SC4GraphicsOptions.ini, dgVoodoo, and 4k monitotor

[Brian Cahill 13]

Hello All,

I'm new here. I love discovering strong online communities like this. You all seem great.

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I've purchased the game through GOG, installed it on Windows 11, and I've successfully installed the 4GB patch, NAM, and some other DLL mods. The game is set to DirectX. I've also installed dgVoodoo 2.82.5 and the game displays the dgVoodoo watermark in the bottom corner. No problems there. But I wonder if anyone can point me in the right direction with these two questions:

Question 1:

Regarding the SC4GraphicsOptions, how do the settings within SC4GraphicsOptions.ini relate to the settings within the dgVoodo control panel? Should I set the SC4GraphicsOptions.ini to Enabled=false when using dgVoodo?

Question 2:

For those using 4k monitors and dgVoodoo, what is your preferred resolution setting?

I have a 27" 4k monitor and currently I'm trying the game at 2560 x 1600 which is alright. I tried 3840 x 2160 which was nice, but it cut off the top and bottom of the game a bit. Does anybody with a similar monitor have a suggestion for a resolution option within dgVoodoo so that the game window is big, but also the in-game elements such as buttons, menus, etc. are actually large enough to read comfortably? I see a list of options under the resolution menu in the DirectX tab such as 2x, 3x, 4x, Max 2x, etc.

Thank you for any insight!

-Brian

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

While I don't have any answers for your specific questions (since my screens are antiques by today's standards), I will mention something you might already know which is explained in the 2nd post of: Problem with Rendering in Region View

[Null 45 3,041]

13 minutes ago, Brian Cahill said:

Regarding the SC4GraphicsOptions, how do the settings within SC4GraphicsOptions.ini relate to the settings within the dgVoodo control panel? Should I set the SC4GraphicsOptions.ini to Enabled=false when using dgVoodo?

The settings in SC4GraphicsOptions will be what SC4 uses, dgVoodoo's resolution settings are ignored by the game.

[Brian Cahill 13]

Well that explains why my screen size didn't seem to change when I changed resolution settings in dgVoodoo 

 

Thanks for the info.

[Null 45 3,041]

As far as I can tell, the UI scaling is not an easy problem to solve. SC4 doesn't have native support for resolution scaling, and the game was designed for various resolutions with a 4:3  aspect ratio that were common in 2003. The highest natively supported resolution in-game is 1600x1200.

Turnstyled has a topic about using external software to upscale the game's window to full screen, in their case going from a 1920x1080 window to 4K full screen.

Modding the game's UI to support higher resolutions has been discussed, but it would be a massive amount of work and you would still have limitations like the fact that the game's icons used a fixed 44x44 pixel size.

[Kel9509 1,363]

On 7/31/2024 at 6:04 PM, Null 45 said:

Modding the game's UI to support higher resolutions has been discussed, but it would be a massive amount of work and you would still have limitations like the fact that the game's icons used a fixed 44x44 pixel size.

Someone on Reddit indicated that for Macs, they can scale up to 4k with no issues.  However, very little details were provided:

https://old.reddit.com/r/simcity4/comments/1m6yzmy/so_extremely_confused_has_nobody_figured_out_how/n4s0048/

Quote

ivan_magnum 2 points 2 days ago 

I play on Mac and if your resolution is 4K native (none scaled) it will set to 4K beautifully

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Does anyone here play in a Mac with a higher resolution?  Does it scale the buttons?  If so, I wonder if that Mac code could be applied to the Windows version in DLL mod?  

[Null 45 3,041]

1 hour ago, Kel9509 said:

If so, I wonder if that Mac code could be applied to the Windows version in DLL mod?

If the Mac version does scaling, it would most likely be on the OS level. I doubt Apsyr would have gone to the effort of changing the data files.

[rsc204 21,808]

So far as I can tell as I’m only using a 2k screen/resolution, no the Mac does not do any automatic scaling of the game.

So I would therefore presume that they achieved that using the same methodology Null45 mentions, via a third party tool.

Don’t forget that generally speaking an :1 ratio (exact multiples) will upscale cleanly. Otherwise pixels get stretched or squashed. Also if you run 1080p upscaled to 4k, whilst the UI will also be upscaled, you’ll loose half the city you’d otherwise fit on screen and everything will be larger.

[Zeratai 83]

After playing over a year with windowed mode at 2560x1440, about a week ago I started to play in 4k fullscreenborderless. I just realize I can alt tab when I want and the game plays very fluid (using a 9950x3d and 4070ti. I really don’t mind the tiny menus, actually, I started seeing them big enough after realizing that playing in window at 1440 was axtually smaller than my full screen borderless 4k (I have a 32 inch monitor).

 

the only setting I needed to modify in dgvoodoo was max fps limit in one of those hidden windows. I was getting suddenly lost of audio and crashes with directx12, so I read a Reddit post of a guy that had the same problem and fixed modifying that parameter in dgvoodoo. Regarding your question 1 that’s the only setting you need to change as the game will use the graphic options ini file for configurations