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Patch: Variable-Width Small Font for Longer Names

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> In the Lineup menu, if you open someone's status screen and then return, some of the text from the status screen "ic Evade Sp" gets thrown up into the top right corner.

I think I didn't even realize there was a Lineup status screen. This probably just means there needs to be code added to redraw text that the status screen overwrote.

> Would there be enough VRAM space to have some kind of alternating buffer? (This would also apply to the glitched text when exiting out of battle submenus.)


I thought about that, but there isn't a lot of free VRAM. Page up/page down in field menus can be improved by bracketing the operations with a "transaction" (there are some examples of this in the existing code), which will make the code try to upload all the text over one frame instead of doing one line per frame as it usually does. Encounter submenus are trickier because there really isn't much VRAM available, and I was thinking the easiest thing to do may just be to blank each submenu before closing it.

> For some equipment, the item's details screen has the first 8x8 pixel block of Terra's name missing. Weird.

Probably a mistake in the static tile allocation of the text in that screen. That screen has to tightly pack the text in order to fit it all in the tile map.

> I am surprised that the blinking portraits issue is a thing. None of the VRAM text graphics pool really need to be refreshed, right? I wonder if the game is rerunning that routine unnecessarily.

I think that the game always redraws the portraits to handle the case in which one of the party members changed Imp status. It's unnecessary in most cases and could be patched out to improve things there. (The Lineup menu is even worse--the game redraws almost everything every frame and I have to add some workarounds to prevent flicker.)

> Have you had the chance to test other special battle scenes beyond the Vargas fight?

I've played the game up through the Cranes, and also lightly tested the Colosseum and Kefka.

> The custom font is well designed on its own, but does feel out of place against the larger text and original window sizes. One solution, of course, is to reduce the size of the large font. But I wonder how the performance might be impacted by using a wider small font, something like FF2 Origins on PS1.

The problem here wouldn't so much be performance as it would be running out of space in the tilemap. If you look at some of the menus, like Config, gear details, and party equipment overview, you can see I get close to running out of tiles on BG1/BG3. Not saying it can't be done, but there would need to be a lot of tilemap reshuffling and probably some abbreviation/rewording.
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RE: Patch: Variable-Width Small Font for Longer Names - by tachiweasel - 01-17-2021, 03:53 AM

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