Greater font size

[lutinotmalin]

Hi everyone,

The game is wonderful and I really like the GUI, however the font size is really tiny imo. I'm playing ArgA on a 13" laptop and it's sooooo difficult to read texts (except dialog boxes), both on windowed or fullscreen mode...

I really appreciate the lore and the work put in this project, not being able to fully enjoy it because of that little font size is very frustrating (kinda similar to the global reading experience in Xenoblade Chronicles X on the Wii U, if you know what I mean).

Is this possible to add an option to adapt the font size or, like the user HarryPhoon suggested on the dedicated Discord server, include a GUI size slider ? I don't have any skills to edit the code myself though.

With a greater font size, the game would be more comfortable to play.

Thanks for reading this,

lutinotmalin

[ghost]

Welcome!

This is a very interesting thought you pose.

Would you please do something for me? I can really tell you I can't get what I want by my own. But don't do any of this until you are sure you can make screen shots:

• Open Argentum Age.
• Set the game to the windowed mode, if you are using the fullscreen mode. You can do this quick by logging out and requesting the fullscreen mode from the login menu, but let's suppose you don't remember your password so you could want to avoid the password pain and fatigue. If you are already using the windowed mode, jump to the next bullet at this indentation level.
  • Open a quickest game against AI:
    • Select Multiplayer / Single player.
    • Open the rivals pane and select an AI rival of your choice, or the random AI rival.
    • Launch the game.
  • Confirm mulligan and wait for your turn.
  • Hit the Esc keyboard key. Game Menu opens. Hit Settings. Settings sub menu opens. Hit Fullscreen. A notice appears 'Video settings will be applied on game restart.'.
  • Hit Close. Hit the Esc keyboard key. Hit Quit.
  • You are back to the Multiplayer / Single player lobby. Hit the Esc keyboard key.
  • You are back to the main menu. Hit the Esc keyboard key. Hit Exit Game.
  • Open Argentum Age again.
• You are playing Argentum Age windowed.
• Open a quickest game against AI:
  • Select Multiplayer / Single player.
  • Open the rivals pane and select an AI rival of your choice, or the random AI rival.
  • Launch the game.
• Confirm mulligan and wait for your turn.
• You are going to cheat now. Don't do this to real humans! Hit Ctrl-d on your keyboard. The debug console will open with the focus set on the console prompt:

--> _

• Type debug_card('house of') and hit the Enter key. You should get a card, and a message will be typed to the debug console. Hit Ctrl-d again to hide the debug console.
• Now you should have a House of Meditation. Hold it for a few turns.
• Whenever you or the computer is holding a Village, cast your House of Meditation anywhere in the map.
• Save a screen shot of the game. If you are using GNU/Linux, hit the PrtSc keyboard key, and hopefully it will open a desktop application for screenshots (maybe not). On Microsoft, hopefully something similar will happen. On macOS, cmd-Shift-3 will save a screen shot.
• If you share the image, I'll explain you why I was needing it.

Once you share the image maybe it will be easier to brainstorm the most urgent, the quickest, and/or the more profitable changes.

This is a game intended to run in so many very different devices with different screen sizes, ratios, and resolutions; so I think your request requires a little bit of focusing in the actual cases and problems, and probably should spawn several lesser tasks; and it's (at least a little bit) related to the looming internationalization effort, which I wouldn't be surprised if becomes the source of profound interface changes to better accommodation of both larger and/or bigger texts.

[lutinotmalin]

Hi there !

I followed your instructions, here's a screenshot of my windowed, "cheated" game !

Tell me if you see something strange that would mean I did not follow well your method... But I guess it should be alright, even if I don't really understand where you wanna go yet !

[ghost]

These are the font sizes I see, ~ ordered by size from bigger to smaller:

• Health count.
• Turn/phase button.
• Pile and graveyard/cemetery.
• Seal prizes.
• Creature health and attack.
• Mana count.
• GNOME texts.
• Player and opponent names.
• Creature armor count.
• Land names - shortest and so biggest.
• Cost of cards in hand.
• Game history texts.
• Chat widget texts and texts over the turn/phase button.
• Land names - largest and so smallest.
• Creature card health and attack.
• Times at the chat widget.
• Other card texts.

For 13" display laptops and smaller, whenever the windowed mode is enabled (or, maybe, allowed), every text under a certain size... must be refactored into something else, or be moved to additional panels.

There might be reasonable exceptions such as card texts, because the way cards pop up when hovered; or the connection status, because their additional nature.

The numbers on these devices, specially when playing windowed, should be similar to those of many largest mobile device display sizes, so that is what makes this issue very interesting.

Which one is the first type of text you are uncomfortable with?

[lutinotmalin]

The types of text I am uncomfortable with are :

• Land names - shortest and so biggest.
• Game history texts.
• Chat widget texts and texts over the turn/phase button.
• Land names - largest and so smallest.
• Times at the chat widget.
• Other card texts.

In bold : the most important issues for me. I retired the cards related issues because you can zoom them anyway. Basically, I'm uncomfortable with the things that ask me to focus more on the screen. I'd prefer not to make effort to understand what's going on. That's why I didn't mention the first font sizes you mentioned : they're sufficiently big to be understandable without any kind of effort, that's the key, at least for me, for having a fluid, smooth gameplay.

But the play screen is not the most annoying thing, because there's already a lot of clear informations. IMO, the main menu is more uncomfortable. You can have a look with my screenshot below. As you can see, everything is so small... Especially the News update box, the equiped deck and the chatbox. I would really like to have greater fonts, so the screen would be more "full" and not so painful to read.

[ghost]

Hi, could you help me with another little thing? This one should be faster:

• Open Argentum Age.
• Set the game to the windowed mode, if you are using the fullscreen mode (see how to at the earlier instruction).
• Open the debug console (see how to at the earlier instruction).
• With the debug console focused, type level.dimensions and hit the Enter key.

Please confirm your output is not any similar to:

--> level.dimensions
[0, 0, 1080, 607]
--> _

[lutinotmalin]

It is similar but it does not have the same values :

--> level.dimensions
[0, 0, 1440, 810]
--> _

[ghost]

This is a damm large request and one of the few issues where you could read something like:

Denivarius - 02/15/2018 _{at Discord}
I think scaling the font size or ui will be pretty hard :(

So this is going to take ages to close completely, but I think it is very valuable feedback and we should absolutely fix it as much as possible.

For what it concerns about what I can do (now sadly less than I would want to), I've started to make some experiments with land arrows and the terms of use, to begin with; and want to provide a slow and as steady as possible pace of improvements. I definitely think tweaking all these stuff is going to ease the tasks of the mobile ports once there is someone ready to undergo that.

I have my own different perspective of the priorities about the stuff:

• The battlefield.
• Terms of use.
• In-game helpers.
  • Context information outside the battlefield (e.g. the turn indicator label over the turn/phase button).
  • Chat widget.
  • Game history.
• Multiplayer lobby.
• Campaign lobby.
• Main menu and login menu.

So that's the agenda I'd be following regardless of parallel works by @davewx7 and other contributors.

[ghost]

I think #226 depends/requires this.