Preventing graphics distortion in odd-sized WoW windows?

[Ozbert]

I recently saw a screenshot of someone's multiboxing window layout where they had their main window across the top half of their screen, and four clones in windows beneath, something like this:

+-------------------+
|                   |
+----+----+----+----+
|    |    |    |    |
+----+----+----+----+

The lower four windows were almost square in proportion, while the upper window was extremely wide compared to it's height.

The strange thing was, the graphics inside all five windows were completely undistorted. How is this achieved?

Whenever I've tried resizing a WoW window to any odd proportion, other than 4:3 (normal monitor) or 8:5 (widescreen monitor), the graphics have ended up horribly distorted, as in this screenshot.

Any pointers appreciated.

[keyclone]

i believe it prolly has to do with keyclone's maximizer adjusting the resolutions as it starts each wow

[Basilikos]

I had a similar problem with Maximizer. What you need to do is look inside your WoW/WTF direcotry and find the config.wtf file so you can edit it. There is a resolution setting in there (just look around for it - it's near the top) and set that to whatever you wish to run WoW at. Note that this doesn't work all that well if you're running more than 1 resolution outside of the same WoW directory.

[Ozbert]

Can you put non-standard resolutions in there?

For example, four Wow windows in each quadrant of a 1920x1200 screen will be 960x585 each (taking 30 pixels of taskbar into account).

[minty]

Ozbert I'm doing close to that on my setup(on a Mac), but can only get the windows to 960x600 by setting in the config.wtf, and have to deal with a little overlap on the top and bottom windows. I've played around with other settings, but it doesn't seem to like anything less than 800x600, if I drop either parameter below those limits, it will size itself to 800x600.

[Basilikos]

Can you put non-standard resolutions in there?

For example, four Wow windows in each quadrant of a 1920x1200 screen will be 960x585 each (taking 30 pixels of taskbar into account).

Sure can. I have my main on a 1680x1050 monitor and there are two secondary machines on either side of me each running two 1050x840 (the monitors are tilted 90 degrees). There's no graphical distortion at all.

EDIT: I just saw minty's post and although I can't verify the contents, I recommend investigating.

[keyclone]

it might be interesting if we could get the currently used aspect ratio being used within the wow client. kind of like ctrl-r to show the fps... something like ctrl-shift-a (or in video-settings) to show the current settings being used.

might be worth a post to the wow forums ... with PiP pics (some nice, some distorted) of course

[Ozbert]

Well I tried modifying the config.wtf for each of my clones, and changed the window size from 800x600 to 960x600. WoW Maximizer still resizes my windows to 960x585, but the graphics are still rendered much more accurately.

I would guess that WoW chooses it's rendering "aspect" based on the resolution selected in video options or in the config file at startup, and sticks with that aspect no matter how you resize the window. If you start off with your window in a 4:3 aspect but resize it to a 16:10 aspect, the graphics stay at 4:3 and distort horribly. Only when you select a new resolution in video options will WoW recalculate the aspect of it's rendering.

This probably means that if you want undistorted graphics for a really wierd window size, say 500x500, you should probably set your config file to 800x800 (based on minty's observation of WoW not accepting less than 800x600).

[keyclone]

you cannot change the settings on the fly (that i know of.. might be a console command for it).

if you are changing the dimensions, you will want to exit wow and restart (they set their aspect ratio at start up)

[Basilikos]

Well I tried modifying the config.wtf for each of my clones, and changed the window size from 800x600 to 960x600. WoW Maximizer still resizes my windows to 960x585...

I don't use Keyclone, so I don't know how to configure the Maximizer using it (or if you even do), but recall that the Maximizer settings need to have the right boundaries setup for each clone since Maximizer will resize the window regardless of what the game thinks the resolution should be.