Fonts are killing me

[martok]

Personally, I've not really had an issue with the font size.  However, I can easily see why others might, so I'm not going to be one of those guys who responds "just suck it up and live with it".  [:'(] 

Seriously, though:  Given how many folks have complained about the font size since vanilla DW was released -- and there's definitely been a lot of you! -- I'm honestly baffled as to why it's not been improved already.  It seems like it ought to be a relatively simple thing to fix. 

[StarWolf]

My suspicion (and greatest fear) is that they may have hardcoded the screens and fonts, making it almost impossible to fix this without a major rewrite of that part of the game code. That's maybe the most likely reason they haven't addressed it. Because surely they do know what an issue it is at this point. Man, I sure do hope I'm wrong about that though.

[adamsolo]

@badken

Completely agree with you on the contrast issue.

[Baleur]

The main font issue i have is the scrolling text at the top of the screen.
Not so much because of the font but because of how CLUTTERED it gets.. Most messages cant even be read "Due to blabla your Blabla scientist increased their energy research skill to.."

In the spirit of readability, i suggest ALL scrolling notifications in the top to be condensed to show quick and easy info.
They need to have a shorter version of the explanatory text you get when you open the actual event log. It makes no sense to clutter the top infowindow with walls of text.
Examples;

"Scientist Bob Kerbal improved Energy Research to +51%"
"Ruins encountered, Kaltor swarm unleashed!"
"Colony ship failed to colonize, enemy territory."
"Human Dominion offers Trade Treaty"
"New Scientist has arrived!" <--- (beats the old wall-of-text "because of something you did in a battle with fleet fifteen, a new troop general has appeared at your world homeworld two")

Basically, any message that takes up TWO rows needs to be shortened, as do any message that does not leave at least 50-100 pixels free space at the sides.
Less clutter, more quick easy info, that's what the window is there for!

[Neotheone]

Same here I have to agree the fonts are just too small for these old mans eyes. There should be selection sizes and the font should be at least THIS BIGnot this size.

[hewwo]

I agree, fonts are not functional sometimes. Why not make most of the screens full-screen? On my resolution (1680x1050 @ 15 inch) it doens't really scale well.

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: Fetrik Snubbe

So is font size complaints the drawback of having a elderly userbase? [:D]

Jk of course. Some screens make me lean forward to read them.
Playing in 1920*1080.

Bah!

Also playing in 1920*1080, and have several decades under my belt. And even being nearsighted with 20/80 in the good eye I can read it fine WITHOUT wearing my glasses.

Honestly, I think the higher resolution your screen is capable of, the clearer it is. However, actual font size might be a problem for some. Perhaps the solution is not to change the font style, but to give accessibility options that resize all fonts to be larger?

[StarWolf]

I found a program that allows you to change resolution when running a game and switch back afterwards, saving/restoring your icon positions on the desktop. So, I tried running the game at a lower resolution and guess what? It really didn't do much at all the resolve the font issues. The one really thin font that is used in some places (it appears to be about 1 pixel wide) is still really, really hard on the eyes. So, I don't think adding game resolution settings is really going to solve anything.

I did a lot of searching to see what's been said about this issue in the past and found out that it's been a problem reported here over and over again and mentioned in many of the game reviews. From what I could find, Matrix has been pretty much silent on the issue but I did see where a beta tester said that the fonts were hard coded and don't expect a fix anytime soon. That was some time ago.

Given the above, we can eliminate some sugested potential fixes that Matrix/Codeforce might reasonably employ:

1) Font scaling is not going to be an option due to the hard coded fonts.
2) Adding the ability to change game resolution will not really help due to problematic readibility with some the fonts themselves

So what does that leave us with? I actually think Badken hit it pretty much on the head with his post:

ORIGINAL: badken
There are a couple of problems with readability with the game. The most important one is obviously font size, but also the design of the font and the contrast of the colors used could be improved. The specific font that's used has a lot of densely packed vertical lines, which makes letter forms difficult to distinguish. Notably, the bold version of the font is *much* better than the thin version that is used for most text in the game. Color contrast, the other issue, can be really bad in some cases: for example, dark blue on gray or dark blue on black are VERY hard to read because of the way the eye perceives the color blue. If you're going to use blue on a dark background, you need to give it a lighter high contrast shadow to make it legible. The default text color in the game is not very readable either. It's a medium-dark grey on black, and there just isn't enough contrast to make things out clearly.

