The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Can someone help a new player set the graphics as nicely as possible? I just downloaded the game and read the manual. I'm not sure if I need to enable Open GL or not, or how to do the command line.  :-\

Do I even need to enable Open GL via the command line in the current version? 0.6.2

There is a nice setup menu ingame that you can use for most graphics options. Custom resolutions, if I remember correctly, require command-line arguments, but you can choose between several common ones in UQM.

A few hints:

• OpenGL is usually a good idea (and necessary for resolutions other than 320x240 and 640x480) if you have a decent 3D card (decent meaning pretty much any GeForce or Radeon ever made and quite a few older cards) and proper drivers.
• Filtering is a matter of taste. Try a few. Most LCDs nowadays (or the graphics cards driving them) use bilinear filtering or something similar, so you can just pick 640x480 for speed and let your monitor upscale if it does what you want. Higher resolutions require more graphics card power, and don't really add any detail. All other filters except bilinear just double the resolution from 320x240 to 640x480 and then use bilinear for the last step, so even the advanced filters may look just as good at 640x480 as a much higher resolution.
• If you're using an LCD, use either 320x240, 640x480 or the native resolution of the LCD. Anything else will probably just be lower in quality. On a CRT, increasing the resolution helps smooth things out, but is not much use otherwise.
• On slower machines (Pentium III class or so), smooth (3DO-style) zooming uses more power than the machine has (mostly because it's unaccelerated). Use PC-style zooming in steps instead.

Thank you for helping! ;D

I suppose that includes 1280x960, right? :-\

I have an LCD and I like running the game in a window, but it's easier to play when the window takes a large portion of the screen. So currently I run the game in the maximum resolution available in the in-game setup. I use any one of the lower three scalers - each of them seems to have different merits. (BTW, one problem with all three of them is that sometimes my ship turns into a purple silhouette until I change its direction.)

So I'm just wondering if I can do anything better without lowering the resolution.

My suggestions were for fullscreen mode. If you're running UQM in a window, the desktop resolution is what matters for matching pixels 1-to-1, not the UQM window size; in this case, running UQM at 320x240, 640x480 and multiples of these (e.g. 1280x960) will probably look the best. In particular, if you're not using filters, multiples of 320x240 are going to look much better (it will still be blocky, but not distorted).

The point is that UQM runs at 320x240 and can use some quite intelligent filtering to double that to a nice and sharp 640x480, but anything else is done either through bilinear scaling (which blurs the image) or nearest-pixel (no filtering; blocky). If both UQM and your LCD have to rescale the image, the results are probably worse than if only one does it.

This is bug 929 (https://bugs.uqm.stack.nl/show_bug.cgi?id=929), which was recently fixed.