[0.17.1] At 1440p now defaults to 125% UI scaling which looks blurry

[SyncViews]

On 0.17.1 on my 1440p display the game defaults to 125% UI scale, which makes all the images such as item icons look blurry and generally not very nice. The default on 0.16.51 is 100% UI scale.

While this can be easily changed, I mostly only knew to do so due to being familiar with the effect and how they looked in previous versions.

ui-scale.png (181.57 KiB) Viewed 4980 times

ui-scale-2.png (22.11 KiB) Viewed 4980 times

I would also note that I had Windows set to 100% scaling, so the "automatic" value didn't come from there (using a 27inch display, so the DPI is not that high, I am sure on say a laptop screen it looks visually different).

[malventano]

Can confirm on 1440P ultrawide display. Normally 1440P displays do not require any UI scaling as their pixel pitch is sufficient for 100%. Recommend this be corrected so that automatic mode scales to 100% for these displays.

[kovarex]

Having high-res version of icons is one of the first things on the list to do during 0.17 expermental.

[tehfreek]

Not sure this is related, but (on Linux) at 1920×1080 full screen the default UI scaling is 100%, but maximized it defaults to 75% (which makes everything hard to see). Maybe the scaling math is a bit off?

[Klonan]

This is by design, you can set a specific scale in interface options

[SyncViews]

If high-res sprites are at the relevant native size (40x40?) then that will defiantly solve it , at 27" individual pixels are easily visible.

I wonder if it should follow the users OS setting by default, on even 1080p ultra book I had OS scaling turned up a little because its so small physically (work PC, never tried Factorio on that personally).

[tehfreek]

Ideally the default scaling would be the font DPI divided by the display DPI (via `SDL_GetDisplayDPI()`). I haven't found a cross-platform way to get the font DPI yet though.

[malventano]

Having high-res version of icons is one of the first things on the list to do during 0.17 expermental.

High res icons won’t necessarily solve a 125% scale since it is an uneven multiplier of even the high res sprites. It will still be blurrier than native.

[SyncViews]

Ideally the default scaling would be the font DPI divided by the display DPI (via `SDL_GetDisplayDPI()`). I haven't found a cross-platform way to get the font DPI yet though.

Its a more complicated problem than simple DPI anyway, so that is only a half-solution in general for software. You need to account for expected viewing distance (e.g. physically, text on my phone is about half the size of my desktop, I keep my laptop nearish to the desktop, and for consoles on my similar sized TV I guess like 4 or 5 times the size). If the OS has a specified scaling of some sort that is a good place to start. Also, I gave up looking for cross platform API's long ago, just accept you need a file with some "#ifdef" style stuff and abstract the exact thing needed.


Factorio gets to be a little more specific by being for mainly desktops/laptops, and not dealing with consoles/tv, phones, tablets so that aspect doesn't really matter here.

[tehfreek]

Absolutely. But it's a good starting point since OS text size is generally the most significant factor in usability. Too small and it's a squintathon, too large and it starts crowding out the other useful bits.

[SyncViews]

That is what I meant, use the OS size, don't try to query the monitor/hardware or such unless you really want to deal with a lot of complexities.

For Windows from my reference I believe it is `GetDpiForMonitor(monitor, MDT_EFFECTIVE_DPI, x, y)` which gives you a corrected fake-dpi. Need to handle multi-screen (e.g. I have run a laptop plus external display with different UI scale settings) and the window being moved (watch move events, etc.) and I forget the Win7 fallback. Can't recall if SDL handles this, I feel like it doesn't since I always solved it myself. Possibly overkill for games though, its more important to get day-to-day productivity apps right, and windows emulates a lot for legacy software (unfortunate often causing blurring, but id rather be able to read/see it than have their 16x16 icons look nice).

EDIT2: I remember now, it does OK, but you need to be careful with windowed mode.

[kovarex]

No, we decided to not use OS scaling for a reason. Lot of people might have non-reasonably big ui scale for their resolution, and there is no control over it. We need to have some reasonable minimum for which the gui would be designed.

The gui is designed for 1080p at 100% UI scale, so if you want to have 200% UI scale, the minimum supported resolution is 2160p. But if someone has system UI scale 200% with 1080p.

[BlueTemplar]

Uh, I have 1920x1200, (so just a bit taller than 1080p), and it does *not* feel like the GUI was designed for 1080p at 100% UI scale !
(EDIT: depends on the screen size of course, but see the 2nd paragraph...)
In 0.16 the GUI looked fine at 100%, now in 0.17 it looks too small, especially the text, which also looks kind of bad.
(This was easily fixed by increasing the GUI scale to 125%.)

And I was surprised at the GUI getting smaller, since with the years the pixel density tends to increase, and one dev even said that 1080p was the minimum now (so I suppose that it was smaller before?),
so overall I would have expected the UI to get *bigger* on my (unchanging) screen when going from 0.16 to 0.17, and not smaller ?!

[Nova]

Uh, I have 1920x1200, (so just a bit taller than 1080p)

Na, 1920x1200 is bigger than 1080p, because that is only 1920x1080.

[BlueTemplar]

Yes, that's what I said.