Quasi-Portrait Mode Using Window

[priested]

My first post but have been lurking for a while. PBA (and Zen) got me back into pinball and I have built a small tabletop cab with an old HDTV as the playfield and a spare monitor as the backglass. Needless to say, like many here I was extremely disappointed when Farsight announced that the PC version would not support portrait mode (at least initially).

Well, I have been playing around with the 2 window modes and discovered that I can temporarily make do on my cabinet using a window but I need a little help from those that may be doing this. At first I tried the Full Screen Window mode. While playable, this is really not an enjoyable experience as the screen is squashed at the top and stretched at the bottom. However, the normal windowed mode is actually quite playable using the overhead camera view stretching the window to where the floor portions are off screen. In fact, stretching this way produces a normal "portrait" view that isn't squashed or stretched. However, the problem I have is that the graphics are somewhat pixelated and any anti-aliasing I applied seem to be lost. In other words, it looks like crap. Not so terrible that I wouldn't play it but no where near as nice as Zen's portrait view.

Incidentally, one benefit is that if your monitors are arranged such that the backglass is the left monitor, the scrolling part of the table menu and DMD during play are displayed on that monitor and out of the playfield.

Is anybody else doing this? If so, is there some way of improving the image or getting antialiasing to work in the windowed view?

Sorry if this is confusing...

 

[Tin_Foil]

Is it possible to post some pictures? I'm interested in what you are doing here, but I couldn't quite follow it from your post alone.

 

[priested]

OK. Below are a couple of photos of what I am taking about. I am using window mode. There is an overhead camera view that is extremely narrow with lots of floor on each side. I have expanded this view to overlap my backglass monitor (and off screen on the other side). This results in a portrait view with the proper proportions (unlike fullscreen window). Since the DMD is on the left side of the screen, the overlapped portion with the DMD displays on the backglass at the right. PBA plays beautifully this way but unfortunately, it doesn't look as clean. Visible aliasing is present even though I have 16x selected. Just wondering how I can clean it up if possible. Even so, this is good enough to tide me over until portrait mode is available but I don't want to buy the tables twice. I hope Farsight confirms their cabinet plans and pricing soon.

Apologies for the quality of the photos. I am not the photographer in our family .

 

[Tin_Foil]

That's not bad for a workaround. I might try to see how well I can configure it in my own pin cab. Let's hope we get some info on actual cabinet views soon.

 

[Gardhul]

This is really nice indeed! I wonder if I can achieve to have it properly configured on my pivoted single monitor... I don't know how to extend the window out of screen borders without the help of a second monitor, and more important, I'd lose the DMD

 

[Sumez]

Wow! This looks great! FarSight need to allow portrait mode ASAP, I don't see what their coding issues can possible be, when you can do this just using windowed mode.

 

[goforthewall]

This is about all the info I can give (as I really don't have any more details).

Cabinet support is different from Portrait. Portrait will be an option based on resolution. It will be similar to playing on an ipad or iphone in portrait. There is no plans to charge anything extra or have this be separate from the game. It'll be available in an up coming patch. Not sure exactly when yet.

Cabinet support will have multiple display support, cabinet controls, real DMD, etc. Management hasn't figured out how that is going to be handled yet. Whether it's a separate app, and add on, etc...

And I actually need a real cabinet in the studio to work on this, and I'm told I should be getting access in a few weeks.

This is from the other thread regarding cabinet packs.

 

[Sumez]

Makes perfect sense, I was just wondering why portrait mode wasn't included from the get-go. Mike made another post where he said there's a lot of programming involved in making it work (and not the cabinet mode, just regular portrait!), which I think was a bit confusing. But I'm not going to dig into it as long as he's promising we're getting it.

I won't play the PC version anyway, but hopefully consoles will get portrait mode as well.

 

[goforthewall]

Mike made another post where he said there's a lot of programming involved in making it work (and not the cabinet mode, just regular portrait!), which I think was a bit confusing.

Well, one of the main things is that all menu screens (around 80!) have to be reformatted by hand. Also, finding a good camera view for portrait that fits the 9:16 or 10:16 ratios that most screens / TVs have, isn't so easy. I've toyed around with the method described in this thread and couldn't find a good (non distorted) aspect ratio. In addition the DMD placement needs to be changed to "free placement" ideally to accomodate the different setups, since you don't want the DMD in the way, when using only one screen!

 

[Sumez]

So basically, everything that's already been done on mobile devices

 

[goforthewall]

So basically, everything that's already been done on mobile devices

Pretty much! But, you know, different engine = more work!

 

[priested]

@goforthewall - Thanks for the info. I don't think Mike had shared that info at the time I started this thread. That still doesn't make the decision to buy now any easier for cabinet owners. While it is good that portrait mode is confirmed to be included for no additional cost, he cannot confirm that we would not have to buy the tables again for cabinet mode. So now what to do?!

I did discover that anti-aliasing was disabled in my Nvidia panel. That along with some other changes I made there has helped the image somewhat. It isn't perfect but it is good enough - for now. I don't really understand why you weren't able to get a non "distorted" view using window mode. Distortion is not my problem if you are talking about proportions or viewpoint. In fact, when Farsight does release a portrait mode, I hope it is a view similar to what I am getting here with the Windowed mode. I prefer this to Zen's view which seems to be further away from the table (smaller ball and smaller table elements). I am just not happy with the image quality. It is good enough for this temporary work-around but I would hope the final portrait image is higher rez and cleaned up a bit. Obviously the menus, while useable, aren't pretty at all in my setup.