The widescreen HUD for World of PADMAN has finally been implemented and will be released with version 1.7. It is important to note that at the time of the WoP standalon in 2007, the 4:3 and 5:4 aspect ratios were still widely used in the desktop sector and the widescreen format only began to establish itself mainly in notebooks, initially in 16:10 format. However, it has been clear since 2012 at the latest that the 16:9 widescreen format will prevail in the future, which we were not yet able to implement with WoP 1.6. But now the time has finally come. Zack Middleton, aka zturtleman, who has already implemented a flexible HUD mod for ioquake3, has played a big part in this. Although we did not aim for a flexible HUD for World of PADMAN, i.e. that you can flexibly choose the position of the HUD elements, we were able to transfer and modify many of the basic functions he created for World of PADMAN. For example, the HUD elements are no longer unnecessarily stretched or compressed if you select a wide or narrow format resolution, but retain their correct aspect ratio. This will probably be unusual for the younger players among you, as you have probably never played WoP in the original 4:3 aspect ratio.
In addition, resolutions have increased significantly since 2007. While some of us were still playing WoP with a resolution of 1280×1024 back then, we have now arrived at 4k UHD. While the maps with their high-resolution textures have aged very well in our opinion, the HUD icons of the weapons, powerups, and spray logos clearly show that they only have a resolution of 64×64 pixels. You have to remember that these icons were created more than 20 years ago and at that time graphics cards with 64/128 MByte VRAM set corresponding limits. Unfortunately, the original icon templates created by ENTE could no longer be found and even upscaling with common programs did not lead to the desired result. So we had to do something about it again. The old bitmap graphics were loaded into a vector graphics program and redrawn or edited by hand until they corresponded to the existing bitmaps. The resulting vector graphics were then exported as bitmaps with a resolution of 256×256 pixels. In our opinion, the result is really good. Did we mention that the scoreboard now offers a medal overview?
Your WoP team