"Out of Range"

[Pizzarth]

I installed armagetron from Synaptic and it seems fine but when I try to load it the screen goes black and a blue box with "Out of Range" comes up. This happens everytime. I think it has something to do with the resolution of the game, I'm running Kubuntu 6.10 and have a 17' viewsonic monitor that's set on 1280 x 1024

[Z-Man]

Try hitting "f" when you see that. This will switch to windowed mode. Then you can play with the screen resolution settings in System Setup->Display Settings->Screen Mode.

If this is the first time you use Armagetronad, it will try to use the standard VGA resolution of 640x480. Strange, either that is not working or your monitor/graphics card does not support it. I've personally seen the graphics mode not work with a GeForce 5200 and a digital flat panel.

[Lucifer]

Also, apparently available screen resolutions is dependent on what's in your x.org config file. I have only one resolution in mine, 1280x800, and I can't run arma fullscreen on anything else, even though my graphics adapter and driver support other resolutions.

You can manually go into ~/.armagetronad/user.cfg and set it to open in windowed mode if you have to.

@z-man: Is it a bug in this case if, for example, he doesn't have 640x400 in his x.org config file that arma still tries to use it the first time? Shouldn't it try to use whatever's available that's near it? I thought that's what it does because for all my fresh rebuilds running from just-made build directories I've never encountered a problem like this.

[Z-Man]

Yeah, a point can be made that unless software rendering is detected, Arma should run at the highest resolution available by default. One problem is that to detect software rendering, you first have to initialize the screen. The other is people with setups where the maximal resolution is not supported by the monitor (may happen a lot on Windows systems with monitors or graphic cards not supporting the communication channel from the monitor back to the graphics driver). SDL 1.2.10, I think, supports passing 0x0 as a resolution which gets interpreted as "whatever the desktop is set at", that should always be a legal default.

I wouldn't rate the current behavior as such as a bug. The only strange thing is that while it starts up in 640x480, you won't be able to set it back to that resolution after you change it once and exit the game. I do think that every reasonably set up system should support 640x480, though.

[Pizzarth]

thank you guys, it worked well. Now on to some tron fun I just had to press f and set the resolution to 1280x1024

[BlindMan]

Maybe it is good idea to change the initial settings in arma to use windowed mode in next releases. That will prevent any display problems on new installs and it is much easier to get than try guesing right resolution from config files.
My english suck but i hope i've said what i want

[Z-Man]

Thanks for the suggestion, but most players will actually want to play in fullscreen mode, so that's how we should start. We're not guessing the right resolution and we don't plan to change that. 640x480 is a standard that should be supported almost everywhere, although by now, its ubiquiousness is surpassed by 800x600; I think that's WinXP's default resolution. For the other resolutions, we use what the OS offers us; it's rather rare that what is offered turns out not to work.

Anyway, here's what I think we should be doing on the first run:
- If SDL 1.2.10 is available, start up fullscreen with the desktop resolution.
- otherwise, start up in the resolution offered by the OS that comes closest to 800x600.
- do a fillrate test
- tune the resolution so that a full clear and two screenfilling textured rectangle fills take less than 1/60 second...
- unless that would pick something smaller than 640x480. If the above operation takes more than 1/20 second in that resolution, consider it software rendering and disable the fancy effects.