Quote Originally Posted by Khatovar View Post
Well, I went ahead and did some testing with your layout. I'm not able to duplicate the master window in first image at all using your script. The master window looks like the bottom image, it goes from edge to edge of the screen. Is that a viewport or something?
Oh my - I greatly appreciate all your effort looking into this, but I'm afraid I've done a poor job of presenting the problem... the black bars at the sides of the bottom frame in the original post are simply a result of the backround image (built into WoW) at the login screen not being wide enough to display at 1920x720 unstretched. The actual window is the width of the whole screen, and the black bars are inside the client area.

The problem is that all the windows in my setup *are* using the correct aspect ratio - until I swap. You can see in yours, the bottom one is stretched horizontally and not using the correct aspect ratio. I have the same problem with the main window unless I force the geometry *to the client* using an entry in config.wtf.

You can see how that bottom window displays various screens used by the game when the acpect ratio is actually working right:



WOW made some engine changes in 3.(1?) that forced the client to only use/save video resolutions and modes that are listed as supported by the monitor in the operating system (it didn't do this before). So now, even if you edit your config.wtf and add a line like
Code:
SET gxResolution "1920x720"
to your CONFIG.WTF file, the setting will only work for one client boot, and the next time you start, the setting will be gone.

So for anyone following this that may be having the same problem, here's more detail on the situation:
  • For the main window, I've forced the client to accept geometry of 1920x720 (2.67:1) using an entry in config.wtf. At boot, the aspect ratio is correct (see screenshot above).
  • For the slave windows, I force the client geometry using a similar line in config.wtf (the clients run from a different drive), with size/aspect ratio 480x360 (1.33:1).
  • Once booted, everything runs like a charm and looks fantastic (until I swap windows, see below).
  • When I close the client windows, the game erases the SET gxResolution lines from the config.wtf, as WoW now always defaults to one of your monitor's 'supported resolutions' as reported to the OS. This can be overcome by setting config.wtf to read-only.
  • The real problem arises when I want to swap a different client into the 'main' area. The game client does not dynamically adjust the aspect ratio it's using to render the scene, so the swapped windows will look either squished or stretched horizontally, by a factor of 2 in this case - very noticeable. See top post for an image.
  • This problem is something that has to be addressed by issuing commands to the game client itself. There is no setting in hotkeynet that can/will tell the game client what aspect ratio to use.


So that's the root of the problem. All the windows are setup and working wonderfully with 'unsupported' but correct aspect ratios upon boot, but I need a way to force the client to re-adjust that aspect ratio on the fly when I swap windows around. I've tinkered with the SET gxAspect command in a macro, but no dice. It always wants a client restart before the changes take effect Tricky!

Any further insights will be graciously received. I've come up with a kind of poor workaround and will post that later as time permits. It unfortunately results in the loss of about 11% of the screen real-estate.