4K and High Resolution Displays

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Background

Project Zomboid isn't built with high resolutions in mind.

First, the cost to sort art into the correct draw order increases exponentially the more tiles are drawn to the screen. Worse, this has to be done on the CPU, largely leaving the GPU to handle only 3D models and drawing those tiles once the CPU is done sorting them.

Second, for most of PZ's life, it defaulted to only 1280 x 720 res and could barely hit 30 FPS. It was only in 2018 that the game became reasonably playable at 1920x1080 through efforts to optimise the game's rendering code in preparation for vehicles.

Third: PZ is built on the concepts of OpenGL <3.1 and below, as PZ's principle audience was (and still is) almost entirely older computers. 4K, Among gamers, 4k itself remains rare, showing as only <3% on Steam's hardware survey (and makes up far less than that of PZ's audience.

in short, it was a bit of a pipe dream that PZ would ever run in 4K and turned into "a pleasant surprise" that it worked at all when one of us finally got our hands on an ultrawide and then a 4K display.

This is why the UI elements do not scale and the game isn't able to automatically scale itself. This will likely change in the future, but for now we'll have to work around the game's limitations in this area.

Smaller Res In-Game for Best Experience

To get the best experience in PZ, we strongly recommend playing at a lower resolution than 4k. This will ensure you get reasonable framerates.

To do so, find a lower resolution that matches your current monitor's aspect ratio. In Options, set the game to that resolution and then set the game to fullscreen.

For example, on most 4K monitors, 1980x1080

There can be some problems, however, that are described below.

The Text is Blurry/Blocky

It may be necessary to go into your graphics cards' settings and enable GPU scaling instead of relying on the monitor to get readable text when downsampling from your native desktop resolution to a lower resolution in game..

The Game Doesn't Fill the Screen

If you run into trouble playing on a lower resolution and are on Windows, then do the following:

• Go to %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Steam\steamapps\common\ProjectZomboid.
• Right click on each of the ProjectZomboid*.exes (red and black egg)
• Left click Properties from the menu.
• Under the Compatibility tab, disable (override) DPI scaling for Application

An alternative way to do this is to set the DPI to 100% instead of having it scale, but this'll apply globally. To do so, go to Start and type "DPI." You should get an option called "Change the size of text, apps, and other items." Open it and change scale to 100%.

You're On a Mac and the Game is Huge

If the window is far too large to view completely, you'll have to go into Preferences -> Display and set scaling to 100%. Emulated applications, such as PZ, on M1 do not appear allow DPI scaling anymore.

4k and Readability

Still, if this is not ideal (or the game ends up looking too ugly to bear, you can enable larger fonts in the Options screen This doesn't only affect the fonts, but will increase the size of some (not all) UI elements, as well.

There are two separate options, one for inventory font size and one for global font size. Be sure you change Font size, not just inventory font size.

Zoom and FPS

If you choose to play on a high resolution, it is strongly advised that you do not enable Zoom levels over 200%. Frame rate will suffer significantly. Check that 225% and 250% are disabled in Options (they should be by default).

[dragonsphotoworks]

Grey was telling you how to play in 4K not 1080P.

[dragonsphotoworks]

I was trying to say you were telling him how to get most out of game. And how to get it to run on 4K monitor with best looks basicialy. Seems i misworded it horribly lol

[M9CO]

Thx.

[r2c]

thanks, the font mod made the game playable for me however the sizing of the UI icons is unchanged and in particular the digital watch display is almost unreadable - any plan to add a proper UI scaling?

[Allexio]

I'm just going to say that you should not be asking your users/customers/players to have to use workarounds because you didn't code your game properly.
This is the only reason I'm really hesitating to buy this game.
When I code, I make sure I use up-to-date libraries and not stuff that is already obsolete by the time I start. Now sure I don't do game dev (for now at least) but still, the principle holds.

Supporting all resolutions for a game is basic stuff. You expect every game to pass that hurdle. It's not acceptable to ask your users to fix the problem with workarounds on their end.

For me it's as simple as: If the game has been in dev for multiple years and has no basic scaling support in 2020, then what else is missing?

[BiscuitOne]

"I'm just going to say that you should not be asking your users/customers/players to have to use workarounds because you didn't code your game properly."

Agreed. This is the first game i've ever played a game that does not support 4k, or other high resolution desktops.

"You adopt something early, you deal with early adopter problems. Same as it's ever been."
4K is not early adopter anymore...

There literally is no excuse. Ask around at GDC, or on game developer forums, literally no one has heard of this being an issue, unless it was back in 2015 when only a small amount of people had high res monitors around 4k. It's not just 4k, but there are many other high resolutions as well that don't seem to work great.

[tilarium]

Цитата допису EnigmaGrey:

Цитата допису _shortcircuit_:

"I'm just going to say that you should not be asking your users/customers/players to have to use workarounds because you didn't code your game properly."

Agreed. This is the first game i've ever played a game that does not support 4k, or other high resolution desktops.

"You adopt something early, you deal with early adopter problems. Same as it's ever been."
4K is not early adopter anymore...

There literally is no excuse. Ask around at GDC, or on game developer forums, literally no one has heard of this being an issue, unless it was back in 2015 when only a small amount of people had high res monitors around 4k. It's not just 4k, but there are many other high resolutions as well that don't seem to work great.

You’ll find accommodating for Windows dpi scaling to be a common topic for anyone that doesn’t have the luxury of using Unity or Unreal. In our case, the version of the library that supplies windowing and dpi awareness outside of OSX. To update it to a version that supports it, requires rewriting the entire rendering side of the engine due to substantial changes to that lib.

Combined statistics for resolutions above 1920x are roughly 8%.

