Outlined text and other visibility woes

[Erk]

WAY too much of the text in VS is just straight antialiased white. About half the time, it is on a light coloured background. Why not outline white text with black or another highcontrast colour, so that it is visible on a light OR dark background? This simple remedy does not change the flavour of the simple text, but it makes it always legible.

Most HUD controls could use the same black outlining. That's all it would take to make them legible all the time, from text to the dots on the radar to ... well, everything.

Likewise, text on planets/stations for destinations - you know, the little blue star with the white text - is similarly illegible a lot of the time. Those blue dots, really, should be displayed all the time, not just on mouseover. I hate the "new planet hunt" where I have to swish the cursor all around the screen until I have mapped out all the hotspots. What exactly is that simulating? by having the blue stars there all the time, and making black outlined white text appear on mouseover, planet-exploration would no longer be a pain in the banana. I see this dude suggests the same. Cheers, dude.

Finally, in a similar vein, the mouse cursor when using mouse support is WAY, WAAAAAAYYYY too big. A little "+" or "o" some such would be fine, guys! The huge cursor is so big it interferes with seeing where my actual targetting reticle is sometimes! And there's no way to move it out of the way to get a better view, as it is my steering crosshair!

Thanks, folks! I am having a hoot getting to know this game.

[ollobrains]

Yeah some minor UI changes would be good, definetly with the text, however it does smell of a open source game and i mean that in a good way, its developed , active development and quiant but playable which is good

[Erk]

Oh, it's great open sourced stuff and very healthy but open sourced projects should not use their nature as an excuse; the goal should still be to improve on this kind of stuff. Vega Strike rocks

[safemode]

VS is a strange game in that it's got two purposes that are equally important to it's development.

1. It's a game in of itself. Different from what came before and is now.

2. it's an engine for making mods that mimic games that are long gone in terms of support and playability. Games that the developers of part 1, became interested in and why VS was even created.

So there are features that are in VS that are simply there for mods to be able to mimic the functionality of old games (as well as create new ones) and at time's VS uses these because nobody has gotten around to "fixing" the feature to be something that is new and for VS particularly. Since the mod-type features work, there is little justification to not work on things that dont work to work on things that currently do. And up until recently, there haven't really been many developers (still aren't really) working on VS to even think about working on simply aesthetic parts of the game rather than serious overhauls and fixes.

So that explains "why" it is doing what its doing. Why it hasn't been made the way you think is more logical, both the markers and the text and all that is probably simply due to lack of time. Those are aesthetic fixes and as such, are far down on the list of things to do for the core developers ...and it sucks to say that there aren't many people outside of a handfull (5 or so) working on VS and like it or not, aesthetic fixes aren't all that exciting to fix. They're not hard, but you have to track down what needs changing and go over with other people if it's what everyone thinks things should look/work like and make the change and in the end, the functionality is the same.

We really need more people who see something they want changed, and make a patch. Not necessarily people who will get all involved, but people who can take out that time costing step of tracking down where things need to change to address the various aesthetic complaints with the game. The thing is, the type of developer interested in fixing mainly aesthetic issues in the game, are the type of developers who find more fun working on mods than working on the main game. Mainly because there is something to compare to....it's much harder to get things "right" when what's "right" is always a debate.



Now your text visibility thing, that's a whole other story. I dont know enough about GL lighting at the moment to work on it myself, but having the cockpit react to only the star's lights of a system is not only aesthetically bad, but seems to be a benign bug. While, light may glare into a cockpit, the controls should never be glared out of view. Even in 2000AD the technology for auto-shading glass was around. I dont know if simply outlining the text with black would make it visible in high light situations, but that seems to be a band-aid rather than a fix. Next time look at some text on the nav-comp while you rotate around to see what i mean.
That's not right.


and that ends my obscenely long reply.

[Turbo]

While we're on the subject, most bar's overhead lights are so bright that they obscure the left half of whatever the barkeep is saying. I would fix my copy, but everything is in DDS format and the DDS tools don't work on either of my computers.

The fixer text, on the other hand, is readable because it comes in at the top and ovelays the bar image. So there are two possible solutions to the barkeep text problem.

Turbo

[ace123]

We added something about a week ago to make it overlay a background behind the text.

If you are using windows, try updating to a new EXE that I just committed.

If you are using a new version, you should be able to see a rectangle behind the text. Should I make that darker? The tradeoff is that it is more noticable in other places.