Mod Approval Process - CivScale - Font and Interface Colours

[Bede]

I, as well, think the san serif fonts are splendid, and T-Hawk's suggestion of Blanket Permission to edit that .thm file (and only that) a most excellent one. (I know, I know, there can not be any degrees of excellence, but the most is for emphasis, not meaning.)

[Griselda]

But if there's a part of this mod that can't be approved, then it can't be approved. I think that there is part of this mod that wouldn't be approvable, so this may be a dead end.

[Ruff_Hi]

For example, a change I really want is removing the drop-shadow that the game uses for much of its text. Trivial to do by editing the .thm file, and obviously it'd have zero gameplay implications. But it seems silly to make a UI and distribution package for T-hawk's Text Drop Shadow Removal Mod to alter three numbers in one text file, and I can't imagine a "critical mass" of the the community ever caring enough for official approval of that. So how can we approach this?

Ok, I will bite - which three numbers should I change to remove the shadow?

Edit: Actually, that file is Python code, so blanket editing permission won't work as you can tap into any part of the game from there. But I think it'd work to allow any editing that's confined to the namespace of GFC_Control.GFC_Control_DefaultControl_Style . Or, more simply, just allow "value" edits like numbers (for colors) and font names.

I don't think it is python - it looks more like C to me.

Another approach to getting these things approved would be for someone to put together some theme files (ie green, yellow, tan, etc) ... show the differences between these files and the vanilla file and submit them individually (or collectively) for approval. That means that the process of creating the files is removed from the approval process and it is just the files themselves that are OK or NOT.

[T-hawk]

Ok, I will bite - which three numbers should I change to remove the shadow?

I'm at work so don't have it in front of me, but search for "shadow" in the file and you'll find the relevant section. The number in question is the fourth value in each of the GColor() expressions. That's the alpha (opacity) value; changing each to 0 makes the shadow fully transparent so it effectively doesn't get drawn.

Edit: Here's the relevant section of Civ4Theme_Common.thm:

.TextShadow_Default = GColor( 0, 0, 0, 255);
.TextShadow_Select = GColor( 0, 0, 0, 255);
.TextShadow_Inactive = GColor( 0, 0, 0, 255);
.TextShadow_InactiveSelect = GColor( 0, 0, 0, 255);
.TextShadow_Disable = GColor( 0, 0, 0, 128);
.TextShadow_DisableSelect = GColor( 0, 0, 0, 128);

Change the last value of each to 0 to disable the drop-shadow. The required ones are _Default, _Inactive, and _Disable. The three "Select" ones are optional; they only matter when you rollover some selectable text such as options on the Civics screen.

And yeah, I'm not sure what language it is -- Python doesn't use curly braces, but C doesn't have a "with" keyword.

[Ruff_Hi]

The approval of the manual editing of Civ4Theme_Common.thm makes the approval of this part of civscale redundent. Thx for your work T-Hawk.

[uberfish]

I think the sans serif fonts are ugly compared to the regular one civ4 uses, was hoping I wouldn't have to see more reports with those

[T-hawk]

I think the sans serif fonts are ugly compared to the regular one civ4 uses, was hoping I wouldn't have to see more reports with those

Well, I can explain why I'm so keen on them. For me, serifs on the fonts and the text drop-shadow both present an extra bit of visual "noise". The mental effort to edit that out causes me palpable extra mental fatigue while playing the game. The elegant cleanness of Civ 3's interface was a major reason I stuck with that game as long as I did.

Another major difference between the games' interfaces is that Civ 3 used dark text on a light background almost exclusively, while Civ 4 chiefly does light-on-dark. Tons of psychovisual studies have established that dark-on-light is easier to read for most people; that's why books and newspapers and Windows and my website use that as the standard. I'm sporadically working on adjusting Civ 4's interface to be dark-on-light, though that's complicated by how the colors of the civs are used for much of the text.