I have a feeling that merely adjusting the text color, making it brighter, creating higher contrast between text and background, would help a lot of people. A bigger font (or using the bold font, which has better spacing built in) would help more, but I realize that might cause some screen layout headaches. An alternative to resizing screens would be giving players the option to use a different font which was better designed for reading at small sizes.

I agree that it is the design of at least one of the fonts that is more the issue than the size. Some of the fonts are extremely clear. There's only one of them, the really thin one, that is really hard to read. If they could just try to address this one, really narrow issue by replacing/improving that one font and maybe some of the contrast issues and not get into any kind of massive overall font fix, I'd be happy.

I guess my questiion is if someone from Matrix or Codeforce could please comment here on this just to let us know if a limited fix like that is even possible? I did a lot of searching but didn't see where anyone official had ever weighed in on this. Even if the answer is "no, we can't do anything" that would be fine. I'd just accept it and move on. But it would be nice to hear at least something.

[willgamer]

(just bought the game yesterday [8|]) +1

[Missouri_Rebel]

I agree with the orig poster as I have a 24 inch monitor at 1920x1080 with near perfect sight and my eyes are really straining after playing for any amount of extended time. Probably not an easy fix though changing the font.

+30

[Nalim27]

+31. Fonts need to have configurable size.

[DasTactic]

This isn't an ideal solution but does work on Windows. I found this while doing the videoing.

ZoomIt is a screen zooming app that will allow you to easily zoom in and out. I just changed the hot-key to Ctrl-Alt-1 and it will zoom in at your cursor and will pan around following your cursor. Works for both windowed and full-screen on my Windows 7 Pro 64 bit system.

[Wolfe1759]

Although I have a 1920x1080 monitor I have found that playing in 1440x900 (changing my desktop resolution prior to launching DW) works best for me.

If there was a way to select resolution from within the game rather than having to manually adjust it each time I play it would be an advantage.

[Wicky]

+1 several other games suffer from the same so what I did was, unburry my old 19" CRT to play these games on.
Fonts that don't scale well with higher resolution are still quite common in strategy games.

[Gelatinous Cube]

As I play at 1300-something x 968 on a 42'' HDTV converted to be a monitor, the font sizes actually work out really well for me. That, by itself, is a good argument to introduce some font changes.

+whatever number we're at

[FirstPappy]

1920 x 1080 here.

+31 1/2

[Byeohazard]

1920x1080

+100,000 rep!!!!

My eyes aren't bad but oh man...get those fonts larger!!!! That would get me excited as much as a new expansion!

[Darkspire]

Probably a silly question but ill ask [:'(]

Has anyone checked there GFX card settings?
Even if you have not set up a profile for DW the default profile for your card might have anti-aliasing on as default which sometimes can cause font problems, there a number of settings on later cards that can really muck up screen fonts.
Just have a sneaky suspicion that DW was meant to be an online browser game which would explain some of the UI shortcomings.

Darkspire

[WoodMan]

Hey guys my new screen arrived today&nbsp;[:)]

I'm finally widescreen (get with the times Woody) and can confirm that the text in the game has not changed at all from my old 1280x1024 resolution monitor.&nbsp; Just letting you know that the screen size shouldn't have any impact on the text size, at least it doesn't on my computer.

Another thing you might want to check: Control Panel>Appearance and Personalization>Display>Adjust Clear Type Text>Turn on Clear Type Text

It was already on by default in mine, so I'm guessing this won't help, but it looks like it makes a big difference so its worth checking.

[StarWolf]

I'm already using cleartype so that's not the issue for me at least. That does make me wonder if the game fonts would look better with cleartype turned off. The way cleartype works that is certainly a possibility for the very thin font which doesn't really have a lot of pixels to work with. It may actually be screwing that one up. But, if they are using bitmaps for the fonts in game, then cleartype will ignore them anyway, I believe.

I'll need to play with the antialiasing settings on a new GPU profile for GW as well, though the way that works is kind of similar to cleartype except it doesn't just smooth fonts but all graphics. If they do use a bitmap font then antialiasing may work where cleartype wouldn't.

It would be helpful if we knew what environment the game was originaly designed to run in (cleartype/no cleartype or anitialiasing/no antialiasing) so we can try to optimize the display of the fonts. Some people are not seeming to have an issue on their systems even at higher resolutions so maybe we just need to figure out what the difference is.