Heretic & Hexen: Use Big Font for Main Options Screen

[OpenRift412]

Since Heretic and Hexen have the luxury of having their own built-in equivalent of BIGFONT, I'd like to suggest for the sake of aesthetic consistency and better visibility that the main Options use the large menu font that that main menu uses.

Of course, the main concern with this is fitting all the menu items on the screen, but maybe it will fit, I'm not entirely sure. Thoughts?

[JNechaevsky]

Unfortunately, that won’t work for several reasons:

1. It wouldn’t be fully consistent with Doom.
2. A menu with a larger font simply wouldn’t fit on the screen vertically (End Game and Reset Settings would go below the bottom edge).
3. A downscaling option isn’t acceptable either. The point is that 1x resolution in Inter is “honest.” When 1x resolution and a 4:3 aspect ratio are used, the entire video is rendered at 320x200 pixels and then stretched to the screen. Downscaling is possible at higher resolutions, but that would only create headaches with rendering/adjusting text and graphics for different resolutions. That’s why everything is always designed with the principle “it must fit into 320x200.”

320x200 (320x240 with aspect ratio correction):

[OpenRift412]

Unfortunately, that won’t work for several reasons:

1. It wouldn’t be fully consistent with Doom.
2. A menu with a larger font simply wouldn’t fit on the screen vertically (End Game and Reset Settings would go below the bottom edge).
3. A downscaling option isn’t acceptable either. The point is that 1x resolution in Inter is “honest.” When 1x resolution and a 4:3 aspect ratio are used, the entire video is rendered at 320x200 pixels and then stretched to the screen. Downscaling is possible at higher resolutions, but that would only create headaches with rendering/adjusting text and graphics for different resolutions. That’s why everything is always designed with the principle “it must fit into 320x200.”

Fair point. I think in order for it to work, some reorganization would need to happen to reduce the amount of menu items.

I think the easiest way to do this would be as follows:

• Move "level select" to the new game menu, somewhat akin to what Woof is doing in its latest dev build. This makes more sense flow wise, since custom-selecting a level qualifies more as starting a new game than as changing options.
• The "Misc features" menu could probably be scrapped. I can't really see what a use case for disabling the autoload WAD and HHE files would be for (out of the box, they don't do anything unless the user specifically adds files to autoload, which at that point they can just add/remove said files accordingly). The accessibility and menu options could be then moved to the "display settings" section, as those options seem to fit under that category as well.
• In the case of Doom, what could be done is adding support for DBIGFONT and then falling back to the small font if a DBIGFONT lump isn't detected

[JNechaevsky]

The simplest approach is not to change the in-game menu just for the sake of changing it. It originated in CRL/Inter 7.0 and has undergone a long process of refinement. It was even positively recognized by @DwarsYT in their 2024 port review video.

I do appreciate certain features of KEX, and some of them have even been replicated in Inter. However, overall, I have no plans to redesign Inter in the style of KEX.