Suggestion for next patch

[Rich]

Well the graphics would be blurry and that's why the higher res is so nice. But just the fonts would be ok. Regardless, Don and Andy might prefer to simply increase the font size in the game rather than use 800x600. Whatever works best and is easiest to implement.

[Imp]

Originally Posted by Rich

Well the graphics would be blurry and that's why the higher res is so nice. But just the fonts would be ok. Regardless, Don and Andy might prefer to simply increase the font size in the game rather than use 800x600. Whatever works best and is easiest to implement.

Simply guessing here fonts is probably not the issue as a simple if clunky workaround could just replace the ones it currently uses from your operating system using explorer or whatever. The tricky bit is probably finding the code & getting the window / graphics round it to resize to the font.

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by Rich

Well the graphics would be blurry and that's why the higher res is so nice. But just the fonts would be ok. Regardless, Don and Andy might prefer to simply increase the font size in the game rather than use 800x600. Whatever works best and is easiest to implement.

800x600 for the background shape used for the dialogue windows, not the screen.

Don's rewriting a bit of SHPEDIT's code removed the 640x480 limitation that was there previously - probably only because the original DOS game was limited to 640. All I did was resize the image that displays icons so it can handle the maximum size we use without cropping, and added a bit of code to clear the background, so older images did not 'overlay'. Plus the MBT palette gets loaded automatically now, so one step is removed.

So there is the possibility for more display space on those screens - or perhaps to use a larger font. (We are looking into the utilities that came with the VFX libraries - which use a bitmap font made up from an LBM image, and not Windows Truetype - the VFX graphic libraries date from the 90's after all).

Larger dialogue windows would probably mean ditching 640 mode support - but who uses that these days anyway (other than on postage-stamp sized mobile phone screens)?.

Andy