Make arrow from consolefont separate Graphic

[Enjay]

Is there any chance this little guy:

In case you can't see it:

Could be separated out from the consolefont and treated as a graphic? The reason is that it is very small and very low res and its appearance may clash with replacement fonts that might be used to make pretty menus.

As far as I know, these days it's only used for Yes/No confirmations and it's the only non-smallfont graphic likely to appear alongside smallfont characters. So if someone has replaced the smallfont, it's pretty much the only thing that clashes with the new font.



I know that the various glyphs that make up the menu sliders are also part of the old consolefont, but they only appear beside the NewSmallFont in the menus and there is less contrast there (though freeing them up would also be nice).

[edit] Just to record it somewhere, though I'm sure anyone who needs to know already does, I noticed that as well as menu "yes/no" choices, this graphic is also used beside the choices in the Strife dialogue system. [/edit]

[Nash]

I think eventually all of the graphics that used to piggyback the console font (so the sliders, and the arrow cursor that Enjay is suggested) should be moved to dedicated graphic lumps. These are things people commonly want to replace for their mods.

[Marisa the Magician]

Yeah, especially in regards to the sliders, since they're basically constrained to always be 16x16.

[Enjay]

Interrstingly, it was seeing the sliders in SWWMGZ that made me think about this again but they looked so good, they are also what made them have a lower priority in my head. (i.e. because they looked so good beside the NewSmallFont there seemed to be less need to pull them out - but now that I think about it, yes, it makes sense that all graphic-like glyphs from the consolefont should be done if they can.)

Also, I can't get the little arrow to change using the same method. I can replicate what you did with my own sliders but I keep failing with the arrow. Maybe I'm just using the wrong character number.

Anyway, I also tried using the scaling factors and cell size options in font.inf and I could actually get nice enough looking higher resolution arrows and sliders that looked good in the menu. The problem is that, because those glyphs are part of a font set, doing that messes up all the other characters. So if the text characters are used elsewhere (e.g. a HUDMessage), they will look wrong. The closest I can get is to make the arrow and sliders look good and the characters look the right size, but the characters will be far too spaced apart. Of course, messing with kerning and character height values in font.inf can go some way to address that (though I never found a perfect value), but then that messes up the appearance of the arrow and sliders (usually most noticeably making the sliders too short).

Plus, if I'm trying to make the arrow and sliders hi-res, then it necessitates making all the console font graphics bigger just to scale them down again. I noticed even a modest increase in their size could be detected with an increased loading time for the game.

So, anyway, yes - the sliders as well would be good. i.e. all the elements of the console font that are essentially used as graphics rather than text elements would be useful to have as actual graphics. I think that is just the arrow and the sliders, unless I've not noticed other elements being used as graphics elsewhere.