UI elements are difficult to see against bright backgrounds

[robn]

If I fly close to eg a bright yellow star (Epsilon Eridani) I can't see various things - label text, gauge backgrounds, crosshairs, etc. It'd be good if we could do something to make them more visible - drop shadows, colour inversion, etc.

[Brianetta]

Perhaps a translucent black label background, such as Youtube uses for non-speech-bubble captions.

[Philbywhizz]

I have written a patch to help with this 626f3d0faa4839acc938fa13e14264a67b65c609. It adds a transparent background to 'target' labels so that when you are silly enough to fly into the sun, you can still read them. :) It probably needs some more work and tidying up (my OpenGL isn't that strong), but it is a start.

[robn]

@Philbywhizz great start! I'm not going to merge it as-is. The backgrounds aren't always perfectly positioned with the text (sometimes they're a pixel out) and the distance between text edge and border is inconsistent. That might be a per-platform thing though related to the font code doing different things on different platforms.

[Philbywhizz]

You are right - it does wrong on closer inspection (I didn't notice it at 1am). This update should fix it 3ecb901615f5ce5b83ce1637e9cbf2eee42fa7ec. Please let me know if this is ok on your platform (I can only test on OSX)

[Luomu]

How about some Freetype-generated outlines instead:

(Centering is not perfect, some letters like g, a, s are slightly off)

Luomu@5e70eea

[robn]

Very interesting! I'm currently doing a lot of work in TextFontFace in my https://github.com/robn/pioneer/tree/text-rendering branch that you might like to take a look at too.

[robn]

Making progress in #325. Work still needs to be done in some UI elements (notably gauges).

[impaktor]

merge of 325 closes this.