Sorry for the inconvenience. You can try the iwbums build if setting a flag on an exe or pressing subscribe on a mod Is too difficult, however. Font sizes are now in options.

And also something I didn't know which solves my problem is that the window sizes can be changed. I hadn't realized this until just now, not sure when that was put in but I like it. Thank you.

[xpe]

This game still doesn't support 4K monitors?

[Uziel]

Цитата допису XPERIUM:

This game still doesn't support 4K monitors?

nope

[xpe]

Цитата допису EnigmaGrey:

Цитата допису XPERIUM:

This game still doesn't support 4K monitors?

Supports them fine, so long as you do what I wrote in the op.

It’s largely pointless not to just scale it to a lower resolution, though. Naturally, asking a game aiming for 1080x to drive 4X the pixels and sort exponentially more tiles is going to cost FPS.

Played game version V41 27 some time ago. Don't know if anything has improved since then but nothing helped from this post. My desktop resolution is 4k and I expect every game to run properly on 1080p, this game being an exception.

Fullscreen was on and it only filled a quarter of my screen while also being very blurry, as if the screen switches to 1080p but the game fails to fill it up. Playing on 4K makes everything too small and that font mod didn't help either.

Even really old games such as Fallout work at 1080p on my 4k monitor. Mind boggling how this game doesn't support it.

[SlickSTi]

Цитата допису EnigmaGrey:

Combined statistics for resolutions above 1920x are roughly 8%.

Less than 2% of Steam users have VR headsets as well. What's your point?

[SlickSTi]

Цитата допису EnigmaGrey:

Цитата допису SlickSTi:

Less than 2% of Steam users have VR headsets as well. What's your point?

Do you think mentioning a far rarer thing that we also have no intention of supporting will somehow change the answer or entrap me into agreeing with whatever you’re demanding?

This is a video game with an audience primarily running potatoes for systems. 4K users are a smaller fraction of its audience than Mac or Linux users. You’ll just have to take it into your own hands and learn a bit about your computer until we have the time to address 4K support properly on Windows.

No. I think you have made it pretty clear you have no interest in supporting 4K anytime soon and would rather force users into workarounds, which I have tried and they don't work very well. Do you think it's my inept knowledge of PCs that is my problem? I didn't buy my computer pre-built, I put it together myself and have worked as a desktop support tech for the beginning 8 years of my career and have been a sysadmin for the past 12. I don't know what you're trying to achieve with all of your snarky responses like, "if setting a flag on an exe or pressing subscribe on a mod Is too difficult". I've liked this game from the beginning and was playing it on a 1080p "potato" monitor that I owned for way too long and finally went 4K, 120hz, G-Sync, HDR. So I guess that's my fault for being an "early adopter". Thanks for all your help!

[tilarium]

Цитата допису EnigmaGrey:

Цитата допису SlickSTi:

No. I think you have made it pretty clear you have no interest in supporting 4K anytime soon and would rather force users into workarounds, which I have tried and they don't work very well. Do you think it's my inept knowledge of PCs that is my problem? I didn't buy my computer pre-built, I put it together myself and have worked as a desktop support tech for the beginning 8 years of my career and have been a sysadmin for the past 12. I don't know what you're trying to achieve with all of your snarky responses like, "if setting a flag on an exe or pressing subscribe on a mod Is too difficult". I've liked this game from the beginning and was playing it on a 1080p "potato" monitor that I owned for way too long and finally went 4K, 120hz, G-Sync, HDR. So I guess that's my fault for being an "early adopter". Thanks for all your help!

You might say I'm not a big fan of people that try to enact some sort of petty revenge for having to do a work-around.

Honestly, I've come around. I play on my 4K monitor at 3840x2160. I no longer use the Big Freakin' Fonts mod but have been using the UI scaling. Yeah, some things are still hard to see like the date on the wristwatch but for the most part I'm happy with what I'm getting. What could be nice is if we can get resizing for all the windows (like the watch) to adjust their size to fit. But all in all, I've been able to play and enjoy the game without having to use work arounds.

[zerg960]

17" 4K monitor - build 40's barely unplayable out of the box (text is too small to read w/o eye strain. Switching resolutions to 1080p results in blurry text.)

Build 41's BFF setting is buried in the menus (not easily discoverable. I'd suggest making 2x scaling the default setting on 4k). I only discovered it after reading @EnigmaGray's post. IWBUMS doesn't help w/ the DPI scaling.

Even then, it's *really* hard to resize the UI menus since UI controls aren't resized, and some UI dialogs (like alarm clocks) have a bit of clipping involved.

I haven't used LWJGL before, but I'd have a look at:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6544510/how-to-get-the-screen-dpi-in-java
https://superuser.com/questions/988379/how-do-i-run-java-apps-upscaled-on-a-high-dpi-display
http://wiki.lwjgl.org/wiki/Using_High_DPI_Mode.html (wiki page last modified 2013, but System.setProperty("org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.enableHighDPI", "true") looks interesting.

Hopefully there's a way to combine information about the physical screen's DPI (or at least read Window's UI scaling parameter) and scale UI elements appropriately.

[tilarium]

I can say, playing the IWBUMS on a 4K monitor and a 3840 x 2160 even while in game it’s actually working good for me. I have the UI scalded up to I think 2x (at work so cant check). There is some overlap of text and the watch box in the corner doesn’t scale (haven’t gotten a watch yet in my 41.4 game so don’t know if it was changed with the watches). Other then that, game runs good. It lags and stutters back if I zoom out deep but I like that. I use it as my character focusing to see what’s out in the distance but as a result he can’t see what’s right in front of him (if that makes sense).