The fix you wanted for tiny text and fonts is here!!!!!!

[Major.Pain]

Thought i would post this to help you guys out if you are having issues with how small the UI and text appears on a high resolution panel.
It is a little program that changes what resolution your game boots up. So for example i use a 1920x1080 display and i have my game boot up in 1600x900 making the text and icons a little larger and easier to read.

You can do this by changing your display resolution before the game boots up already right but, it will mess up your desktop ect and you need to change it back after you quit the game, a pain all round and i dont consider it a good solution.

However, the 12noon Display Changer does all this for you by you either changing the Target line in a games shortcut or typing a few simple commands in Command Line.

After you install the Display Changer all i need to do to run Distant Worlds at my desired resolution is:

WINDOWSKEY+R to bring up the Run dialogue and type the following in the text field below, you dont even have to type this in each time you want to play as the Run dialgue remembers what you typed before-

"C:\Program Files\12noon Display Changer\dc.exe" -width=1600 -height=900 /c "F:\Distant Worlds\autorun.exe"

Now my game runs in 1600x900 and when i quit the game my desktop reverts back to what it was before 1920x1080.

To be clear, your target line will be different to mine as you need to link the first part "where the display changer installs" to the second part "where Distant Worlds installs" and change your "width" and "hieght" to what your display can display.

There are more detailed instructions on the developers website including how to use this with multimonitors ect but if you have a question i will try to help also.

This is a great little program that is free to use but i would have happily of paid for it as i use it on a few games to make things easier on the eyes :)

Link below

http://12noon.com/?page_id=80

[BearDownChicagoBearsHo]

If you actually read my post on the front page before you and that really bad troll came in here i literally said 'the game is NOT unplayable'.

Also, you believe that you have conditioned your eyes to see beyond their normal capability by staring at small print and a computer monitor all day? Ok then. I think that's all I need to hear.

Again, even though that isn't remotely possible, let's entertain that for a second. You had to stop the effects of aging on your eyes, and then train them through a vigorous program of reading small print books, have your IDE text set to small for maximum source code visibility, and staring at a computer all day. Yet me, the dude with a 21" monitor an arms length away from my face is the outlier. Ok then redux.

The guy posted a 1920x1080 screen. I cannot make out the word 'Ikkuro' clearly until my face is 8 inches from the monitor. There is like literally a singular line of pixels between the i and the first k. This isn't subjective. You are not easily making out 1 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pixel from a normal viewing distance without a giant monitor. Not to mention the blue text by the planet name is straight up illegible, probably due helped by compression admittedly.

You are a piece of work dude. Do not spit in the wind and tell me it's raining. This isn't an eyesight thing, this is a you are completely full of ♥♥♥♥ thing. The freaking evidence is right there for everyone to see. While you are sitting here trying to lie to me, like 3 people have stopped in these threads, looked at the same picture, decided it was bad enough to not spend money on the game, made a post and left. Again I dont even care too much about the font, it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and borderline unacceptable in 2014 but im not out to do anything other than explain how and why it looks bad, which I already did on the first page. You on the otherhand are getting off on telling lies to strangers on the internet. You did it yesterday, you did it today. At least I was getting off on yelling at snakes on the internet for their serpentine behavior.

[mr. flappypants]

Originally posted by BearDownChicagoBearsHo:

tears

You obviously have a few minutes to spare. Could you please tell me the benefits of your video monetization policiles?

[wizaerd]

Originally posted by BearDownChicagoBearsHo:

even more nonsense words

I will keep saying it for as long as I need to. I, and many others, do not have any issues reading the information presented to us on our screens. it's simple. It doesn;t matter if you believe it or not. Let me repeat it yet again so you get the full gist of it... I, and many others, do not have any issues reading the screens.

[BearDownChicagoBearsHo]

Whatever issues my crazy ass has are far overshadowed by yours. If I ever behave like yourself when I have damn near 60 years of life experience I hope someone beats me within half an inch of my life. Just so I have be shuffled around the hospital for 2+ months while reflecting on how I carried myself as a senior citizen. You're doing the geriatric equivalent of plugging your ears and going 'lalalalalalalala'. Nonsense words lol, not a damn thing in that post was nonsense.

There are 3 actual options
1) You are outright lying.
2) Your monitor size and/or position is not what one would categorize as normal, or reccomended. You have yet to even address this so I might give you the benefit of the doubt and say this is the actual situation and it even makes you look a little better.
3) You are dellusional or at the very least looking past the problem while claiming you don't have it

Then there are 2 options that are absolutely not possible
1) You are telling the truth
2) You are able to reliably and easily decipher text that has 1 pixel inbetween same-colored letters on possibly non solid backgrounds with a standard monitor set up at 1920 x 1080

Take care, don't train your eyes too hard today.

