Some Questions About Editing Menus & Screens

[NiTROACTiVE]

I have some questions about editing menus and screens which is for this project I've worked on.

 

1. I want to change the colors of the message font (such as for item pickups and obituaries) without the need of of going to the Message options to manually change them to fit the color scheme of the WAD. How can I do that?

 

2. When it comes to the complex ZDoom/GZDoom options menus different from the classic MS-DOS options menu, how could I change the header fonts for each page with a font that matches the project? As you can see from images posted on this thread, the header font is different from the original Doom font.

 

3. When it comes to the automap, let's say I wanted to change the word "Monsters" (which counts the enemies on the map) with something else such as "Demons", is that possible? If so, then how?

 

 

[EarthQuake]

I've used the TEXTCOLO lump to change/define message colors before. I'm only going by a decade-old memory here, but I think you can colorize pickup and obituary strings within the LANGUAGE lump using the Print color escape sequences (e.g. "Picked up a \chblue\cl keycard."). The LANGUAGE article mentions colorizing strings, but I'm not sure which strings it works with. You will probably want to define some new colors and then use the "\[colorname]" escape sequence in your strings. Hope that works for you.

 

I poked around in the LANGUAGE lump in zdoom.pk3 and I did see some strings relating to the options menu and stuff, so maybe it's possible to redefine the strings you want, even though they're not listed on the Strings page. As for the menu headers, I believe they are all strings now, so for example OPTMNU_CONTROLS is "Customize Controls" in the menu.

 

Edit: sorry, misread the font question. I actually don't know if there is a way to change which font is used for the menu. This was something I had to design around in the past. I honestly find manipulating the GUI to be the most infuriating aspect of modding for (G)ZDoom any source port. :)

Edited February 14, 2021 by EarthQuake