Is there a way to have the wide screen aspect on a 5:4 screen like it was prior to 1.3?

Thanks

I would like this option too.

I was waiting for the new patch, since running 1280x1024 on a 19" screen
I had black bars above and below screen.

With 1.3 patch the screen is now over the whole area ..no black bars, however,
left and right sides are now cut off. It looked better before with black bars above
and below.

In addition all cutscenes are our of focus ...for example the first dialogue chice
...Roche offering his hand all I see is his hand??

It may be tough. It's like watching a movie on an old 4:3. Your choices are either pan and scan or center the image. There is no other choice. 4:3 is simply a different shape than 16:9.

Just figured it out.

Ihave the following resolution options 1280x1024, 1280x960, 1280x800, 1280x768 and 1280x720 in the config. If I set resolution to 1280x720 it is as in 1.2 patch.

All I need to do now is to determine which option would be the best.

The best way to find out what a customer doesn't want is to give him what he says he wants :)

cbarbagallo has it right: you cannot make the game look the same in 16:9 and 4:3. In play, when the camera is under your control, it's less obtrusive; but it's unavoidable in cinematics, when the camera is fixed.

The usual (sometimes, the only possible) strategy is to keep the vertical field of view fixed and vary the horizontal as needed. If you do this, you are going to lose:

10% of the horizontal field of view going from 16:9 to 16:10.
25% going from 16:9 to 4:3
Approx. 30% going from 16:9 to 5:4

The choice of letterboxed vs. cropped presentation, which the patched game now has, is a sufficient improvement.

Are you talking about this weird effect of FOV being reduced? I get this while playing 1280x1024 full screen now on my 4:3 monitor.

Yes, you're going to lose horizontal FOV as a consequence of the fix. There's just no way to put a wide-screen scene in a narrow-screen frame that is going to please everybody.

Thanks for clarification, I'm not too deep into technical stuff :) One thing bothers me - why other games do not (or seem to do not) have similar problem? Is it because the whole game was written in 16:9 and now what they do is just scale it?

Damn, looks like I won't be able to hold back from buying a widescreen monitor for too long now :( but...I like my oldschool 4:3 so much : |

Actually, what "we" wanted was free FOV settings... what we got was a wrong FOV settings that we still can't change.

Most people on 5:4 screens don't play on the default fov (at least those who know what it is, and what it does), but on 80, 85 or even 90 which means you get alot more visual screen estate (at the expensive of nearly impossible to notice perspective distortion)

That said, on 3rd person games the distortion of increased fov becomes more noticeable because the camera is higher...

I think the art direction has a lot to do with what they can or can't give you. They can't give you pixels that don't exist, and they won't give you a frame that doesn't suit their artistic vision.

Going from 16:9 to 4:3 does not give you an extra 1/3 vertical FOV unless the art was done in such a way that the game can render it and it still looks good enough that the art department will stand behind it.

I have a 16:10 monitor, and now the FOV is definitely WAY to narrow. I know, there is a good reason why I can't have the same FOV as a 16:9 BUT... they should have locked the picture vertically.
As it is now, the picture is just zoomed in which is bad as Geralt takes up way too much screen space.

The best way of fixing this would be to have a 75% Horizontal FOV for 4:3, 85% for 16:10 and 90% for 16:9 with a locked Vertical FOV of course...

Btw. The dude that made the flawlesswidescreen fix for Witcher 2 1.0 - 1.2 actually found a way for the user to adjust the fov with his tool, but he couldn't make it work without the game crashing a lot, so he removed that feature. This just show that it isn't particularly hard to make this work fine for everybody...

Maybe this is why it's harder (see answer below)?

That being said, it is way easier to just stretch the image to fit the screen and cropped off the rest.

Some time ago I had hoped to find an adjustment for the FOV in W2. I find it to be a tad bit narrow on my 1920x1200 monitor. It is typical for me in most games to tinker with FOV to expand my view.

It sounds like I am going to miss this FOV adjustment even more after patching.

What's the chance someone will come along and add in this functionality?