The Mana World Forums

A few non-complex suggestions on various bits of the clients I think could be made more beautiful and practical. All of low importance. And sorry for the title, had to alitterate.

Both clients (0.0 and 0.1)
1a. When running tmw in a window larger or smaller than default (screenheight/screenwidth options) the background image when logging in is not centered (nor scaled nor tiled), which might be more nice looking than how it is now.
1b. Related, the version number on the log in screen (top left corner) could, for instance, be made more visible having an own background, text colour, text outline and/or text shadow.

The tmwserv client (0.1)
2a. A mention of the -d / --data option in the INSTALL or README files would have resulted in one less question in the support forums.
2b. Mentioning how to simply make a parallell/dual installation of both clients at the same time. Perhaps in the INSTALL file and/or on the wiki.

This is something which should be taken seriously.

Do a mantis ticket about it, please.

If anyone else has GUI suggestions to improve the current cluster of random we has as our excuse for a gui, please do empty your minds here.

1a. Aethyra has solved this by having multiple wallpapers, one for each common resolution.
1b. Definately

2a. That is temporary, but should be done until the need for it has been removed.
2b. One client for both would be best, and is one possible long-term plan.

Rotonen wrote:Do a mantis ticket about it, please.

Not sure whether this was directed at me, but I just created my first ticket (#427) for the two login screen concerns.

Jaxad0127, do you know if the Aethyra fix look (reasonably enough) good on custom window/screen sizes, let’s say a widescreen? I guess my initial thought on using some kind of scaling or tiling could look horrible in such cases. My second thought is to use some kind of border...

jaxad0127 wrote:1a. Aethyra has solved this by having multiple wallpapers, one for each common resolution.

IMO a quite bad solution. It is impossible to cover any screen resolution the user comes up with and you require a ton of redundant graphics.

Scaling the image at runtime would be better. I think most artists who create login wallpapers would use automatic scaling anyway instead of designing the wallpaper individually for a dozend different resolutions.

Different aspect ratios could be coped with by adding black borders at the sides of the screen. Not the most beautiful solution but it beats tiling or deforming. Cropping could also be a solution.

I wouldn't mind if the background image just got centered.

Put it in .svg format for resizability?

Most graphic artists are used to working with raster-based formats. Creating artworks vector-based means a completely different workflow.

Converting an image from vector to raster is trivial (many digital artists use vector-based techniques during some steps of creating raster-based artworks) but vectorizing a raster-based artwork is a process which has to be done manually, requires a lot of care, takes really long and leads to dissatisfactory results for images in many graphic styles.