MedievaLands Forums

Hail all!

You'll doubtless notice that the Tavern and Bulletin Boards seem a bit different today. I'd like to discuss that change.

The original Yserbius game ran in VGA Mode 13h - 320x200 in 256 colors. This was a very common monitor mode for DOS games, as it was near the upper limit in the amount of detail and color these games could show when running on that operating system. When I created the engine that implements the Yserbius game (CommunityKit) I chose to render everything internally at this same resolution.

But that resolution is far from ideal in a few ways. First, and most obviously, it limits the amount of things that can be on screen at one time. This is particularly obvious in the dungeon's text window - that thing is pitifully small, and can only show eight very skinny lines of text at once. It's a particularly obvious pain point when we realize that most of the player's interactions with the game - chatting, exploring, and combat - have to be funneled through that small window.

Second, although the resolution is 200 pixels high, it is stretched at runtime about 120 percent in the y dimension. This leads to some graphics looking a bit stretched or squashed, depending on the source graphic. The art of Yserbius was of course designed around this issue - but it still leads to some strangeness.

So, to address these two issues, I'm adding a 'HiRes mode' to the graphics renderer. For screens in HiRes mode, the game will render at 480x360, and will feature a brand new font which has more detail than the old default font. The first place you'll see this is in the Tavern, and I think it really makes chatting there - and browsing the Bulletin Boards - a much more pleasant experience.

I'll be expanding the use of this new HiRes mode in the coming month, and hopefully it'll be used throughout the game by mid to late March. Please let me know if you see any issues in the implementation - this is a big change, and I could use your eyes in making this improvement better in every way.

(As an aside, you'll also see the other two fonts - the 'big' font and 'small' font - fixed up as well in the coming week).

One other change: in the Tavern, you'll now see that your speech and emote text is themed differently. I'm also including an experimental 'Mood' script that can further theme your speech (use the /Mood command to check this out). I'd like your input on how to further improve this. Let me know if you come across any weird issues... I'm sure you'll know them when you see them.