Posted March 09, 2019
Q: HD means 16:9, right?
A: The FAQ on the Blizzard page states that the graphics in gog is UPSCALED.
The gog description says the same (and a bit clearer) "aspect ratio-correct upscaling".
That means they made the picture larger than the original thumbnail resolution but you still have the 4:3 ratio of course!
Q: Why doesn't gog simply do it?
A: There is a video on youtube where a developer talks about D1 and how they implemented the graphics: Diablo: A Classic Game Postmortem (@20m 18s).
They made a bad design choice, kept it and had to add workarounds for moving and the AI (the game is tile based and calculates where you will be and draws your way "backwards" and stuff like that).
Long story short: they messed it up during development so you cannot have widescreen all of a sudden. Like ever - without reprogramming the game; that would require full access to the source code and a developer team working for a year. You would need to change all the workarounds in the graphics, in the AI, probably in the networking too. So it is a rewrite of the game, incompatible to the CD version.
If you don't want to (or cannot) touch the code, you would have to create some loader that starts the original game but somehow hacks the game to preload all areas around your actual 640x480 window, put them together to whatever your resolution is and draw that. (As Diablo creates random maps you cannot precalculate the areas as they did it in Baldurs Gate; though you might be able to do it for Tristram only)
It looks like the Belzebub guys did that. I opened the downloaded archive and saw several graphics libraries and an executable: Belzebub.exe (the loader), SDL2 (a media library), glew32 (a graphics library), libpng (a picture library).
Sorry, but you cannot expect the gog team to do the impossible here. They make the game installable and runnable, they don't rewrite the code.
A: The FAQ on the Blizzard page states that the graphics in gog is UPSCALED.
The gog description says the same (and a bit clearer) "aspect ratio-correct upscaling".
That means they made the picture larger than the original thumbnail resolution but you still have the 4:3 ratio of course!
Q: Why doesn't gog simply do it?
A: There is a video on youtube where a developer talks about D1 and how they implemented the graphics: Diablo: A Classic Game Postmortem (@20m 18s).
They made a bad design choice, kept it and had to add workarounds for moving and the AI (the game is tile based and calculates where you will be and draws your way "backwards" and stuff like that).
Long story short: they messed it up during development so you cannot have widescreen all of a sudden. Like ever - without reprogramming the game; that would require full access to the source code and a developer team working for a year. You would need to change all the workarounds in the graphics, in the AI, probably in the networking too. So it is a rewrite of the game, incompatible to the CD version.
If you don't want to (or cannot) touch the code, you would have to create some loader that starts the original game but somehow hacks the game to preload all areas around your actual 640x480 window, put them together to whatever your resolution is and draw that. (As Diablo creates random maps you cannot precalculate the areas as they did it in Baldurs Gate; though you might be able to do it for Tristram only)
It looks like the Belzebub guys did that. I opened the downloaded archive and saw several graphics libraries and an executable: Belzebub.exe (the loader), SDL2 (a media library), glew32 (a graphics library), libpng (a picture library).
Sorry, but you cannot expect the gog team to do the impossible here. They make the game installable and runnable, they don't rewrite the code.
