I’m making a live debugging plugin for Godot. Currently the main component is the text overlay which properties and custom messages can be conveniently printed to, every frame, from anywhere.
From A1 to A5, which of these screenshots have the most readable text for you?
Same below, from B1 to B5, which are most readable at a quick glance?
I feel like A5 is the most readable, with A4 not being too far behind.
In the Bs all of them felt pretty readable, but again B5 and B4 were most readable for me after closer inspection.
I like 5 the best, though I’m wondering how you’ll handle black text as the gray was still hard for me to read in all of the cases.
Oh, also: I’m moving this to General since the Help forum is set up to work like StackOverflow where one definitive answer is chosen. Also, you can add a poll to your original post, maybe you’d want to add one of those? The option to add a poll is under the gear icon in the post editor.
Thanks, I wasn’t sure. And added polls now.
Unfortunately Discourse compressed the images quite heavily, obscuring some of the relevant detail and messing with contrast. But it’s still a valid test and valuable info.
Are suggestions welcome or would you just like a vote on what’s there?
Suggestions absolutely welcome!
ok thank you
my suggestion is to put a transparent background behind the whole text layer in place of text drop shadow.
Something like this:
I don’t think that’s gonna work, since as you can see in the 2nd group of screenshots, the overlay can easily take up the entire screen, and devs still need to be able to see the game world in between the lines of text.
I might try a background that only shows up behind actual text (“font background”, if you will), but past experience tells me it’s tough to tune it to where it’s actually helpful.
Thanks for the suggestion tho!
yeah I hear that
I’d say play with the transparency of it.
The legibility issue stems from the contrast between the text and background
drop shadow can only help so much with that.
I don’t know how this is displayed in editor, like if it’s an animated overlay but if taking up the screen is an issue, I’d suggest something like Skyrim’s console for example:
The console slides in from the bottom of the game window
It might not be worth it for this problem however
Yeah, this fits a different purpose. Instead of being an interactive console, it’s a live display of things you want to monitor as you playtest. So, completely non-interactive, and up to the dev how much stuff they wanna display at once and how much screen space it takes up.
I’ve also thought about building an interactive console, but that’s a slightly different project, and I’d have to have a look if maybe existing ones already do what I’d like it to do.
ahh okay I see, that makes more sense
Thanks for the votes, folks! I’m likely gonna go with A4/B4, which is text outline width 3. I’ll also make sure to let users easily override the theme used by the plugin, so they can tune it to their scenarios.
