I have to agree with DocLotus here: this seems to have been pushed out prematurely. .84 looked fine on my laptop but it looks awful on my HTPC, where I had increased Windows' font scaling.
I don't know that I'd say it was premature. Scaling was implemented
about a year and a half ago and has been broken on natively high DPI displays since its inception.
It took Matt buying a 4K screen recently for it to get any attention. (which speaks to larger issues with MC development, where it can be difficult to convince the team that something is necessary when none of them plan on using it, or are bothered/affected by it)
I've just had a look at this on a high DPI display now, and I agree that the recent changes clearly have issues.
I'm not sure that the current solution is the best way of handling things.
The Windows scale (e.g. 200%) is acting as a multiplier for whatever the current scale is in MC.
So if MC is at "100%" then it's actually displaying at 2× size.
If MC is at "300%" then it's actually displaying 6× - which is far too large.
The largest size that MC should be rendering is 4× - at least based on the current resolution of "retina" assets. (which would be 2× size on a 200% display)
Since it's now acting as a multiplier in the most recent change, it
is now scaling skins which do not have explicit scaling support (they are supposed to be fixed at "100%" but get displayed at 2×) and that's breaking them because only some of the skin elements are being scaled up.
I'm not sure what the best solution is right now though.
I feel like Media Center should be displaying an absolute size, where "100%" is always 1× size, and ignores Windows' scale factor.
The current solution is confusing because if you have Windows at 200% and MC at "100%" it's actually being scaled up to 2× size.
If you wanted it to display at 1× size, you would have to set MC to "50%".
But if Windows is at 150% there is no "67%" setting in MC to restore 1× size, and people should not have to be calculating what the right scale factor is.
MC scales should match Windows scales in my opinion.
So if Windows is at 200%, then MC should also be at 200% to match the size of other applications, rather than "100% ×2"
But I'm not sure that it should be an automatic change.
I mean, it
should be in order to remain consistent with other applications, but many people seem to want the OS at one scale, while keeping MC at another.
So it would be a nuisance if you want MC at 1× size and it automatically switched to 200% every time you launched the application.
I'm not sure whether MC supports Windows 8.1's independent monitor scaling either. I suspect it will be fixed depending on which display it is launched on.
Perhaps the best solution would be to have a new default size which is "Automatic" that respects the Windows DPI settings, and if the user overrides that with "100%" for example,
then MC will be fixed at 1× scale.
That would be similar to how applications like Firefox operate where
layout.css.devPixelsPerPx is set to "-1" by default which is automatic, and can then be overridden with a fixed value of "1" or "1.5" or "2" etc.
And in the meantime, I'm not sure that skins without scaling support should be displayed at anything other than 1x scale - at least not until the rendering bugs are worked out.
If at all possible, I do think that MC
should support scaling "non-retina" skins, because people may switch to high DPI screens which require the larger interface size, but want to keep their old skins. Even though the skin graphics will be scaled up, text and thumbnails would at least be rendered natively and still benefit from the increased resolution.