If you play Uru using a widescreen monitor, you may have noticed that KIimages do not look as expected, especially when you upload them to an imager like the ones in the Bevin neigborhoods.
Uru was designed for screens with an aspect ratio of 4:3 (800x600 and 1024x768). This is still true for the offline versions like "Uru Complete Cronicals". Even with these settings there is some image distortion, although most people won't notice it. Uru Live added support for widescreen monitors later on, but it only enhanced this graphics problem already present in the game engine.
So, when you configure the game with a resolution of 800x600 or 1024x768, you are unlikely to even notice the distortion. However, as soon as you use the widescreen settings you will notice the distortion. If not immediately in game, then when you make pictures and watch them on screen or on an imager like the ones in the Bevin neighborhoods.
Update: Cyan made a number of changes recently (November 2019). One of those changes is better widescreen support. This means that you can now set Uru to use the widescreen settings while maintaining proper image proportions in-game. A good place to see the difference is in one of the pods when looking through one of the two windows on the lower deck. The pictures further down this topic were made when Uru was not yet updated. KI-images on the other hand, will still be stretched instead of cropped, unfortunately.
There are two reasons for the image distortion:
The first applies to everything you see on your screen in-game. The second applies to making pictures (KIimages) when you use a widescreen monitor. I will explain both reasons in the next paragraphs.
This can be compared to how maps are made of the earth. Maybe you remember the map of the world back at school. On these maps Greenland appears to be even bigger than the US. Most people know that Greenland is actually smaller than the US. The misrepresentation is caused by the technique of projecting a curved surface onto a flat surface. Any decent atlas should have a chapter explaining this effect in detail. Wikipedia has a good article about it as well.
Note: When you change to first-person view (F1) this effect is even more prevalent. The next two pictures were taken from the exact same spot. I only turned my avatar about 30 degrees. The Bahro poles look thinner than they actually are in the middle of the picture and thicker than they actually are on the left and right side of the picture.
When you configure Myst Online - Uru Live with the standard resolution of 800x600 or 1024x768 then your Kiimages won't be affected by the following technique. With these standard resolutions, your KIimages will look exactly like they do in-game. However, when you do use the widescreen settings, everything changes. Anytime you make a picture using your KI, the game wants to make an 800x600 pixels KIimage of what you see on your screen. Instead of cropping the image (cutting away the left and right side from what you see on your screen), the game wants to confine the whole screen (like, say 1920x1080 pixels) into an 800x600 pixels image. That means that the x-axis will be scaled more than the y-axis, resulting in even more image distortion. Both MOUL and the UAM-Shard use this (flawed) technique. The Gehn Shard and The Open Cave Shard do crop the image, thus greatly reducing the image distortion.
