Reduced Height Windows
A couple of people have mentioned over the past year or two that they wouldn't mind being able to play Aurora in a lower resolution. The problem seems to be the height of the windows rather than the width, primarily because the resolution of Aurora is based on my old secondary monitor, which happened to be 1280 x 1024. With the move to widescreen monitors and laptops, resolution width has increased over the last few years but height has stayed still, or in the case of laptops, even decreased a little. Over the years I have looked at several possible solutions to the resolution issue without much success, mainly due to the severe limitations of VB6 compared to modern languages. However, I recently had a brainwave and I have been playing around with it. Eventually, I decided to work my way through every screen that was over about 800 in height, all twelve of them, and try and find a way to optionally reduce their height without losing functionality. The result is the creation of a new 'Reduced Height' mode, which you can activate from the main menu bar.
When you enter one of these windows in this mode, the program reduces the height of various grids and lists within those windows, removes an occasional minor control and shunts everything below them upwards, or in some cases upwards and sideways. In almost every case the top third or so of the window remains the same. This has been done on a case by case basis rather than through some clever programming trick and it's been a grind as I have had to manually figure out the new position of every control (or parent frame) on those windows and hard code the relative change in position. Yuck! However, it's done now so Aurora has a new optional minimum resolution of about 1280 x 800.
To activate the reduced height mode, use the 'Reduced Height Windows' option on the Game Parameters menu on the main menu bar.
The updated windows include:
Economics
Class Design
Ships
Fleets
Commanders
System View
Events
Combat Overview
Strikegroups
Tactical Intelligence
Shipping Lines
Task Forces
Attached are examples of the normal class window and the reduced height version
Steve