Halo 2 Xbox resize HUD for Widescreen

[KiZiK]

Hello, folks
Was reading the boards about Halo 2 Xbox modding for a long time, also enjoyed a lot of downloaded mods.
Also made some stuff from "Halo 2 Hacks" book. Looking at Halo 2 in widescreen mode the stretched HUD and crosshairs always made me sick.

Some days ago I tried to bring the idea to life, but a lot of stuff is gone from boards, tutorials don't have images no more, also Entity was giving me errors - some crazy ish.

I hope somebody who knows how to do it, will tell me how is done the resize of bitmaps so their
aspect will look normal in Widescreen mode 16:9. Or maybe someone with free time will do this.

[KiZiK]

Only the aspect ratio and resolutions can be changed on Xbox, mine are Widescreen and 480.
Halo 2 geometry looks normal but the HUD is stretched. Don't know any other options that could
make the HUD look not stretched, like it does in Halo2Vista.

[KiZiK]

Maybe you know what values can be changed to make horizontal aspect of the crosshair bitmap to be more narrowed that way, so when Xbox will stretch the HUD - it will look same as it looks on 4:3 aspect ratio.

[JacksonCougar]

I can't actually get my Xbox to run on widescreen to test anything.

[KiZiK]

I can't actually get my Xbox to run on widescreen to test anything.

why you can't make Xbox show picture in 16:9 aspect?

Maybe your situation is as mine, I have a CRT TV that is 4:3, connected the Xbox and set the console to show in Widescreen then clicked a button on TV that can compress the 4:3 image to 16:9 that way so top and bottom of the screen are big black lines (obviously this function was made for situations like that, don't think that every TV has this option).

[JacksonCougar]

Okay, it still renders to a 640x480 framebuffer and then distorts that to make the widescreen image. The scene is rendered squished so it looks normal when stretched, but the hud is not. I can't really see any easy way to fix this because it would be handled by the engine. Even if you did inject new bitmaps that were distorted to look normal after being stretched the radar sweeps and dots would still appear squished.

Not saying its impossible, just don't see an easy way.

There might be a way to hook into the texture coordinates of the screen shader and just skew them. I will try to look into it when I have more free time because shaders are tedious to muck with.

[KiZiK]

Okay, it still renders to a 640x480 framebuffer and then distorts that to make the widescreen image. The scene is rendered squished so it looks normal when stretched, but the hud is not. I can't really see any easy way to fix this because it would be handled by the engine. Even if you did inject new bitmaps that were distorted to look normal after being stretched the radar sweeps and dots would still appear squished.

Not saying its impossible, just don't see an easy way.

There might be a way to hook into the texture coordinates of the screen shader and just skew them. I will try to look into it when I have more free time because shaders are tedious to muck with.

I'm not about a Halo 2 game that will be able to look cool in both ways 4:3 and 16:9, main thing that is creepy - the crosshairs, if that thing could be fixed - i'm pretty sure people who play on widescreen will love that.

By the way - there is a HEX hack for Halo: CE on Xbox that makes it widescreen:
http://ps2wide.net/xbox.html (search Halo)


as we can see - HUD does the same thing in H1 at 16:9


(also there is a similar hack for Midtown Madness 3 my beloved game after Halo)


[But back to Halo]
Was stuck at this tutorial, after cloning chunks the bitmap became corrupt everytime I tried.
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1426


maybe this could be a way?
http://old.halomods.com/forums/viewtopi ... 3000c2af0c

[Click16]

I try to forget about my old tutorials. Please don't judge me.

[KiZiK]

I try to forget about my old tutorials. Please don't judge me.

Buddy, do you know any possible methods to make it happen?

[XZodia]

There might be a way to hook into the texture coordinates of the screen shader and just skew them.

This is basically what I would suggest, except it doesn't require any shader changes...
The ui coordinates are in one of the w__ tags (wgtz or something) iirc.
Just scale their x coordinates appropriately, (you will need to do this in every map). Quite a tedious task, so if you have any programming skill, I'd suggest you automate it.