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28032022

Completely rebuilt the object inspection framework to draw item descriptions and names from a CSV file, rather than being hardcoded into macros. The actual in-game behaviour when inspecting objects has been changed as well: previously, simply hovering over the object would immediately display the text in the lower letterbox, which would dynamically adjust its height to accommodate the length of the text.

However, this approach inherently limited the amount of text that could be displayed by the height of the letterbox itself, which also meant that more text had to be squeezed in by reducing the font size. This made legibility difficult for longer passages.

Objects now display a prompt when hovered over (ie “Examine box”), and now require the item to be clicked on in order to open up a popup box which fills the screen. This allows for a lot more text to be displayed at once with a larger and more legible typeface, as well as being a lot more accommodating to paragraph breaks. I think this approach is a lot better, and it also forces people to move through and look at the environment more slowly and conscientiously. I might repurpose the old system for something else, maybe have it display special messages specifically when hovering over Avery herself. We’ll see.

I’ve also changed the primary font to Monofonto, from Fixedsys. It’s a lot more visually appealing and easy-to-read for general usage. However, I have changed the way that fonts are loaded so that switching between them should be fairly effortless, and will likely be built into a menu option somewhere down the line. Combined with the aforementioned change to the observation prompts, this opens up the possibility of adopting accessibility-specific typefaces like OpenDyslexic.