So excited to hear GoG and Activision are teaming up to finally re-release the Armada games!

The big question is will you guys be modifying them to support modern resolutions??

I've tried for years to find a way to get Armada 2 to run just in simple HD 1920x1080 resolution. When I used the 1.3.0 fan patch on Armada 1 I got all the lovely newer resolution options yet the popular Armada 2 1.2.5 fan patch doesn't seem to do that and I've been stuck with old smaller resolutions up to 1280x960. I've been hunting through many forums for help on this issue and I can see a few posts here and there but no working solutions.

Seems so strange that the fan patch for Armada 1 upgrades the graphics options yet the Armada 2 one doesn't! I saw an old thread on the Fleet Ops forums about them making a separate patch that allowed modern resolutions in original armada 2 but the thread went dead years ago.

I saw advice over on armada fleet command about editing the prf file to be 1920 1080 instead of 1280 960 but as soon as I started the game it reverts it back to default 800x600 so that doesn't work.

I have Armada Fleet Ops which is great for multiplayer and I've even tried the Armada 2 Classic project and Upgrade project mods for Fleet Ops that puts the A2 campaign in there however I've seen people posting about various bugs/glitches and I couldn't get the intro video working either. After playing Armada 1 campaign in HD I really want to play Armada 2's campaign in HD and would rather do it in the original game if I can!

So yeah this new official re-release is now the best hope for finally fixing this problem!!!

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After the Armada community moved en masse into FleetOps or quit playing the game altogether, the necessity of a standalone patch for the vanilla game kind of evaporated, since almost no one was actually playing it. Additionally, a large portion of the game is hard coded in 4:3 really low resolutions; the main menu, load screens, all the cutscenes, etc cannot be changed to a widescreen format. Even though the game code itself could probably handle it, the source assets in higher resolutions simply don't exist. I honestly wouldn't expect widescreen in either Armada game from GOG, since it is extremely unlikely that there is any kind of "team up" between GOG and Activision. These games were not developed by Activision, they were only published by them. The developer, Mad Doc Studios, doesn't actually exist anymore, they were absorbed into Rockstar Games over a decade ago, so even if they still had the means to patch up the game (unlikely), I doubt Rockstar would have any interest in helping Activision do that.

Are you sure about that wide screen thing cogadh?

I've got my Armada 2 disc that i used to play with my wide screen monitors and it plays fine, installing the game from the auto run menu doesn't work from my memory but i think if you go into the disc itself and click on the setup you can install it.

I just got sick of having to put a CD into my computer every time i wanted to play.

Absolutely certain, I've been playing this game for 20 years and even used to mod the original way back in the day (made an epically failed attempt at restoring about a half dozen cut missions that still partially exist in the game files).

The game will work on wide screen monitors (I play it on my 1440p monitor all the time) but in its vanilla unmodded state it does not even have wide screen resolution options, only 4:3 resolutions, maxing out at 1280x1024, if memory serves me. All of the cutscenes are at a fixed 640x480 resolution. You can check this yourself by watching any of the .bik video files in the game's directory in VLC media player and viewing the media properties, though some videos are at an even smaller res (160x120) those are used for the in--game comm screen only. The menus are a fixed 800x600 resolution, which again, you can check yourself by opening any of the full screen menu background images in the game's bitmap folder. The main menu full background is 800x600 and all the bitmap menu elements are designed to fit in that resolution.

If you were using a widescreen monitor and the in-game image filled the whole screen, then odds are your monitor was automatically stretching and scaling the image to fill the screen, but the game itself was still running in old low res 4:3. On my own setup, my monitor does some of its own scaling to bring it up to 1440, but I have it keep the 4:3 aspect ratio so I get black bars on either side of the image, instead of stretching the image to fill the screen.

Yes I'm sure it's running on low res and stretching the image to fit the screen, I'd hope like the thread author said that maybe they'll make it look a little nicer but if instead of doing it in a way of resolutions or scaling, Maybe use a form of Anti-aliasing or something to smooth the rough edges?

Another trick is to have a smaller monitor, the two monitors i have are almost the same except one is 24 inch and the other is 27 inch, The 24 inch can fool you into thinking the picture is sharper with some games.

Both are 1920x1080 at 60Hz IPS panels.

Having just bought the game and wanting to play it in windowed mode, I was forced to walk it's resolution all the way down to 800x600 to get it to display well enough to play. THe cinematics are still borked but at least the menu/gameplay is aligned properly. But now it's playing in a window the size of my phone.

Is there a reason you need to run it in window mode? I also just bought it myself and using the included DX wrapper configuration, I'm able to run it full screen, scaled up to my monitor resolution with a fixed aspect ratio (no stretch, pillar boxed) and other than a momentary drop to desktop when switching between the menu, cutscenes and gameplay, it runs perfectly and looks beautiful (well, as beautiful as 20 year old low res game can get).

Seconded. Runs just fine at 1600x1200 with side pillars. I don't get a drop to desktop either, just a brief flicker.

I have a similar problem with the GOG version. Everything beyond what would have been the native resolution (so 800x600 for the menus, and 640x480 fpr the intro video) gets blacked out. It looks scaled but the old resolution is still hanging around somewhere, and the whole picture then gets cropped (with the rest of the screen black) to show only that area of the screen.

At least on widescreen resolutions it also crops the game itself to 800x600 (with the pillar on the left included, so even less is visible than you'd hope), though if I set it to 1024x768 I get an uncropped and playable game - it's just difficult to get there through the 800x600 cropped menus.

Does anyone have an idea what might be causing it?

I'm using a Radeon, if there's any known issues with the DirectX wrapper there.

Fleet operations mod works perfectly with GOG version and has full modern resolution support. Also graphics are massively improved.

+1 here. used to run FO in "eyefinity" across three monitors... though today that's barely wider than a standard ultrawide monitor.

On top of that, there is a "classic" mod for FO that basically remakes the original game on the improved FO engine so you get the resolution with the original game. I think they even rebuilt the singleplayer modes in the FO engine too.

Won't help with the cinematics though.

Yup you both repeated what I said in my OP at the start of this thread. Fleet Ops is brilliant but if you want to play the original campaign with cutscenes you're in some trouble. The Armada classic mod for FO allows you to play the campaign missions but has no cutscenes. The Armada classic upgrade project added in a lot of the in-game GUI videos but not the big full screen main cutscenes and on top of that for some crazy reason it includes some forced expert level AI that even on the easier difficulty mode will drop 20,000 borg ships on you in the first 5 mins of the first mission lol. If someone just wants to play the good old Armada 2 campaign in HD resolution with nothing broken or missing it's still impossible which is just so weird.

So it very sad to see that GoG were unable to tinker with the resolution options with the re-release.

As for the no widscreen talk earlier in the thread, so I'm guessing that the fact I can see a max resolution of 1280x960 on my disc copy of A2 (which actually is a wide resolution as 4:3 of that was 1280x1024) is because of the fan patch? And does anyone know if the A2 fan patch works with the GoG version? If fans were able to unlock lower widescreen resolutions then surely GoG or fans could get it to include some higher widescreen resolutions like 1080p.

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i run at 1920 X 1080 which is a pretty standard laptop widescreen but software drivers are not going to cut it i.e, people that allow Microsoft to install default drivers for their Gpu will have major issues