Scaling the UI? And other option questions.
Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2014 6:43 pm
Hello I got this game a couple of days ago and so far it's pretty fun for an alpha. However I've come across something that I see in a lot of other games.
Scaling of the UI. I have a 2560x1600 30" monitor. In a few games they often leave out people on high resolutions. In those cases it's unplayable. The GUI is usually extremely small which often leads into you having too constantly squint your eyes or lean into the screen to read text mostly or make out other UI elements. Even AAA titles with big budgets often make this mistake. Which either leads to sore eyes, frustration, or simply just not playing the game. After about 30 minutes it will wear you out and quit the game. Dreading the next time you play the game knowing it will be a fight to make out what's on the screen.
Some games do partially fix the issue in a couple ways. For example in kerbal space program you are given a simple slider to change the Flight UI from small to medium, large, and huge (something along those lines). The rest of the game is left untouched. So as you are building your rocket your dealing with tiny menus, tiny icons, and extremely tiny text. That's what I call a game that you can optionally scale in a very limited way (ie: only able to scale a certain element of the game UI, and limited by how much you are able to scale). Then you have a game like Prison Architect which auto scales the UI. While it is decent. You often wish you could just move that slider forward to make the UI a little bigger. I could give more examples. But it's probably just better to show you a screenshot of what I experience in Factorio.
http://i.imgur.com/m2cld4H.jpg
However due to the fact that the image is huge. It will just be zoomed in on your monitor because it's a much smaller resolution compared to mine. My resolution is about 2x bigger than 1080p. So if you view it on a 1080p monitor you will have to actually zoom out 50% or more to get sort of what I see.
With that said if you see the image. You'll notice for example in the inventory dialog box. The big icons (which let's you click different categories to see the different recipes based on their category). Then the smaller icons below them which you click to craft that item. If you could scale it up to where the small icons are as big as the big icons and then of course double the size of the big icons that would be much better. The same with text the big text that says Inventory and Crafting that should be the size of the small text and those should be two time bigger as a result. I would say to increase the dialog sizes and the grid sizes and minimap. But I would presume that if you made the text and icons bigger you would inherently have to scale those UI elements as well.
That's really the only thing stopping me from enjoying the game. I'm not sure how hard that would be to implement. I presume resolution we see in game is not the resolution that it was made. That you have images that are bigger if that's the case it would only be a matter of including that with the game and have some sort of option to enable that. Then the text I would assume is even simpler considering you would just increase the font size that the game renders. Now the minimap well it's pretty much useless in my case. I'm always hitting the M key to pull up the full map because trying to make anything out on the minimap at this resolution.
Moving on I did have a couple other questions related to the options menu that I don't understand. The first is under Graphics settings there is a check box for Light Entity Info Background. I went into a game and kept toggling it on and off to try and see a difference or what it does. No idea what that does.
In other settings you have a Max Threads option. By default it's two. My i7 920 has 8 logical cores. A couple other games allow you to tweak this but I've never understood it much less how it's beneficial in this game. I'm pretty sure the operating system handles which cores on the processor are used by a program and when. The programmer has the ability to create threads to execute multiple instructions at the same time. For example you may create a thread just for rendering graphics, one for AI, maybe one for sound, and then another one for user input. As you can tell I don't know a whole lot about programming. So those four threads are not waiting on each other. For example if the rendering hasn't finished you wouldn't want your sound to stop playing and then after the rendering is done the sound that was waiting to be executed plays a sound two seconds or more after you were expecting sound to play.
So you tell the operating system you need four threads. If the first logical core is doing something else in some other program you wouldn't want to wait for that program to finish. Instead the operating system gives that task to a different core. Though a processor is so fast even with just 1 logical core it would seem as though it were doing multiple things at once. Some things take higher priority etc. The point is all that's delegated to the operating system. So what does max threads do. If it's set to two does it tell the operating system I never need more than two logical cores. Or does it just enable more sub systems be processed simultaneously? So if you have the CPU horsepower you can say "Yes I do have the horsepower create all the threads you can" which may or may not speed it up.
