Console Text Scaling

[MG_Man]

As resolutions get bigger, the console text gets smaller, and unlike the rest of the text in the game there is no scaling for it. Is it possible for there to be a cvar added or a behavior that will also scale the text in the console to high-res just like the HUD text?

I know that the console text ought to be smaller than the regular text still, maybe the "hi-res" output can target a smaller virtual screen size like 640x480 instead of 320x240.

[Enjay]

Yes, this would be nice. As well as screen resolutions getting bigger, my eyes are getting older. A bit of assistance would be appreciated.

[Nash]

Seconding what Enjay said... my poor eyes can't read the console font very well. :(

[Graf Zahl]

Actually, the console needs more than just some scaling option. To be honest, it needs to be redone. Hopefully I find some time for it...

[Hellser]

Actually, the console needs more than just some scaling option. To be honest, it needs to be redone. Hopefully I find some time for it...

I might be wrong here, but isn't the console code from Quake? If so, how much of it was changed?

[Graf Zahl]

I can't say. What I know is that the text buffer management is horrendously inefficient and can cause serious performance issues if a map is spamming messages.

[Ed the Bat]

I can't say. What I know is that the text buffer management is horrendously inefficient and can cause serious performance issues if a map is spamming messages.

Is THAT what causes that? Wow. I've noticed a tremendously long load time on maps with missing textures (which get reported in the console). Never guessed it would be the console itself causing the slowdown.

[Graf Zahl]

Yes, indeed. It's really the shitty console buffer that causes the slowdown, nothing else! The code is truly of the 'What were they thinking?' kind.

Not for much longer, though, I'm almost done with a replacement that formats text only when necessary. And it can retain all its history. On modern systems the memory it uses is hardly relevant.

[JPL]

Did this end up happening? I don't see any options for it anywhere. Trying to do lots of console stuff on my HiDPI laptop and it's pretty rough.

[Graf Zahl]

Nothing about the scaling - but I replaced the console buffer with a significantly faster version. It still slows somewhat down with excessive message spam but significantly less than before.

[ibm5155]

Text rendering is freaking slow, idk how is it made but if it's not this way, I would sugest doing a sprite rendering instead of text.
I did a SDL console, and the text rendering method was so slow that it would be useless to make a console game, so I did a test with a spriteblock, and I rendered each letteras a image, and boom, I got 1000fps ...
The only problem I would think is coloring the font, hmmm, if all the chars on zdoom console couldn't change their colors, so all chars would have the smae color, would this increase the performance?

[Graf Zahl]

Guess what ZDoom's fonts are...

[Nash]

Sprite text (bitmap) sucks for scalability and high def displays.

[wildweasel]

Yeah, if this happens it'd have to be exact multiples or else risk looking really ugly. (personally, I'd wind up using a nice 2x scale.)

[biospud]

By the way, I recently needed a larger console font in GZ3Doom, so I hacked in a way to make the console text respect CON_SCALETEXT=1.

https://github.com/cmbruns/gz3doom/comm ... e7b35f20d4