[BlackAlpha]

The fix doesn't work for me. To get a noticeable difference, I need to put the resolution really low (1280xSomething). The game then becomes very blurry and pixelated, with large windows. So I'll stick to the tiny text.

As for the healthy eyes discussion. Reading tiny text all day is not healthy for the eyes in the long run, but I'm willing to put up with it for this game...

[mr. flappypants]

Originally posted by BearDownChicagoBearsHo:

*snip*.

You're 60 years old. Start acting like it.

[wizaerd]

Originally posted by BearDownChicagoBearsHo:

Whatever issues my crazy ass has are far overshadowed by yours. If I ever behave like yourself when I have damn near 60 years of life experience I hope someone beats me within half an inch of my life. Just so I have be shuffled around the hospital for 2+ months while reflecting on how I carried myself as a senior citizen. You're doing the geriatric equivalent of plugging your ears and going 'lalalalalalalala'. Nonsense words lol, not a damn thing in that post was nonsense.

There are 3 actual options
1) You are outright lying.
2) Your monitor size and/or position is not what one would categorize as normal, or reccomended. You have yet to even address this so I might give you the benefit of the doubt and say this is the actual situation and it even makes you look a little better.
3) You are dellusional or at the very least looking past the problem while claiming you don't have it

Then there are 2 options that are absolutely not possible
1) You are telling the truth
2) You are able to reliably and easily decipher text that has 1 pixel inbetween same-colored letters on possibly non solid backgrounds with a standard monitor set up at 1920 x 1080

Take care, don't train your eyes too hard today.

Stop. Just stop. You cannot dictate what is possible for any other human being. There are some people that can see a whole lot farther than you or me, and then there are people who cannot. it's a simple fact of life. What is true for you is not true for everybody else. So just stop.

Some people use the Callibri fonts. Some people can read that font just fine, others cannot.

Some people can read 6pt fonts, some people cannot.

Some people can read white text on a black background, some people cannot.

I, AND MANY OTHERS, CAN READ THE SCREENS FINE. It's simple. You have issues reading the screens. Ok. MANY OTHERS DO NOT.

I'm not sure why you feel this overwhelming need to argue with me specifically, or continuously call me a liar, but there ARE MANY OTHERS WHO ALSO CLAIM THEY CAN READ THE SCREENS FINE.

So just deal with it dude.

[BearDownChicagoBearsHo]

Originally posted by mr. flappypants:

Originally posted by BearDownChicagoBearsHo:

*snip*.

You're 60 years old. Start acting like it.l

god i hate even adressing you because you're just like really really really bad at trolling. it's not hard to get me riled up and you didn't even come close. anyways, he is the one that is pushing 60 according to the exchange we had yesterday.

[mr. flappypants]

Originally posted by BearDownChicagoBearsHo:

anyways, he is the one that is pushing 60 according to the exchange we had yesterday.

Sorry about that. I was mistaken (thank god).

Have you de-torqued yourself yet bro?

[Nevos]

You can't really argue with some one about their own sense of sight and come out not looking foolish.

As it was said before many can read the fonts without an issue, while others can not. To argue that some one is wrong or lying about their own ability to read it clearly is pointless. So please try not to get upset when some one does not agree with you on this matter.

I do hope there is a more permanent solution for those who have this problem with reading the fonts.

[wizaerd]

Originally posted by BearDownChicagoBearsHo:

Take care, don't train your eyes too hard today.

There has been bunches and bunches of research done on eyesight, and training your eyes. One such study even proved that after wearing eye glasses that reversed the world upside down, would eventually cause the eyes and the brain to remap the eyesight so that they were seeing upside right. When they removed the glasses, the world was upsside down, and after a while the eyes and the brian once more corrected itself.

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/mar97/858984531.Ns.r.html

Other studies reveal that what is visible within certain images to one person isn't so visible to others, and vice versa. So it's not so far outside the realm of possibility for someone to be able to see something more clear than you.

[kamikaze.kyle]

A quick disclaimer: this post is based upon what I've observed from how the game acts and what I've found digging into the game's resources.

The game was written in C# using XNA Game Studio from what I can tell; at least partially since it uses the XNA 4.0 libraries and some compiled XNB resources, particuarly the fonts. It also makes a lot of calls to generic Windows inteface frameworks (popup dialog boxes, scrollbars, tooltips, etc) which are just flat out of place in the game's UI, but ironically at least work according to modern UI design paradigms.

