Is Windows Scaling being applied intentionally?

[BHunterSEAL]

I was having trouble changing the resolution to my monitor's native 3840 x 2160. I type those values in, enable Fullscreen and restart, but when the game loads, it indicates I'm back to 2560x1440.

If I forget to check Fullscreen, prior to launching I get a popup stating "Your BoC window width (height) setting (3840 / 2160) exceeds your final screen width (2560 / 1440). It lists my video mode as Windowed 3840 x 2160 (although Fullscreen is checked), with a Native screen size of 3840x2160, Windows Scaling of 150%, and a final screen size of 2560x1440.

This can be fixed by setting Windows Scaling to 100%, although the small size of everything on my desktop makes Windows rather difficult to use outside the game., I don't think the Windows Scaling ought to be applied to the in-game resolution settings... am I doing something wrong?

[GreenTreeGames]

We are looking into this. (No one directly on team has screen this size ;-) but we found a colleague). We will be getting back to you further.

[Jonny Tenebrous]

You can manually disable Windows Scaling by opening Burden of Command's installation folder, right-clicking the BoC.exe executable, selecting "properties", opening the "Compatibility" tab, clicking the "Change high DPI settings" button, and enabling the checkbox at the bottom which says "Override high DPI scaling behaviour. Scaling performed by: " and make sure the dropdown box says "Application". Click OK to exit. Now you will have BoC play in native 3840 x 2160, and I've confirmed this on my own PC. I've had to do this on a lot of older (pre-2018-ish) PC wargames... I think 4k display support used to be a bit of a developer afterthought but it's super common now so this should really be accounted for.

That being said, the UI has clearly not be fully tested at 4k, as mentioned above. It's not terrible, and some aspects of the UI are reasonably legible. However, tooltip dialogues (for example, when mousing over units) and some system dialogues, are very small indeed at native 4k, particularly if - like me - your display is 27" rather than 32". This would be a hindrance for most people to read clearly, and I hope it'll be fixed for release. I think it's essential that all games released in this era have fully scalable UIs. High-DPI has been around for over 12 years now, and monitors are not becoming lower-res as time goes on.

With the very notable exception of the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs with physically small screens and 800p resolution. I do ~75% of my gaming on Steam Deck these days and I really appreciate when developers of strategy games make their software Steam Deck certified with the official green checkmark. Again, fingers crossed for Burden of Command!

[GreenTreeGames]

Thanks for such a thoughtful reply Jonny. I will pass this on to team member who is also looking into.

And you are right some things have been scaled right now and some not. I appreciate your pointing out which ones. The ones on the tactical map are probably not going to be reasonable to resize (if you mean the graphical ones rather than textual). But popup ones we can.
We have done testing overall on DPI. But I will let team member who has addressed this reply more thoughtfully then I can.
Luke (lead)

[Remus]

First, thank you for posting, both to raise the issue for others who also run into this and because your post caused me to look into the behavior of the Graphics Settings area and we uncovered a subtle crash-bug which has now been squashed! :-)

Based on your post, it looks like you have a 3840 x 2160 (4K) native monitor, with Windows scaling set to 150%. This changes your *effective* resolution to 2560 x 1440. That is what out code looks at to see if the requested Window size will fit. And when you entered your (bigger) *raw* screen size in, that triggered the warning you saw.

That warning window offers 3 options to fix this, two of them are easy in that the code takes care of it:
1. Switch to Fullscreen (and ignore the requested window size).
2. Auto-calc the window size that will fit on your screen and use that instead of what was requested.
3. Quit and change your Windows Display settings.

The poster above described option #3 very well. You have several choices if you dive into the Windows settings, such as change your screen resolution or change your Windows scale factor. The one you pick will affect how large or small the UI is on the screen (4K monitors can make the UI very hard to read!).

If you pick either of the other choices listed above (#1 or #2), the game should launch for you and based on your stated settings, you should see a screen/window at 2560 x 1440 with BoC within it.

Did you try that, and did it work (or not)? Is the resulting UI at that resolution suitable/readable?

If that is too small to see, then your best bet from there is to go into Windows and change the screen resolution to the closest one (but a bit larger than) our minimum (1280 x 1024). Then launch in Fullscreen mode and see if the game is more readable for you.

[Stinger]

Originally posted by Jonny Tenebrous:

You can manually disable Windows Scaling by opening Burden of Command's installation folder, right-clicking the BoC.exe executable, selecting "properties", opening the "Compatibility" tab, clicking the "Change high DPI settings" button, and enabling the checkbox at the bottom which says "Override high DPI scaling behaviour. Scaling performed by: " and make sure the dropdown box says "Application". Click OK to exit. Now you will have BoC play in native 3840 x 2160, and I've confirmed this on my own PC. I've had to do this on a lot of older (pre-2018-ish) PC wargames... I think 4k display support used to be a bit of a developer afterthought but it's super common now so this should really be accounted for.

That being said, the UI has clearly not be fully tested at 4k, as mentioned above. It's not terrible, and some aspects of the UI are reasonably legible. However, tooltip dialogues (for example, when mousing over units) and some system dialogues, are very small indeed at native 4k, particularly if - like me - your display is 27" rather than 32". This would be a hindrance for most people to read clearly, and I hope it'll be fixed for release. I think it's essential that all games released in this era have fully scalable UIs. High-DPI has been around for over 12 years now, and monitors are not becoming lower-res as time goes on.

With the very notable exception of the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs with physically small screens and 800p resolution. I do ~75% of my gaming on Steam Deck these days and I really appreciate when developers of strategy games make their software Steam Deck certified with the official green checkmark. Again, fingers crossed for Burden of Command!

THANK YOU was just about to request a refund.

Well trying to play on my big screen, my preferred gaming method, at my native 3480 x 2160 at 300 scaling, which works for all other games and normal PC stuff, and the game is playable except for instance the popup to describe the Lt. the text is too small to read at the about 10' distance. Most games have a UI scaling option which allows those boxes to be enlarged but don't see here. I can change the resolution on my desktop to 1920 x 1080 and did and that fixed it but also screwed up my desktop and now have to rearraign everything and I can't go back and forth for just one game.

If I set the game resolution to 1920 x 1080 and uncheck full screen it opens in a window about 1/4 the size of my desktop and i can find no way to make that window full screen, F11 does not do it.

Any solutions or is this something the dev's can fix by allowing such pop ups to be size adjustable?