/viewport command explained
 

Okay, here's the low down

When you type the /viewport command, it tells you it wants 4 numbers: x; y; w and h.

x = where you want the viewing area to start from the left of the screen
y = where you want the viewing area to start from the top of the screen

So, 0,0 would mean that it starts in the very top farthest left corner of your screen.

w = how wide you want the viewing area to be from x
h = how high you want the viewing area to be from y

So, 1280X1024 means that your viewing area would be 1280 pixels wide and 1024 pixels high

Put it together, and you get:
/viewport 0 0 1280 1024

This is telling your computer to start drawing the viewing area at the top left corner and to make it 1280 wide and 1024 high.

If you put in a view port of
/viewport 0 0 1000 750

it would be telling your computer that it wants it to start drawing the viewing area at the top left corner, but to only make it 1000 pixels wide and 750 pixels high. This would let you put stuff down the right hand side of the screen and across the bottom, without them hiding the viewing area at all.

Now, say you wanted to put some stuff down the left hand side of the screen, and across the top, but again, you don't want to have it hide stuff on the screen. Let's say that the items you are putting down the right hand side are 20 pixels wide, and the ones across the top are 24 pixels high. What you would type is:

/viewport 20 24

That tells it to move over 20 pixels and down 24.

But you still need the last two numbers, right?

You figure that out by taking the width and height of your screen and subtracting the two amounts above.

So, if you have a viewing area that is 1280 wide by 1024 high, yoou would go:

1280 wide minus 20 (the amount you are moving it over) = 1260
and
1024 high minus 24 (the amount you have moved it down) = 1000

Which means that your complete command line would be

/viewport 20 24 1260 1000

Make sense?

God madeth the /viewport command
And the people rejoiced:p

thanks
 

Thanks for the tutorial, needed the info.

Great info, was wonderin what the 4 numbers meant :D

Cairenn actually explained it very well. Maybe this will help a little more the first two numbers (20 24) are like x and y on a graph ... the starting point - read her post to see which way it goes up and over.

The second two numbers (1260 1000) are how wide the screen will be and how high it will be from your new starting point (20 24). Put it all together with the command and you get /viewport 20 24 1260 1000.

Hope that helps.

Kuv

Ok ok i know how to do viewport but if i use lets see 800 buy 600 and change the viewport to say 800 buy 400... You will cut off at the bottom ... Meaning at 800 600 youll see that rat at the bottom and viewport 800 400 you will not see the rat ....Anyway to make it show the hole screen not cutting from the bottom ???

Using something in 4/3 ratio will fix that for example 400x300 or 780x585 or 600x450, etc, etc

But what about video use?
 

I understand the viewport command, and love my 'letterbox' eq screen, but what does it do to the video card demands?

If I run a 1024x768 window but viewport down to 640x400 does my video card have the demand of a 640 screen or 1024?

I wan to know because my 1024 is a bit laggy 800 works great. If I jump all the way to 1280x1024 can I viewport down to 1024x768 and still play the game? Giving myself plenty of black frame for all my cool looking UI windows?

bottom line. Does viewport affect video perfomance?

I've never noticed that fiddling with my viewport had any real impact on my video performance. =/

Reducing your viewport will only affect your system performance if your vidio card is what is causing your slowdown.

I have been messing with a program called fraps that will display your framerate real time in D3D games. Interestingly, in every zone I tried it in, I got no difference in framerate on my main system regardless of what resolution I set in game.
I have vsynch enabled, so my maximum framerate is 75, well above what is detectable by even the most sensative of humans. 30fps is above what like 99%+ of humans are able to detect.

In the Plane of Water deep in, I was getting 15-17 fps in about a 56 person raid. My fps stayed consistant throughout the range of resolutions from 640x480 through 1600x1200. This was with all models off exept dark elf and wood elf males, and horses and elementals on.

In the plane of tranquility, I got 50-75 fps consistantly regardless of resolution. Looking up from inside the waterfall in tranquility, I got 9-10 fps regardless of resolution.

This is all with an AthalonXP 2700+ cpu, geforce4 ti4200, nForce2 motherboard with 1 gig of 400mhz ram.

I actually got VERY SIMILAR results on an AthalonXP 1700+ system with a via KT266 motherboard wtih geforce3 ti500 and a gig of 266 mhz ram.

When I turn all models off, the performance of both systems goes up, and is ALMOST IDENTICAL.

When I turn on all models, both systems performance goes down. It is with all models on that I start seeing a big difference in performance between the 2 systems. All models on with the xp1700+ system is nearly unplayable on a raid, heh.

Both systems also have a sharp dropoff in performance if I remove any ram from them, regardless of is models are on or off. The 2700+ had a higher percentage dropoff than the 1700+. I suspect the higher dropoff of the 2700+ was because removing a stick of ram dropped it down to single chanel DDR, thus reducing the memory bandwidth. Single chanel DDR actually comes very close to maxing out the available bandwidth to the cpu, so upgrading to dual chanel is actually only a minimal performance boost.

I do not own a pentium system to do any testing with it, but I suspect there would be similar results based on what some folks in my guild were telling me.

I'm really starting to think that its rather pointless go with anything over a geForce3 vidio card at this time, unless you like running with models on. I hate the Luclin models myself.

It seems like system ram actually has a huge impact on game performance.

I was really suprised that the xp2700+ and 1700+ CPUs had similar performance. That little tidbit, and my observation of what happened when I removed ram, seem to indicate that one of the main bottlenecks for EQ is memory quantity and bandwidth to the CPU rather than vidio card performance.

This would somewhat explain why litterally every single person to ever raid in the Plane of Water has poor system performance, even when sitting inside a cubby hole staring at the back of it. The 3d under water environment just has to many things for the system to track, so the memory and cpu buss gets flooded and performance degrades. No amount of vidio performance or resolution changes will help it at all because the vidio is not the bottleneck.

If this is true, then a P4 system using RAMBUS would perform slightly better than an equivelent speed AthalonXP system using dual chanel DDR, due to the higher memory bandwidth.

I may do some more detailed testing on it. One of the things I want to do is try swapping the vidio cards in the systems, and borrow some ram from someone so I can test more memory configurations. I want to test with 256 megs, but I don't curently own a stick of 266+mhz ram that is under 512 megs.

Thank you
 

Very good info. It's amazing what this game does for system literacy :) my GF plays on the brand new box next to me and we compare performance constantly. After just a year of EQ she has picked up quite a vocabulary (of tech terms) and now throws questions my way that make me hit the tech sites to answer :)

Funny enough, this question of the viewport is one of them.

Now if I can just keep her off the sites I use to answer her questions ~chuckle~

Just a quick thank you for the information in this post and 3 cheers for Search!

I was wondering tho. If you set the hight value to something other than that which would be required for a 4:3 ratio, is the view cut off at the top, the botton, or both?

I believe both..

Also,
the 4/3 ratio was just my example for kenney because he was using 800x600 (=4/3)

To get the smallest distortion posible you should use the same aspect ratio as your resolution.. For instance if you normally run at 1280x1024 (=5/4), A viewport with a ratio of 5/4 would be best.. 4/3 would look ok though..

wow that was posted almost a year ago hehe..