Okay, What Should We Do About Long Descriptions?

As Conjurer Dragon has been faithfully pointing out, there are many instances now where long description text for items (the one where you shift-click) runs out of the popup text box due to the new larger font. And the truth of the matter is, there are actually a huge number of cases where this is so. I would even guess as many as half of all long descriptions run outside the box.

We obviously can't keep it this way as it looks very shoddy and amateurish, so we have to do something about it. In some cases it can be handled simply by truncating the descriptive part of the entry ("a longsword is a sword that is very long and has a very long shiny blade that warriors use to poke their victims with. Being long, the longsword is used in such a way to take advantage of this longness by sticking the lengthy length of the long blade into your foe. The longsword is very long.") Sadly this doesn't work in all cases however, as many items have very in-depth stat descriptions as well. The options that would fix this for 90% of long descriptions are:

1. Eliminate the verbal part altogether and just list the stats.
2. Eliminate the stats altogether and just display a short verbal description.

Some items are beyond even these solutions, like Scather and Fragarach, which descriptions seem to go for paragraphs.

I was hoping that we could hot link to custom entries in the help menu, but that function doesn't seem to work in long description boxes.

Anyone got any ideas or suggestions or preferences? It's possible, for example, that we could script a corresponding item-descriptive note to be added to your inventory when you receive a weapon, but that would end up cluttering your inventory with a bunch of notes.

 

Unfortunately no (that I'm aware of) - the long description reference function seems to basically be a dump routine. It ends there.

We can't engineer scrollbars either, and it would require a .dll hack to reroute the shift-click thing to another routine.

 

That would really be no different than the function of the in-game Help system. Either way you would be consulting an outside source for information, the difference being you click the ? button or drag the proposed book onto the use button.

The small 10 point Arial font is going to be a thing of the past soon, as everything is switching to Priory 12 point as a part of the UI overhaul.

I'm still trying to 'have an idea' that would allow us to link the written_ui system.

 

Thanks but I don't think reducing the font height is going to get it. (I assume you hacked the .dll for your example images.) If you changed the height universally, it may adversely affect other appearances of the font, as you can see from the ability scores in your image, which are no longer positioned correctly. Also I don't think doing that will buy nearly enough real estate in the long description boxes.

As to your 1-2-3-4, the problem is of course doing it. Are you able to hack the .dll to accommodate a redrawn box with larger dimensions? Without .dll hacking we aren't able to expand the size of the box that I'm aware of.

 

Interesting that you can actually add fonts ... that's never been doable before.

 

We've already modded all the .mes-alterable fonts in-game, changing Arial 10 point to Priory 12 point to improve style and legibility pretty much across the board.

If you check out the UI modding sticky thread in General Modification, you'll find a lot of information there about what interfaces (both art and fonts) are controlled and moddable via .mes files and what is in the .dll. Offhand I would say that maybe 60% of fonts in-game are controlled via .mes files and are thus more easily moddable by us. (We only rarely have .dll modders on-hand.) However, random1 located upwards of 100 instances of the Arial 10 font and Arial 10 font bold in temple.dll that control a variety of font appearances in-game, most notably for dialog. We've since updated all these as well to Priory 12. (The changes will be appearing in 'phase 2 of the UI overhaul in v7.9 of the modpack.)

What I take it you've done here (added a new font and gotten it to actually appear in-game) has indeed never been done before at Co8, though many including random1 have tried. At this point though I'm not really sure how useful new fonts would be to us, since we have been moving forward with the Priory 12 upgrades for quite a long time now, and many other elements are dependent upon the appearance of a specific font - box sizes, etc., such as is detailed in the OP.

I believe the font in long description boxes is an example of one controlled by temple.dll, so we can't limit an appearance of it to there alone by modding .mes files. The larger point it seems to me is still that simply changing the font for those boxes is not going to solve the issue of text overflow. We want larger fonts for legibility, so we can't just revert it to Arial 10 or some other small font. (Well we could, but we don't really want to.) Which leads us back to either enlarging the boxes themselves (something I can't do with the options and tech currently available to me) or improvising, which was the original purpose of this thread.