SKYRIMLE Skyrim Interface Makeover (Fhaarkas Font Mod) by Fhaarkas

[Harpalus]

The only thing I can't get over is the increase in the size of the menus. I'm having a hard time understanding why the author did this. If I'm not mistaken, it's even larger than vanilla's default. I even customized it with some of the changes from Fertigo Pro, but it's still way to large. I'm on a HD display for a reason and my glasses work perfectly fine. I don't need assistance.

 

Unless I'm missing something, I believe the author increased menu size because the vanilla menus have clipping issues on some resolutions when using wide fonts. I experience clipping issues using Fertigo Pro where the text is too long for the MCN menu with a 1920x1080 TV screen, for example. Widening these menus resolves the issues. Presumably I would similarly experience the "squashed font"/"too-narrow menus" using this mod's font if I stopped using its large menus.

 

Of course, I play Skyrim from the couch so some larger menus aren't a big deal to me. I don't know if it's a good pick for STEP or not, but I like SIM.

Edited April 8, 2015 by Harpalus

[TechAngel85]

Widening the text fields would have been okay but either on purpose or as a side effect, the author also increases the font size. That's what is confusing about this mod. The author made features like the smaller icons to minimize the immersion breaking effects of having large icons and in the way of your view but then makes the font larger...just doesn't make sense. That's why I'm guessing it's a side effect of his fixes.

[Octopuss]

Feel free to ask him, I believe he is still active on Nexus.

You might just get used to it though. Took me just a few minutes. And not like anyone spends more than few tens of seconds in the main menu each day :P

[Fhaarkas]

Hey guys mod author here. A bit late to the party but I thought I can answer some of the questions here.

 

Main Menu

To be honest this one is a bit of a hackjob (OK actually the whole mod is but this part more so). I really, really dislike how the vanilla menu behavior is not KB+M friendly. I regularly use scroll wheel to scroll through menu options and if you hover the cursor over an option it will be highlighted as the active option and the big enlarged one in the middle will be inactive even though the point of it being enlarged is to highlight it as the active option. Now if you take away your cursor and scroll through the options, it will scroll around the smaller option instead of the large one meaning you will now have the 'center' of menu being a different thing than what it's supposed to be, which is the big enlarged option in the middle. Without going into a tirade of expletives about "something, something, console, port" I'll just say that it drives me insane.

 

The better behavior would be - when the cursor is moved away from the list of options the focus should revert back to the enlarged option and not stay on the last highlighted option. So the hackaround I did is increasing the hit box large enough so that the mouse cursor would almost always stay over the center and when it is not over the center option, it is way out from the hitbox of other smaller options. This way when you're not directly selecting an option using mouse cursor, the highlighted option should be the big one meaning you're free to use your scroll wheel from anywhere outside their hit box and and have the options scroll around it. Insanity averted. I don't exactly remember why I made the big option obnoxiously... big but I think it has something to do with having to keep the text field around the same height as the hit box lest it looks all wonky.

 

Ideally I'd just tweak the ActionScript but I know pretty much nothing about AS other than being able to read and get the gist of what a script does. If anybody wanna volunteer uploading a mod fixing this, I can send you over the tweaked source files so that it'd be compatible with wide fonts. I took some liberty of changing things around a bit in the game load menu (enlarged highlighted option, actually-centered thumbnails) but you can always take those out since the widened text fields are the only essential things. I've been meaning to upload the whole source files so that other modders can base their work on my tweaked files if they want but I'm a morbid procrastinator and haven't got around to it. Maybe I should.. in a few days.

 

All The Extra Stuff

I really didn't want to include these things like alternative compass, crosshair, map markers and whatnot since I believe there are better, more polished dedicated mods out there for those. But my mod is more of less incompatible with any mod using their own hudmenu.swf and map.swf, and all because I can't stand for clipped date in map and garbled NPC names in HUD. It's absolutely anal but when I see those my OC keeps reminding me that there's a mod I'm using here, that doesn't cater very much to wide fonts and it's clipping the date that nobody ever care about in map screen.

 

When I got around to updating the mod a few months ago some users asked about these features and I thought it's probably a good idea to offer some alternatives to some of the popular mods without having to put up with garbled NPC names or clipped dates.

 

Future Plans

Not much but I plan to update the installers and give some more options like no-install and such. The next update will probably be when SkyUI 5.0 is released and most likely to be just a compatibility update, if required.

 

Bonus Feature

I'm not sure if anybody noticed, but this mod also change the look of books and letters and make them appear more like handwritten scripts. Things like seeping ink, a little transparency and such. It's quite subtle and not really something that you would easily see without making comparisons so I won't be surprised if it goes unnoticed lol. It's uploaded as its own standalone mod (Authentic Text For Books and Notes) but I decided to include it in this mod as a feature as well.

 

EDIT: Some things to avoid giving the wrong impression.

Edited April 9, 2016 by Fhaarkas