Adjustable text size

[Tempel]

I would like to be able to adjust the size of the in-game text when playing. I'm trying to play on my TV, and it's too far away for me to be able to see the text clearly; I'd guess that some people with vision problems could have a similar issue.

I managed to partially achieve this using the wiki instructions for replacing fonts (and adjusting the "Size" property). This makes the text bigger, but other GUI elements do not change to suit: the top and bottom edges of the text get clipped by most buttons, and certain menus (particularly the Options menu) become unusable as buttons are pushed out of position or visibility. Also, I don't want to be modifying files installed by my package manager, and would rather have this as a setting stored in ~/.config/openmw. Would this be possible?

[SwissCM]

The current UI is made for fixed-size. I think once OpenMW hits 1.0 a more moddable UI might be a good idea, allowing for a TV/Controller/VR friendly interface.

[Uncanny]

This would be a nice feature to have. I been playing in front of a normal computer screen and I find myself needing to lean forward whenever I need to read something. Not that big of a deal perhaps but it feels unnecessary, because many times it's because that the interface doesn't make good use of the space available on the screen. The journal, books and scrolls only uses about 1/8 or 1/9 of the total screen. All of these could greatly benefit from an optional x2 or some size slider in the options menu. The same goes for the character creations screen(s) (and perhaps a few others screens) that are also unnecessary small.

You could of course edit this yourself or in the future create/use mods that changes this, but I think it's not beyond the scope of this project (after 1.0) to have these option like this included in the engine.

[Chris]

Part of the problem with increasing the text size is that Morrowind uses a rather low-res bitmap font. Scaling it up would look horrible. We'd need to support hi-res fonts, or more preferably vector/true-type fonts, first.

[Greendogo]

I though we had already replaced the bitmap fonts with TrueType?

[psi29a]

No, we use the built in fonts by default.

But people can use mods to replace this with scalable fonts.

[scrawl]

ttf fonts are already supported. This is roughly documented on the wiki.

The idea is to support fonts of any size. Unfortunately this will take a major refactoring of layouts, mostly because no one thought of this during the early development of openmw. So this is postponed until 1.1.

Actually, in most cases you probably don't need bigger fonts and it should be sufficient to just scale the whole GUI. If you're having trouble reading the font, then surely icons, graphical buttons, and such should also be bigger. MyGUI doesn't support this very well, though. The easiest solution would be to render the GUI to a smaller texture and then upscale it to the whole screen. Of course this will introduce blurriness, but should not be a problem for the "sitting at a distance from screen" use case.

[scrawl]

The MyGUI render manager in the OSG branch now supports scaling. Just a neat little trick, telling the render manager that the screen is smaller than it actually is, and changing the injected mouse coordinates to match the "virtual" screen. I imagine this is similar to what MCP does.

Screen (2x scaling):

[Pop000100]

It's good to know land is so important.

edit: will that be a .CFG setting, in the menu or what?

[nnayo]

nice result, well done!