Hi All Upgraded my laptop to a new screen that can display 3840 by 2160 and running EQ2 at that res is odd. The models look superb but the UI text shrinks to something tiny on the point of unreadable. I apprecaite that I can change the font and button sizes etc but some text and windows is unchangeable. Searching the forums I've seen that some users tell the game to run as full screen to autoscale the resolution by the monitor rather than windows setting it but this stops you alt tabbing to another window or browser as everything then pings back to high res again in EQ2. My current workaround is to set the screen resolution in windows down to 1920 by 1080 before I launch EQ2 but it looks a bit blurry and horrible and its a pain to have to keep doing this for this one game only as everything else copes (first world problems I know!). Has anyone got any other hints or tips to get this game running and playable on a high res screen please?
There's no way to get everything right through normal game options changes until the Devs either provide more tweaking options or handle auto-scaling better for 4K. That said, we're not totally out-of-luck yet. You can enter the dark place of tweaking UI settings in the XML files under the UI directory themselves. I've never done any UI modding in the past, just used the 3rd party stuff people have released over the years. However, since I bought a 17" 4K laptop recently, I have been dabbling in the UI settings editing XML files to figure out which node goes to what element on screen. Sadly, that was the easy part (not really). The hard part was getting game windows to scale properly with the text font. That opened up a whole new can of worms as some windows are frames within frames (i.e. Quest journals). Getting the text right causes tab text to be larger than the tab and whatnot. Same actually goes for the chat window titles. This is where I gave up, for now. The game window layout elements need to auto-scale with the font to make this as painless as possible. If I had the time, I'd start documenting every XML setting as it maps to each UI element, then work on a UI mod for 4K, but I just can't devote myself to that effort right now. Also, I ran into a situation where even after I got some settings just right, the game seemed to overwrite the values in the XML on the fly setting them back to whatever they were. That suggests that perhaps there's a hard-coded range of acceptable values that the game normalizes the XML files to even though those files can be edited. There might be additional settings or other things that can be done to work around this, but it's yet another exploratory time sink away from playing the game or dealing with real life. This is why the devs need to step in and fully support 4K as a subscriber managing the effort of a UI mod probably isn't the best idea for the masses.
Let me also add that using the EQ2 UIBuilder is still the most intuitive way to manipulate layout rather than directly editing the XML files. It was just faster to tweak the XML directly when taking stabs at things, but using EQ2 UIBuilder gives instant visual feedback for changing the UI elements.
Thank you all for the responses. Looks like I'm going to using my workaround for a while then. Its a shame as other older Daybreak games like DCUO handling scaling on 4K screens but I appreciate that they were built and designed by other teams with just a common owner, I remember Sony at the time launching EQ2 and stating it was designed for the future and would only work fully on PC's that hadn't been designed or built yet. How wrong they were...I think with that statement they were more thinking that chip clock speeds would keep climbing and then the industry swerved to multi-core technology instead. I doubt high resulotions to this extent were foreseen.
I'm exactly in the same situation. I was really looking forward to playing EQ2 in high resolution and the graphics look really great but, barely being able to read anything because it's all so tiny gave me a headache.I tried to tweak the UI with EQ2 UI Builder but ran into the frame in a frame thing and gave up. So I ended up using the same workaround you do. But it's a annoying to have to switch windows resolution every time I want to play EQ2 and when i'm done back to regular, and if I forget my desktop icons get all messed up and I have to redo them all. Not to mention, the screen is a little fuzzy when using the lower resolution.With more and more people playing on 4 K screens, I fear this will draw away even more people to games they can play and enjoy in ultra HD and with the recent layoffs I don't think they will get us a scaleable UI anytime soon ... if ever.
