Gokyabgu: Still I really can't understand why they don't add the 4:3 ratio. I hope they fix this with an earlier patch.
Here is a little quote of an unpleasant user (who, with this, said something useful for once) over at the official board that might explain why they can’t fix this within a matter of hours. However, obviously that does not condone the fact that they didn’t already include this
before the release:
The mathematics for transforming any 3-D world onto a 2-D screen of any desired dimensions (horizontal, vertical, and aspect ratio) has been well known for a long time. The two most widely used 3-D APIs, OpenGL and Direct3D, both include pipelines for the needed transformations that don't require any more programmer attention than supplying the model-view, projection, and color matrices. For any given camera position, field of view, screen resolution, and aspect ratio, these differ only in the selection of a few well-understood parameters. The overcurious can read about the OpenGL pipeline here: OpenGL Transformation (
http://www.songho.ca/opengl/gl_transform.html); Direct3D has pretty much the same features. (For the still more overcurious, OpenGL uses a fixed camera and slews the world around the camera to change viewpoint; Direct3D uses a movable camera.)
So in theory, there isn't a problem in rendering any 3-D game onto any rectangular screen, and CDPR's or any other game engine's inability to render in more than one aspect ratio (like 16:9) is puzzling. There are three reasons that make sense to me why this might be so.
There may be rasterization problems that haven't been solved. This is hardly unheard of: when Fallout 3 came out, 16:10 was still predominant, and the game had problems with 16:9 aspect ratio, causing each scan row to be offset by one pixel.
There may be artistic issues that make certain aspect ratios undesirable. This shouldn't be much of a problem between 16:10 and 16:9, but it might be between widescreen and 4:3 or 5:4. If all of the art direction went into producing scenes that look good in widescreen, pan-and-scanning it down to the narrower 4:3 or 5:4 format may give results too unsatisfactory to release, just as it does in cinema.
There may be problems with on-screen overlays. These aren't part of the 3-D rendering pipeline; they're overlaid after, so they're always in screen coordinates. If these are developed to a particular resolution or aspect ratio, they may fail on a different one: the HUD or menus may be clipped or out of position, or aids like health bars on actors may be confusingly misplaced. This is often a problem on games that are released for multiple screen resolutions or aspect ratios without sufficient work to get the overlays right for every supported screen. Fallout 3 is again a good example of a game that had this problem on release.
My guess is the most likely cause is the on-screen overlays. These are a lot of work to produce, and if they are even a little bit "off", they make the game a lot harder or even unplayable. So if you have limited resources (remember, CDPR is no Bethesda or EA, not by at least two orders of magnitude), this is one of the areas of development you're going to be tempted to cut back on, and it's also a reason why support for different aspect ratios might have to be released in an update.