Most fo the game's fonts are -- again from what I can tell since my old XNB extractors don't work on Windows 8 anymore and won't run properly on my virtualized Windows 7 image -- bitmapped XNB SpriteFonts. It's a limitation of the XNA framework since XNA was designed for the Xbox and Zune where you're talking about running a game at a fixed, known resolution. This means that they're not the TrueType fonts that Windows normally uses (ala the text content on Galacticpedia). As such they act like the UI elements and do not scale properly with resolution. A font might look blurred if it's scaled up since the font doesn't EXIST at any larger size. And if you don't scale the font then the font will get smaller and smaller as your resolution increases. This also results in some weird looks on the fonts depending on the background.

Now the game DOES use some TrueType fonts here and there depending on what part of the interface you're talking about. DW uses a hodgepodge of standard Windows APIs and their own stuff, so it creates a pretty large disconnect between UI elements at times. It ties into Internet Explorer (IIRC) to display the Galactipdiea and some other UI elements and thusly responds properly to Windows ClearType preferences and DPI scaling.

Anyway, gist of it is the game does make some use of sprites for fonts which results in incredibly poor multi-resolution support. Other games that use sprites for fonts usually use several different sizes of the same font for a particular UI element then pick the size to use based upon the game's resultion. Or they use a single graphics resource but at a very high resolution, which is scaled down accordingly (this is how Apple's Retina resolutions work in HiDPI mode -- the bitmaps are 4x the "normal" resolution). If the devs choose to do so, they can add in scaling (there's some evidence of this when you expand the info pane and with the scaling function in the ship designer) without actually creating new resources to support multiple resolutions, but in that case stuff gets bigger but blurrier. Ideally a game engine would use TrueType fonts or vertex UI elements which would scale infinitely. Such a limited and fixed UI like DW's is best left to a console or in the late 90's/early 00's when it went out of style on PC-only games. Imagine running MOO2 at 1920x1200 when it was designed for 640x480. That's what DW is doing, though not quite as extreme.

This particular topic's workaround is just scaling in a different way -- scale the resolution down rather than the graphic resources up. People have a great deal of varying tolerances to eyestrain and visual acuity, so some might have issues reading the games fonts at higher resolutions and/or on smaller screens. I don't have much issue with the font sizes myself, just the fact that some are rendered so poorly it looks like the devs went halfway to pixel art and gave up, or a graphic artist forgot a segment on a letter when specifying transparency. It's not that they actually did any of that, but it's the result of using bitmapped fonts and some pretty poor choices for background imageas (the Tutorial Windows result in a fugly, jagged font at 1920x1200).

Side note: if I could get my XNB extractors working it'd be a cinch to redo the fonts at a larger size or different kerning for higher resolution monitors, though this might cause weirdness with other UI elements that aren't properly recompiled (text suddenly gets clipped, etc). EDIT: this assumes they are SpriteFonts, of course, and the devs didn't figure out a way to hack in their own custom data type.

[BearDownChicagoBearsHo]

dude thank you for that post. I was actually surprisingly on point with a lot of the stuff I was kicking around on the front page lol. It was really interesting to read a technical write up on the subject. yeah and i totally agree about the rendering of the fonts. that is the actual problem more than anything. I can read a tiny font just fine, its that the letters literally blend into eachother sometimes or even become 100% indecipherable depending on background. Add that together with the font being small and sometimes you simply cannot read things easily. I'm pretty sure the font that im typing in right now is actually smaller than what the game uses but i have 0 problems reading any of it from even 3 feet away.

do you know what resolution the fonts were made in? if that makes any sense

[BearDownChicagoBearsHo]

Originally posted by wizaerd:

Originally posted by BearDownChicagoBearsHo:

Take care, don't train your eyes too hard today.

There has been bunches and bunches of research done on eyesight, and training your eyes. One such study even proved that after wearing eye glasses that reversed the world upside down, would eventually cause the eyes and the brain to remap the eyesight so that they were seeing upside right. When they removed the glasses, the world was upsside down, and after a while the eyes and the brian once more corrected itself.

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/mar97/858984531.Ns.r.html

Other studies reveal that what is visible within certain images to one person isn't so visible to others, and vice versa. So it's not so far outside the realm of possibility for someone to be able to see something more clear than you.

im not doubting that someone can have better eyesight, its that the screenshot posted has a line of like 6 pixels inbetween an I and a K I'm sorry but you arent reading that from 20" away easily. let alone the completely indecipherable blue text word that may or may not have been messed up by compression and it happens all over the UI. with '1's' it's bad with k's its bad. the other guy in this thread details it far better than I do. The actual font itself is sprites and leads to wonky ♥♥♥♥ happening more than the size of the font itself.

[mr. flappypants]

Originally posted by BearDownChicagoBearsHo:

*snip*

I'll point this out once more to you. This is with regard to another post you made with a screenshot.

You mentioned that it was difficult reading the GDP numbers in the lower left hand box.

Have you tried clicking the button that enlarges this box?

That right there will fix your problem with the font in the lower left hand box.