Enhancement Request: Make darkening of background configurable

[ungesundes-halbwissen]

While some will like the darkened background during conversations, others will not like or need it (especially when using a better readable font).

If possible, it would be great to have a shortcut to toggle this darkening on and off while playing.

[JohnGlassmyer]

I was thinking of adding a persistent preferences mechanism, perhaps using a dialog box to configure a set of options which would be persisted in saved games somehow.

The preference I had been thinking of having be configurable was the volume of music (as well perhaps as the volume of sound effects).

Was there a particular shortcut you had in mind?
In what way would you imagine opening a dialog box or other means to configure a set of preferences?

[ungesundes-halbwissen]

"b" for "toggle background" or
"d" for "toggle darkening" would be suiting, especially since you would have all three "toggle" switches (audio, combat, mouse hand) on top (ish) of the manual

Making preferences persisting in the save games sounds like a neat idea. On the downside people would lose compatibility with their existing savegames if I am not mistaken. With this in mind, wouldn't it be a better option to save preferences in a dedicated pref.-file (ultimahacks.cfg)?

[JohnGlassmyer]

I'm wary of adding too many keys. Beyond supporting the original shortcuts present in U7BG and U7SI, I don't want to make it too easy to inadvertently toggle things. Also if I continue adding configurable preferences, the key map could get rather crowded.

My rough undestanding is that each savegame is simply an archive of the files within the GAMEDAT directory, so I suspect that it would be not too difficult to simply store a new file in there containing UltimaHacks preferences, which would go unnoticed by an unmodified game engine. But I would need to confirm this.

In the base game, music, sound, and speech toggles are persisted within savegames. It would make sense to put things like music and sound volume in the savegame as well. And then why not other things? I believe that handedness (in SI) is not persisted at all.

[ungesundes-halbwissen]

If you are right and existing asvegames keep working, your solution sounds like the better and "cleaner" option. Thanks for considering it in the first place :-)