How to change the thickness of text outlines?

humaldo

Hi there!

I'd like to make the text outlines of my subtitle texts thicker, but I don't know where and how to change this. I already searched, google, the AC forum and the AC scripts but didn't find anything.

This is what I want to achieve:

Thank you very much!

ChrisIceBox

If you're relying on AC's own Menu system, you can change the thickness on line 247 of MenuLabel.cs (AdventureCreator/Assets/Scripts/Menu).  The second to last parameter, 2, describes the thickness.

If you're using Unity's UI system instead, you can add the Outline component and tweak the values instead.

humaldo

Thanks, Chris!!! It worked, but I found the code in line 300 of ../Assets/Scripts/Menu/Menu classes/MenuLabel.cs (AC Version 1.41a) 
AdvGame.DrawTextEffect (ZoomRect (relativeRect, zoom), newLabel, _style, Color.black, _style.normal.textColor, 2, textEffects);

This is the result with value 6:

Changing the value bigger than 6 brings broken results, btw

In case you're wondering what I'm doing: I'm experimenting with porting an AGS project 1:1 to Unity, using Adventure Creator :-)

ChrisIceBox

I'd be very interested to hear how things go!  I was an AGSer myself many years ago (too many..)

humaldo

I'll post it to the Games Showcase forum as soon I'm done

humaldo

Hi again!

I'm still trying to create pixel-perfect 1990-LucasArts-Style Adventure Games with AC and I'm still not happy with the text-outline in AC:

There are 2 main issues:

1) The text outlines in SCUMM and AGS are different than in AC. This makes text slightly harder to read in AC Games (Darkside Detective has the same problem in the demo, they faked the thick SCUMM-style outlines in all screenshots)

2) When changing the resolution of the game, the border-thickness doesn't change -> The game doesn't look pixel-perfect anymore, which is really bad if your main goal is to emulate the 1990 pixel style.

Are there any solutions to this problem? How are the chances that those issues get solved in a future AC update? 

Thanks!

ChrisIceBox

You're using the regular AC menu system for this?  I was under the impression that AGS actually used a font that had an outline within the file - maybe not.

AC does it's outlining by re-rendering the text to the left, bottom, above and below the original - so presumably by also doing the corners it'd reach what you're looking for.  If so, perhaps an Outline With Corners option would do the trick.  I don't know what impact that'd have on performance, however.

humaldo

Yes, I think AGS uses Fonts with outlines attached, I tried to find and use such fonts for AC as well, but regular Fonts doesn't seem to work that way (only found "inverted" fonts). Is there maybe a easier solution? Anyway, the most important thing is my point 2) - When the screen resolution changes, the relation of outlines to the font should still be right. (A lot of people complained about the fact our two games are only available in windowed mode yet - especially on a retina mac the outlines get veeeeery thin in fullscreen mode ).

ChrisIceBox

I'd have to see if that's possible - it's actually quite a challenge to "tell" a label that it's parent menu is supposed to scale with screen size or not.  You could change the thickness based on screen size, sure, but you wouldn't want that to happen if the menu's Size was set to Absolute Pixels.

machineboy

Any chance font outline thickness could be a setting that could be saved in the settings somewhere, so to avoid having to edit the advgame.cs every update?

ChrisIceBox

It's not a tweakable property more out of over-cluttering the Menu Manager.

If you switch to Unity UI, you'll have total control over how the menu looks.

humaldo

Hey, I'm back, just switched from AC.149 to 1.51g The first thing i noticed was that changing the outline size via "AdvGame.DrawTextOutline (rect, text, style, outColor, inColor, size *=2.5f, effectText)" doesn't work anymore. Do you know anything about it? in 1.49 everything worked perfect, and i don't want to learn and change to Unity UI now, shortly before my current game is finished Thanks!

humaldo

Strange. After i run into strange error messages, I restarted my Computer (Win7 64) and tried it again -> Now it worked. Maybe i was just tired Anyway, here's the current location of the line-thickness-changing-magic-code in AC 1.51g:

AdvGame.cs in lines 1162-1164:

if (textEffects == TextEffects.Outline || textEffects == TextEffects.OutlineAndShadow)

{AdvGame.DrawTextOutline (rect, text, style, outColor, inColor, size *=3f, effectText);