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I recently bought this game because of the fact that I wanted to play it like I did when I was young. I was really excited that I found a versoin here on GoG that works with Vista, but the movie cutscenes at EXTREMELY pixalated and I don't know why or how to fix it. I can honestly say it looks worse now that it did when the game was released. The actual game play appears to be the same. However, since one of the amazing things about this game is the amazing story, video and audio quality for the time, I want them to be the same as they were when I originally played them. Can anyone help me or tell me what I am doing wrong? I'm using Vista 32 AMD dual core with a nvidia GTX 260 for my graphics card.
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What resolution monitor are you using and is the game enlarged to fit the monitor?
My resolution is 1440x900 and I don't know how to enlarge the game. (unless you mean if it is fullscreen or not, then yes it is fullscreen.)
Post edited October 19, 2009 by Marlfox
Well the problem is the games resolution is locked at 640x480 so it has to scale itself up to fit your 1440x900 resolution. I believe how it does this is to use more of your monitor pixels as a single coloured pixel for the 640x480 resolution. So your getting bigger blocker pixels because it has no other way to scale it. If it was rendered at 640x480 without scaling it would be a small image in the middle of your screen with large black borders around it. I'm fairly sure this is how it works and the only fix I can think of would be to get a older lower resolution monitor and play the game on that.
That's what I was assumming, but I also assumed the GoG devs would have anticipated this and either made the game scale with different resolutions, or lock at that resolution without being stretched. It's very frustrating to play the game where a big portion of it's selling point is the amazing cut scenes. Has anyone found a way to view it on a smaller area so the resolution does not try and fill the whole screen? I've even tried to lower my resolution and it looks the same, if not a bit worse.
Does septerra core have any settings or configurations files that might have scaler options in?
I guess gog could have locked the cutscene resolution at its original size but then we would have people on here complaining the videos are too small and have black borders around them.
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Ralackk: Does septerra core have any settings or configurations files that might have scaler options in?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm looking for.
And anyone that would complain obviously doesn't understand that "bigger isn't always better". Quality over quantity. I feel like this pixelation is greatly depriving me of a major portion of this great game. I mean, I only bought the GoG version because when I used my old CD (yes I still have mine in a known location) I couldn't view any of the movies because of a directx error or something with vista. I could have played the game without them and saved $5 instead of paying for it and not getting anything worth watching.
There is only so much GOG can do with the games, re-building the cutscenes to a higher resolution is well beyond those limits. Doing that would very likely require access to the original uncompressed video files, assuming those files still exist and that they are already at a higher resolution that could be re-encoded in a larger scale. Fixed scaling is way, way beyond the limits since that is handled outside of the game code by your video card.
As for the problem, do you have fixed aspect ratio scaling enabled and configured in the Nvidia control panel? If you are using a wide screen monitor and you don't have fixed aspect ratio scaling enabled, then some of the excessive pixellation could be caused by the "stretching" of the videos to fill the wide screen resolution.
I haven't altered anything on my card because it's new and I haven't had the need or urge to tinker with it. If you could elaborate on how I could attempt what you just suggested, I would be grateful.
I messed around and the best thing I could come up with, which isn't as good as the original but is a vast improvement, is to set my graphics card to not scale so that was the game is a fixed portion of my screen and the pixals are not being stretched. I also tried this on my monitors lowest resolution but found that it did not visibly inscrease the image. I'm going to download the game on my laptop, which obviously will have a lower resolution and screen my default, and see how it fares. IF the image quality is better I will play the game on it seeing as how I'm not worried about the game not preforming well without a card, lots of ram, or a fast processor. If anyone has any other ideas of solution. Please, and I mean PLEASE, let me know. Thanks for you help as well guys.
Post edited October 20, 2009 by Marlfox
From your description it sounds like you stumbled across what cogadh was getting at anyway. Also lowering the resolution on your monitor wouldn't help because the pixel size will always be the same on that monitor its a hardware design so they could have higher resolution settings. What you have on that computer may be the best thing you are going to get, you could contact gog and ask them about the videos but don't be suprised if they can't do anything about it. The only other way I can see you doing it is if you had a old monitor handy to play the game on.
Fixing the aspect ratio is a better solution then anything else, it keeps the pixels scaled properly so while it still looks pixelated, it wont look blocky.