The mockup from WillLem feels weirdly streched to me
Yeah, some of the elements do look a bit stretched/squished. This might just be because he was doing a mockup though?
Yes, absolutely: the graphics were
very roughly resized for this mockup: I would expect that the final result would look way better than this, of course. It's just that there's no point in me spending hours doing that if people don't like the idea.
It's possible, though, that Icho simply doesn't like the larger horizontal size, and that's more what he was referring to. I'd say this is more likely, since he's also against the idea of 1 row of menu cards.
My main reasons for favouring the wider menu/1 row of cards combo are these (@Icho, I'd be interested to know your thoughts here):
1) It's tidier. This is probably the main, main, main reason tbh.
2) It allows the scroller to be bigger, so longer lines of text can be displayed.
3) It allows for vertically bigger (and therefore easier to read) text.
4) It doesn't favour any particular set of cards as being "most important" (and therefore on the top row).
5) 2 rows is busy for a title screen, and new players may not be sure where to look; I experienced this the first time I played NeoLemmix.
6) Human eyes are more suited to greater horizontal width, hence why widescreen is a thing.
Having said all this, I'd also vastly prefer a vertically laid out menu (similar to Lix's) over keeping 2 rows of cards.
The bigger font looks like it's intended to be reminiscent of the Amiga font, but I don't think it's actually the Amiga font - looks like maybe it was produced by stretching the current font, which itself looks like a manually squished version of the original Amiga font.
Yes and yes. I probably prefer the vertically larger text because it's more reminiscent of the Amiga font, for sure, but the main reason is that it's easier to read. But yes, for the purposes of this mockup I just stretched the current NL menu text vertically.
To be fair, somewhere between the two would probably be better: not quite as tall as Amiga's, but taller than DOS's text, would be perfect. I'd be happy to make that font and send it over to you so you can play with colours.
Incidentally, does anyone have the original backgrounds? The one currently shipped with NeoLemmix looks pretty blurry to me
+1 for this: if we
are using this background (which tbh wouldn't be my first choice, but if it's what people want then fair enough), let's use the best-looking and highest resolution version that we can find.
That's probably not what Proxima meant. I think he's specifically talking about having two different sizes being problematic during video capture, since often the captured video can only be of one frame size throughout.
From what I've seen, OBS is capable of automatically resizing the source/output in Windowed mode, if the window size changes. But, in any case...
If NeoLemmix handles the two different sizes by resizing the window
...why would NL have to resize the window? It
currently adds black bars to the edges of the screen when the window is resized, and nobody has suggested that this behaviour changes. In fact, I'd say this behaviour is preferable to any automatic resizing of the window, which indeed
could cause screen capture recording issues.
WillLem's layout looks "weirdly stretched" probably partly because it's wider than even the 16:9 ratio. If we keep the 400 vertical dimension, the horizontal dimension should be only around 711 to match 16:9.
Fair shout: let's go with 711 x 400 then, if people like the idea of a wider menu.
the window size stays the same
Yeah, exactly - I'm not sure why people think that
any resizing of the window is being suggested here, it isn't!
To make it very clear: if the menu
is made larger, then I'd suggest black bars continue to be added to the edges of any level measuring the same as or less than the default pixel width. NeoLemmix currently does this anyway, and it's fine.