Ingame, GSB uses widescreen with no letterboxing. Every other screen is effectively letterboxed down to 4:3. This loses a lot of screen real estate and makes the UI worse than it has to be. Are there any plans to put widescreen support in the design or deploy windows?
Putting aside how easily the ‘special’ scenario elements could be replaced by five coloured icons that allow players to see what kind of changes are in place without having to click twice to look at and close a popup, the scenario window doesn’t lose out too much from being so narrow. The deployment screen, by contrast, could show all kinds of extra information in the ‘unused’ space and this wouldn’t affect 4:3 users (if any even exist). A widescreen design screen would pretty much allow every module to be available, sorted and grouped all the time (at least in vanilla; tabs are still useful) and still have space for an ‘engagement envelope’ display and ‘pre-set design default orders’ area, while maintaining a hull-choice dropdown and save/load/name elements.
The deployment screen could benefit from using the space for a slightly larger (and less popup heavy) orders area and an easier ‘saved deployment’ system (with preview, hopefully). Basically, the game is a spreadsheet so there’s always more information the player could use at each stage, and losing about 20% of the screen to ‘space pictures’ isn’t so great. I’m not sure why the ‘right click’ stats visible in the deployment screen (ie, right click on a ship’s status area to see armour etc) isn’t visible all the time. Is there an overriding reason why the pre-game stuff is 4:3?
In other news, why does ‘blur the game so everything is smudged’ default to on? I seriously thought the game was broken until I turned it off. 