Modifying Radio Menu & Mission Message Font Size

[Kirkwood]

A few members of the community I play with were complaining about being blinded by the server messages & radio menu when playing in VR, especially at night.While there is a font scale dropdown in the settings menu this only goes down to 1 which can still leave these rather big in VR. A quick dive into the Options.lua allows us to change this decimal values like 0.5 and reduce the font size further.

 

 

Quick Guide:

 

1. Navigate to the config folder within your DCS saved games folder (C:\Users\$USER\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Config or C:\Users\$USER\Saved Games\DCS\Config)
   
2. Take a copy of Options.lua and open Options.lua in your favourite text editor.
   
3. Find the line with ["messagesFontScale"] = , this will likely be set to 1.0 by default. If it missing add this line under the graphics section.
   
4. Modify this to the desired decimal value and save. Remember this is a scale value, so values less than 1.0 makes it smaller and above make it larger. For VR I would recommend currently around 0.5.
   
5. Launch DCS:pilotfly:
   

Hope this helps some people.

Apologies if this is already known to people or there is already a post for this, no one in the community I play with were aware of any so thought I would share :)

 

 

If anyone from ED see's this it would be a real QOL improvement if we could change the field for this ingame to a slider or even a simple text box with validated entries.

Edited October 7, 2020 by Kirkwood

[speed-of-heat]

There is a GUi for this, in options?

[Kirkwood]

There is a GUi for this, in options?

With a minimum scale factor of 1, hence the above method to decrease it further.

[speed-of-heat]

ah got it

[imacken]

A few members of the community I play with were complaining about being blinded by the server messages & radio menu when playing in VR, especially at night.While there is a font scale dropdown in the settings menu this only goes down to 1 which can still leave these rather big in VR. A quick dive into the Options.lua allows us to change this decimal values like 0.5 and reduce the font size further.

 

 

Quick Guide:

 

1. Navigate to the config folder within your DCS saved games folder (C:\Users\$USER\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Config or C:\Users\$USER\Saved Games\DCS\Config)
   
2. Take a copy of Options.lua and open Options.lua in your favourite text editor.
   
3. Find the line with ["messagesFontScale"] = , this will likely be set to 1.0 by default. If it missing add this line under the graphics section.
   
4. Modify this to the desired decimal value and save. Remember this is a scale value, so values less than 1.0 makes it smaller and above make it larger. For VR I would recommend currently around 0.5.
   
5. Launch DCS:pilotfly:
   

Hope this helps some people.

Apologies if this is already known to people or there is already a post for this, no one in the community I play with were aware of any so thought I would share :)

 

 

If anyone from ED see's this it would be a real QOL improvement if we could change the field for this ingame to a slider or even a simple text box with validated entries.

 

Thanks for that. Yes, that has been an annoyance for a long time along with text in the top left being way too small in 4K.

[Windmill31]

Had the same issue in VR. 
Maybe the location of the files have changed since the last post on this topic but I had to fix this issue in a different manner than described above...

Here is how it worked for me:

Open up the following file (for standalone OB users) with your favorite editor: 
DCS World OpenBeta\Scripts\UI\gameMessages.dlg

I searched for all strings containing:
["fontSize"] = *,

These values control the radio menu (I believe) and the server messages font size.
The default values stating ["fontSize"] = 20, are the ones controlling the message font size. I set this to 10 and that worked great for me (on rift S), 12 might give better readability.

An option in the GUI to go into sub 1 scaling (e.g. message scaling 0.5 and 0.75) would solve having to do this manually.
I would definately like to see the font scaling option in the GUI some day! ;)

Hope this helps anyone looking for a manual solution.

Cheers,
87th_Blade