Right angles and monitor adjustment

I get many emails from people claiming that the right anglesin the eyballing game are not square. Though I already explained this in the "about" page, there are many people who indignantly claim that the game doesn't know what a right angle is.

Its very important that your computer's display aspect ratio matches that of your monitor. I frequently get emails from people claiming that the right angles are not quite right angles. Some even send screenshots, which allows me to be doubly certain that it's their display that's the problem.

If you are using an LCD display, your screen resolution should be set to match the display's native resolution. For example, 17" or 18" non-widescreen monitor tend to have a resolution of 1280x1024. That's a 5:4 aspect ratio. If you set your computer to 1024x768, that's a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is not quite the same as 5:4. The image thus gets scaled and stretched vertically more so than horizontally. This makes right angles not look like right angles (unless they were aligned with horizontal and vertical). It also makes circles look like ovals, and makes the other solutions look subtly incorrect.

Distortions can get much worse if a widescreen display is used without setting the PC's video output to something that matches the monitor. So if right angles don't appear quite square, is not a problem with the game, it's a problem with your display. Please check your display settings before emailing me, because I'll just send you a link to this page!


Back to the game