A Little Bigger Title Screen

Hi friends!

You know what we haven’t done in a super long time? An RPG Maker VX Ace tutorial! ::kermit arms::

Reddit user EraldoCoyle asks: “I’d like to make the command window on the title screen bigger. How? …The little window where you select what to do on the title screen is too small and I’d like it bigger.”

Listen, I get it. You’re advancing in age. Things get harder to read. You need clearer direction about what to do. You are constantly confronted with your own mortality. I can’t fix most of these things. I can fix your title screen, however.

To do this, however, will require modifying some of the base scripts. Don’t fret, it’s just a few small changes.

Line Padding

The developers of RPG Maker VX Ace got about halfway to coding dynamic window creation before they gave up. What do I mean? Well, the nice thing is that when you create a command window, it automatically determines the height of that window by calculating the height of each command in that window, summing it all up, adding a little padding, and returning that value as the height. That’s great! That means we don’t have to do the math ourselves, and we can be confident that the window will be the correct height if we add or remove additional commands.

So what’s the problem? Well, RPG Maker assumes that every command line will just be size 24 font. So even if you increase the size of the font of your command, you’ll get something like this:

titlescreentutorial2

And that looks downright silly. So we’re going to make the height more dynamically calculated by changing a line. In your scripts, open “Window_Base” and scroll down a little to line 29, to the function “line_height.” You’ll see it just always returns the number 24. Boo. Replace that 24 with “Font.default_size” to always get the correct font size for this number.

Change the Font Size for Title Scene

Scroll down further to “Scene_Title” and take a look at the function “create_command_window.” It’s around line 91. Before we create our window, we want to increase the size of the font. So before that first “@command_window…” line, add another line before it that says something like “Font.default_size = 32” – you can replace 32 with whatever size you want the font to be here.

We need to make sure that it only applies to the Title Screen. So there are two functions – starting a new game, and using continue – where we want to reset the font size. Head to “command_new_game” and “command_continue” and add “Font.default_size = 24” to the end of each of them. Your script should now look like this:

TitleScreenTutorial3.png

Change the Window Width

Finally, if you want to change the width of the window, open the script Window_TitleCommand and find the function “def window_width” around line 21. The number after return is the width of your window, in pixels. Change that to whatever you want.

Test it Out

titlescreentutorial1

You may find you want to toy with numbers like the Font and the Width. You should know where to do that now!

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