roughly 1/2 to make it revert to the older style has the same effect--making them roughly twice as wide (not to mention everything else is also roughly twice the size, killing your view of the action).

If your graphics card can handle it set the Background setting to 2x the overlay setting.

e.g. 1280x720 for Overlay and 2560x1440 for Background.

Menu resolution should just be set to the same as Overlay unless you are using some ridiculously high resolution like 1920x1080.


EDIT: Some people here seem to be confused about how menu resolution works. Decreasing menu resolution will make the menus larger, not smaller. If for example you set your Overlay to 1920x1080 and the Menu resolution to 1280x720 the menus will be drawn at 1280x720 and then resized to fit the screen. So they will be larger then if you had set the menu resolution to 1920x1080.


Interesting bug found: If the Menu resolution is set differently from the Overlay resolution then the Background will use the same resolution as the menus on the title screen and character select screen and will change to what you actually selected once you select a character and enter the game.

Strange that FFXI actually has the ability to change resolutions once the game has been launched.