Tchos' HD UI panels and dialogue compilation and expansion

Tchos' HD UI panels and dialogue compilation and expansion

Version 1. 3 +International patch

Category: UI mods

This mod overhauls many aspects of the user interface of NWN2 to provide larger fonts and larger panels for HD widescreen resolutions of 1920x1080, as well as support image portraits in the vertical rectangular size of 256x400 pixels.

Also works at lower resolutions, though the panels and fonts may appear too big, and at some resolutions the bottoms will be cut off.

I recommend tracking this file, for alerts to any future updates.

See the Revision History section near the end of this document to see what's new.

Index:

• []Summary

  []Requirements

  []Installation

  []Using the mod

  []Known Issues

  []Revision history

  []Credits

  []Contact info

1. Summary

I play at a high resolution, so I want big panels that take advantage of the large screen size, and also large fonts so it'll be readable. This mod enlarges the font and panel sizes of nearly everything in-game, making them both easier to read, and require less scrolling to see everything, and also adds support for NWN1-style portraits, in a 1:2 ratio of 256x400 pixels. Included in the package is a file that explains every change in detail, but broadly, this affects the panels for conversations, vendors/containers, quest log, examination/descriptions, spell lists, inventory, character sheet, party portrait bar, target icon, and various menus. Many instances of ALL-CAPS TEXT have also been changed to mixed-case, for easier readability.

Ragnorak's Expanded Lists for Hi-Rez, Shin-Anubis/Thanatos2001's Character Sheet NWN1 Portrait support, and Fire&Ice/WhatIsSol's Big Fonts UI are excellent UI mods, though they were designed for somewhat lower resolutions than 1920x1080, and have slightly different goals which don't work together perfectly. My goal was to expand everything, redesign some UI aspects, and get everything nicely integrated.

My work on this mod started as a mod for the conversation panel (what the game files call the "quick chat" panel). I prefer the dialogue to be presented in this manner, rather than the "cinematic" style that's the default in the toolset. I prefer being able to control the pace of the conversation, and not have it fed to me in line-by-line chunks.

But I wanted the box to be much bigger, since I consider the dialogue to be an important part of the game. You can't do anything else while you're in a conversation, so why not make it the main focus of the screen while you're in it? Putting it in a little box in the corner is no good, especially at this resolution, where the font is rather squintworthy.

I made the conversation portrait twice as large as it was, to put more focus on the subject of the conversation (though still only half the height I set for the character's dialogue), and with the portrait aspect ratio change I was able to just put it in a kind of "column" on the left, with both the NPC name and the dialogue in a second column to the right of it. One note about the altered aspect ratio, though... I couldn't find any parameters to adjust the camera placement for the default "rendered" portraits made out of snapshots of the character model, so it basically looks like a slightly off-centre closeup. The custom portraits at the intended aspect ratio look perfect, though.

I think it's a pretty good size for both the NPC's dialogue and the list of your responses. Now you can have up to 10 response options visible at once without the scrollbars appearing, if they're all of a typical length. How much empty space you see is, of course, dependent on the amount of dialogue written for any given part of the conversation.

Next, I expanded the portrait selection window to show much larger portraits, to make it easier to choose one. I tried to make it more than four columns, but I couldn't get the portraits to appear correctly in the additional columns, so I just left it at four.

Finally, I expanded the column of portraits for your party members to use the full height of the screen at 1920x1080. Even in the vanilla game, there are times when you can have 5 full companions and enough animal companions/familiars/summoned creatures to make you have to scroll through the portrait column to check your companions' health or status effects. Now there's less unnecessary scrolling at 1920x1080.

Long story short, I went through the rest of the interface panels and increased the panel sizes of most of them. Included is a file describing each XML file, what it does, and what's new about it, and you can pick and choose which UI elements to change based on that information. (Documenting these files was quite a chore in itself, but shou