A couple interface and tech newbie questions.

BurningBeard · #1 July 1st, 2009, 04:32 PM

Hey all. I'm new to this whole Dominions thing and I'm still on the fence about purchasing it. I had a couple of questions.

I noticed that there are variables that can be edited for resolution. I am visually impaired so small fonts really screw me up. I would think that 640x480 would beef up the text sifficiently for me to be able to read it, but I'm curious as to whether this would totally mangle the game window. Some games and apps don't like being pulled down into such a low res. Think I can do this? Barring that, is there any way to tweak ingame fonts to suit my needs?

Also, I'm running cruddy onboard intel video with 64MB VRAM. The rest of my specs are good but would using onboard video totally kill performance for me?

Thanks in advance and I hope to be playing with you all soon. Cheers.

Gregstrom · #2 July 1st, 2009, 04:48 PM

Onboard video is normally fine, as long as detail is down to minimum. The game demo will be a perfectly good test of this.

However, simply changing the game resolution doesn't seem to make the fonts any larger. It just makes everything fuzzier on my screen. (my best guess is that this is how the devs avoided the issue of low resolution mangling UI) You may be better off running the game in windowed mode and using some form of zoom/screen magnification software.

Edi · #3 July 1st, 2009, 04:50 PM

As long as you dial all the visual settings down to the lowest detail, you should have no trouble running Dom3's graphics. For the resolution, that would depend on the specifics of your condition, so experimenting might be worth it. You can try the demo, because it will give you the answer to all these questions.

BurningBeard · #4 July 1st, 2009, 05:18 PM

Wow! Thanks for the prompt replies. I'd considered the screen magnification, but it's highly cumbersome to use. I suppose I should've snagged the demo first to test the waters, but I've not been at my home desktop to do so.

So there is no way to tweak the ingame font then? That's a shame, but I'm used to it as a long-time 4x and TBS player.

Anyhow, thanks again.

Sombre · #5 July 1st, 2009, 05:30 PM

Is there no special app available which runs in the background and magnifies the screen constantly?

Gregstrom · #6 July 1st, 2009, 05:38 PM

I think (only having seen one of these in action) the issue is that the apps can only magnify part of the screen at a time, and you'd have to keep shifting the focus of the app to view different parts of the game window.

Sombre · #7 July 1st, 2009, 05:48 PM

Even if you had a huge screen? Could get an HDTV or something.

BurningBeard · #8 July 1st, 2009, 05:59 PM

Hahaha! The concept of playing a low fidelity game like Dom3 on like a 50 inch HDTV is pretty hilarious to me. Seems a bit impractical, but I'm getting evil overlord lair vibes off of it. Also, that wouldn't work because I'm near-sighted as well... so big screens like that tend to overwhelm me.

To the point about magnifiers though, yeah... the real problem is that these programs divide the window into two parts so you get about half of the screen to work with. Monitor size is kinda irrelevent because you're still losing half of your screen real estate to a magnifier app. Half is half regardless of how big the whole is.

Gregstrom · #9 July 1st, 2009, 06:15 PM

This makes me think someone ought to put together a VR goggle solution to the problem... in about 2040 or something