[Prophet]

In a message, the message sender part could be in different colour from the rest of the message. Perhaps more opaque or lighter than the rest of the message.

When you have messages like:

You: We must accelerate the quantium sequencing of the vertical extension of the Omega-13!
Epsilon Eridani outpost C&C: Why do you need to do that to the thingmajing of the brown color?
(Disclaimer: the examples are overkill and I would not even dream about putting them on any of my missions.)

Not a problem if you have messages in audio. But when you read those in a heated battle, you soon start to wonder, who said what? But if the sender parts (You and Epsilon Eridani C&C) would be in a shade of grey, for example, it would be so much easier to concentrate on the important part of the message.

Thoughts?

[666maslo666]

Good idea!

[Mobius]

Not quite simple to do,however.

[CP5670]

This might help a little, but the message sender text is almost never more than two words long. I think something that would significantly improve readability is to crop the horizontal width of the message text, so that it only goes halfway across the screen before moving to the next line. Text is generally easier to read with more, shorter rows.

[Trivial Psychic]

Wouldn't that pose a problem with long messages, causing them to scroll out of view?  This would especially be difficult for non-voice-acted campaigns, where the player is trying to read everything on the fly.

[CP5670]

I think it should work for messages that are around four lines or less in the editor. If you're getting several such messages fast enough that you're having to read one while the next one is displayed, well, it's a badly designed mission. This could be made a command-line flag though, so you can disable it where it causes problems.

[Prophet]

improve readability is to crop the horizontal width of the message text,

That wouldn't really remove the sender designation problem... If there are lots of long messages coming, I usually go to the message screen to read them. But when there are bunch of one line messages, I have to go to the message screen to figure them out because the sender names screw it up. Reducing the message area would not help, it would just make the text scroll faster, and would screw things royally on smaller resolutions. And would generally look weird IMO.

[karajorma]

The problem with this I see is that you aren't limited as to the colour you want the HUD. You can set it up to be anything you want it to be in the options. So given that how can you make sensible choices for the colours easily? Whatever you choose is going to clash with someone's HUD set up.

[Prophet]

I know. But if the colour (whatever it may be) would be just a bit lighter, for example, it would be enought. Or how about if there would be a tab in the message.

SS Ess Ess: This way the message sender would be easily seperated form
                  the message itself. This way there would be no need to mess
                  with the colours, and the message area wouldn't become too
                   crowded.

[karajorma]

Yes but that might break some missions where the message already takes up all the available space.

[Gregster2k]

How about the ability to resize the message window to be a transparent text overlay that sits over the HUD and allows you to read it while shooting at enemies behind it?