That's it for now. Thanks.
p.s. sorry for the long post.
Scaling of the UI. I have a 2560x1600 30" monitor. In a few games they often leave out people on high resolutions. In those cases it's unplayable. The GUI is usually extremely small which often leads into you having too constantly squint your eyes or lean into the screen to read text mostly or make out other UI elements. Even AAA titles with big budgets often make this mistake. Which either leads to sore eyes, frustration, or simply just not playing the game. After about 30 minutes it will wear you out and quit the game. Dreading the next time you play the game knowing it will be a fight to make out what's on the screen.
Some games do partially fix the issue in a couple ways. For example in kerbal space program you are given a simple slider to change the Flight UI from small to medium, large, and huge (something along those lines). The rest of the game is left untouched. So as you are building your rocket your dealing with tiny menus, tiny icons, and extremely tiny text. That's what I call a game that you can optionally scale in a very limited way (ie: only able to scale a certain element of the game UI, and limited by how much you are able to scale). Then you have a game like Prison Architect which auto scales the UI. While it is decent. You often wish you could just move that slider forward to make the UI a little bigger. I could give more examples. But it's probably just better to show you a screenshot of what I experience in Factorio.
http://i.imgur.com/m2cld4H.jpg
However due to the fact that the image is huge. It will just be zoomed in on your monitor because it's a much smaller resolution compared to mine. My resolution is about 2x bigger than 1080p. So if you view it on a 1080p monitor you will have to actually zoom out 50% or more to get sort of what I see.
With that said if you see the image. You'll notice for example in the inventory dialog box. The big icons (which let's you click different categories to see the different recipes based on their category). Then the smaller icons below them which you click to craft that item. If you could scale it up to where the small icons are as big as the big icons and then of course double the size of the big icons that would be much better. The same with text the big text that says Inventory and Crafting that should be the size of the small text and those should be two time bigger as a result. I would say to increase the dialog sizes and the grid sizes and minimap. But I would presume that if you made the text and icons bigger you would inherently have to scale those UI elements as well.
That's really the only thing stopping me from enjoying the game. I'm not sure how hard that would be to implement. I presume resolution we see in game is not the resolution that it was made. That you have images that are bigger if that's the case it would only be a matter of including that with the game and have some sort of option to enable that. Then the text I would assume is even simpler considering you would just increase the font size that the game renders. Now the minimap well it's pretty much useless in my case. I'm always hitting the M key to pull up the full map because trying to make anything out on the minimap at this resolution.
Moving on I did have a couple other questions related to the options menu that I don't understand. The first is under Graphics settings there is a check box for Light Entity Info Background. I went into a game and kept toggling it on and off to try and see a difference or what it does. No idea what that does.
In other settings you have a Max Threads option. By default it's two. My i7 920 has 8 logical cores. A couple other games allow you to tweak this but I've never understood it much less how it's beneficial in this game. I'm pretty sure the operating system handles which cores on the processor are used by a program and when. The programmer has the ability to create threads to execute multiple instructions at the same time. For example you may create a thread just for rendering graphics, one for AI, maybe one for sound, and then another one for user input. As you can tell I don't know a whole lot about programming. So those four threads are not waiting on each other. For example if the rendering hasn't finished you wouldn't want your sound to stop playing and then after the rendering is done the sound that was waiting to be executed plays a sound two seconds or more after you were expecting sound to play.
So you tell the operating system you need four threads. If the first logical core is doing something else in some other program you wouldn't want to wait for that program to finish. Instead the operating system gives that task to a different core. Though a processor is so fast even with just 1 logical core it would seem as though it were doing multiple things at once. Some things take higher priority etc. The point is all that's delegated to the operating system. So what does max threads do. If it's set to two does it tell the operating system I never need more than two logical cores. Or does it just enable more sub systems be processed simultaneously? So if you have the CPU horsepower you can say "Yes I do have the horsepower create all the threads you can" which may or may not speed it up.
That's it for now. Thanks.
p.s. sorry for the long post.