Guild Wars 2

Does anyone else have a Black Lion Trading Company interface that looks like this? Some prices and text are completely illegible. I’ve been dealing with this since launch, thinking that maybe it was part of the original Black Lion problems and that it would sort itself out. But now it’s driving me crazy :\

Is your screen resolution correct?

This looks like the known bug which happens when setting interface size to small in the graphics options. A workaround for me is to set interface size to normal.

I have this too.

My guess is they are using embedded Chrome:

• Chrome has known issues with fonts on Windows.
• Anet can’t fix it without huge time/cost (since it’s a Chrome/Win issue).
• Have to wait for Chrome team to fix.
• Chrome team does not look like they care to fix it (google it – they’ve got bug notes on this issue for over a year).

Sad panda

Nothing to do with chrome.

When you set the ui to small you get this.

I am used to it by now, but you can swap to medium UI settings just to shop/sell

Embedded Chrome.

Just like embedded IE. C++ has APIs that enable devs to embed the browser engine within their desktop apps. IE is standard with MSVC++. Chrome is probably easy enough for them to get if they prefer that engine instead of IE.

The TP is a webpage using Ruby/RoR. I’m assuming based on the font issue that they are using Chrome’s engine since embedded IE doesn’t have that problem. When you go to small UI, it just sets the embedded browsers font size to 80% (or thereabouts).

That’s also (probably) the reason for the delay with preview on the TP – they’ve got to replicate the whole preview system using Ruby+JS+CSS so it can be used within their Ruby pages. OR else, use something like JavaBeans (can’t use JavaBeans though since the desktop client is C++ and not Java – and they aren’t using Java on the web side either) to have the embedded browser communicate with the desktop client to have the desktop client render based on data sent to it via the embedded browser. They might be able to use some goofy Flash to save data on the client’s harddrive and the desktop app read it – a bridge if you will – but I doubt it, that’s clunky, — or have the browser save a cookie (or maybe use HTML5’s database API) and the desktop app read the files the browser writes — that’s goofy also since the browser can never “tell” the desktop app when it’s written anything to the client side so the desktop app will have to poll the place where those data files could possibly be written by the browser. What a lot of clunky code. So they’ll probably just stick with in-browser — which also means preview won’t have any of the cool animations or effects unless they go nuts with the preview and use something like Flash to render it – but then they have to translate their whole render engine to Flash and download all the animation and skin data files via the Flash/web each time someone previews — to get them into the preview since the browser can’t read them from the client’s computer. pita.

Best thing to do is take it out of the embedded browser (they can probably use the same JSON behind the scene) and code it into the desktop app.

This post is NOT about the topic.
Guild Wars 2 seems to be using similar code to safari (from what i saw). Same rendering issues.
Also, launching safari when Black Lion Company is open (and the other way around) SOMETIMES kills (replaces?) first process. Processes of both of these are same named…maybe it confuses windows.

I’ve got this too, I have however learned to live with it. It’s annoying but not a make or break issue for me.

I didn’t think about the interface size, so I’ll give that a shot. Thanks for the advice.

Even if that works, this is still an issue

They’re scaling the entire UI, not the fonts, that’s what is causing the problem with readability. The plugin ‘object’ is being scaled down (for small ui) but internally it is still at 100% so you get ‘jaggies’ which causes the readability issues. This is what happens when you don’t do things correctly because of a schedule.

I’m sure they could pass a UI-size value to the browser object and have it select a new css file – it uses a rest interface to get data in the first place so I know it isn’t that hard.

I would love for them to fix this, I love having a small interface, but having the TP font like that drives me crazy.