Line spacing for menus

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lennyhome
Slime Knight
Posts: 115
Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2020 6:07 am

Line spacing for menus

Post by lennyhome »

This is the general idea:
Image

The style that I like better is 9 pixels spacing always.
So in menus.bas I changed line 482 from:

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IF menuopts.edged THEN .spacing = 9 ELSE .spacing = 8
to:

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.spacing = 9
and in editorkit.bas:

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menuopts.itemspacing = 1
to:

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menuopts.itemspacing = 0
It doesn't cause much disruption but it's not reflected everywhere. More tweaking is needed. I think it should be made consistent.

I'm sure this is going to be controversial because somebody's game may rely on some mini-map ascii-art but even then I think it's worth it for readability. Let me know what you think.
TMC
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Re: Line spacing for menus

Post by TMC »

Haha! I was actually meaning to make that change before the next release! Or maybe even 10 pixels.

That appears to be a megamanspritegame screenshot. That game has a font with characters 8 pixels high (which I didn't know), whereas almost every other OHR game use a 7-pixel high font with 1 pixel for descenders, so they don't usually run together like that. (I know the slice editor intentionally has tighter line spacing just to get more on-screen but I don't think that's a good reason now that Custom doesn't default to 320x200 anyway.) Regardless, I also think 8 pixels is too close.

Changing the lines you pointed out only changes the "standardmenu" menus in Custom, which are not used anywhere in games with the possible exception of a couple debug menus. There are also a smallish number of editors that don't use standardmenu, most notably editbitset. I am trying to make everything throughout Custom more consistent.
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Bob the Hamster
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Re: Line spacing for menus

Post by Bob the Hamster »

Yeah, since that option only affects custom and debug menus are n game I feel fine about changing it.

Do we want to make that an editor preference people can change?
lennyhome
Slime Knight
Posts: 115
Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2020 6:07 am

Re: Line spacing for menus

Post by lennyhome »

The only use case that I can think of for 0 spacing is for "semi graphical characters". I haven't played many OHR games so I don't know if it was ever extensively used that way. But even then unless it makes those games unplayable, I would just do 8x(8 + 1 spacing +/- optional item spacing where applicable) everywhere.

Yes. This latest batch of changes have all been inspired by Megaman sprite game. I took interest in the smoothing filter because it made the font hard to read and then it became a Scalex implementation and I wanted the new arrow controls to be able to follow the path with better precision.

Maybe it used to make more sense to not have spacing between lines of text on CRT displays because the scanlines used to be visible. I don't know. But right now if the bottom of a character touches the top of another, the upscaler will fuse them and that should be avoided.
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