Bigger font size in Mac version?

[peterb]

Hi.  I'm playing AI War on MacOS X via Steam.  I find the default font to be utterly unreadable, way too small for me.  How can I make it bigger so that I can enjoy the game?  I searched the forum and found some instructions that seem to be for an outdated version of the game -- I'm hoping there's some way to do this.

[keith.lamothe]

Sorry to hear it's being hard to read; could you post a screenshot or two so we can see what you're actually seeing? We've had a few reports leading us to believe that some people are getting a much-harder-to-read display than most players, and if it's a bug like that we might be able to fix it.

If general, the text in 4.0+ is much bigger than it was in the SlimDX versions.

[x4000]

Often if your font looks unreadable, it's because of one of two things:

1. You're using a very large resolution for the size screen you actually have.  Thus shrinking the resolution used (under Settings, Interface) will make both the font more readable, and the other elements of the game easier to see.

2. You're using a 4:3 aspect ratio or 16:9 aspect ratio resolution on a 16:10 monitor, or some other combination along those lines.  That would make everything look kind of stretched and blurry, depending on your specific drivers (sometimes they do letterboxing, sometimes not).  In that case, moving to an appropriate resolution for your screen's aspect ratio would clear it right up.

Almost definitely it's one of those two things.  Hope that helps, and let us know if not!

[peterb]

Well, yes, my initial run of the game was at 1900x1200.  When I dropped it to 1280x800 it was "better" but still (IMO) too small.  My high-level point here is that from an accessibility standpoint it's sort of useful to let the user adjust the font size independently from the rest of the interface and rendering pipelines.

[keith.lamothe]

Well, sure, it's a very nice thing to have, but the interface code would have to be far more complex to accommodate dynamic sizing (among other technical complexities) and many of the windows are already as large as they reasonably can be and making their text bigger would just blow it all to pieces, so to speak.

If you can post some screenshots I can see if it's doing something weird or if you're referring to a specific block of text that actually can stand to be larger, but otherwise I don't think I can help you.

[x4000]

The newer unity versions have so much larger text than in the past, that some players from the older versions actually complained about it a bit -- there's definitely not room on smaller resolutions to have the text any larger, and playing at larger resolutions and then increasing the font size would just make it look like the smaller resolutions but with the actual ships and game icons rendered in a tiny fashion.  Given the technical challenges Keith noted, and the above, dynamic text sizing isn't something we plan to do (and I can't think of many -- any? -- RTS games I've played where font size was controllable).

At the default resolution for my MacBook Pro with the game (1400x900), the text is slightly larger than the default in Safari, for example.  At 1280x800 it's a bit bigger, and at 1152x720 it's pretty huge-looking.  Our stance is that you can really custom-tailor the view to the size that you like to a pretty great degree here, just not the font independently of the rest of the view size.  That's pretty standard with this sort of game, I also feel.

I wish I could do more, but we also have to work within the constraints of what makes a rather huge UI actually fit on the screen and be testable with a minimum of resolution-related bugs.