Map preview texture seems compressed

[yoyobatty]

Reproduction Steps

Select any map and notice how the preview looks compressed and aspect ratio is shrunken to 4:3

Expected Behavior

Actual Behavior

Platform

Windows

CPU Type

Intel/AMD

GPU Manufacturer

Nvidia

UT2004 Version

3374p19

UT2004 Install Path

C:\UT2004\

UT2004 Installer

OldUnreal Full Game Installer

UT2004 Installer (Other)

No response

Additional Information

No response

[hexengraf]

Most likely the problem is with the screenshots prepared by the mapper. Your first screenshot is incorrectly stretched due to lack of widescreen support, while 3374 fixes it to be the correct dimensions.

From https://beyondunrealwiki.github.io/pages/level-screenshot.html (see last comment):
"It's worth noting that, although the desired texture resolution may be 512x256, it isn't displayed to that aspect ratio (2.0), but instead to something more akin to 1.5, meaning that you want to crop to, say, 512x384 (or use something like The GIMP's crop tool to do the calculations for you ;) ), and then do a non-aspect-ratio-preserving scale down to 512x256."

The screenshots should be saved as stretched to later be de-stretched by the game. It seems like a bad idea overall, but it was always like that so trying to change it now would only cause issues with existing maps that use the properly stretched screenshots.

[yoyobatty]

Gotcha, I'll the user who reported this to me know that.

[hexengraf]

I bet what also happened was some maps created after widescreen resolutions became common place assumed the incorrectly stretched in-game previews as the right aspect ratio. It is a sad mess that has no clean solution, if the original way of preparing the screenshots was not stretched, we could at least just try to preserve whatever aspect ratio the screenshot was saved as, but all of them are saved in the 2:1 aspect ratio regardless if they're stretched or not.