Welcome to The Bug Genie

One of the things about the UI in the original Arx that really annoyed me was the nonstandard way it displayed the captions during conversations. First, it slooowly scrolled in the text as it was being spoken, even for a single line of dialog. Second, the way the text was scrolled in meant that the first and last part of most captions wasn't visible until after it had already been spoken. Third, captions run the full width of the screen even in widescreen modes. Multiple usability studies have shown that very wide blocks of text like this are difficult to read because your eye loses track of where the start of the line was.

Recommended resolutions:

• Display as much caption text as possible in the window as soon as the dialog starts.
• If necessary to scroll, tweak the scrolling code so it doesn't start scrolling until the first line has had a chance to be read (i.e., delay the scrolling time by one line), and so it brings in the last line before it starts being read (i.e., speed up the scrolling by one line).
• Constrain the caption text display to a reasonable, resolution-independent width in the center of the screen.